The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Gotthia

In the fourth century the Gospel had reached the Goths of the lands north of the Danube, and a Christian community had grown among them, served by its own clergy in the Gothic tongue (this is the world of Ulfilas, translator of the Scriptures into Gothic). When the pagan chief Athanaric renewed the persecution of the Christians among his people — suspecting them, as the Romans had once suspected the early Church, of disloyalty and of a foreign faith — a fierce trial fell upon them.

The synaxarion preserves a roll of the martyrs, though the manuscripts vary. Among them were the priests Bathuses and Wercas with their sons and daughters; the monk Arpylas; and the laymen Abibus, Agnas, Ryas, Igathrax, Iscoüs, Silas, Sigetzas, Suerilas, Suimblas, Thermas and Phillas; and the women Anna, Alla, Larissa, Moïko, Mamica, Uirko, Animais and others. According to the account, a body of them were gathered in their church for worship when the persecutors set the building on fire, and they were consumed together, offering their prayers as their lives ascended. Others were slain by the sword or by other torments.

After the persecution, the Christian Gothic queen Gaatha and her daughter Duklida gathered the relics of the martyrs and, at peril, conveyed them out of the Gothic lands — some to Cyzicus in Asia Minor — where they were received with honour. The memory of the Twenty-Six was thus preserved in the Church, and the Empress kept it as a testimony that the Gospel had taken root even among the peoples beyond the empire's edge.