Two Martyrs of Cyprus
The Holy Two Martyrs who suffered in Cyprus
Martyr
Commemorated 18 June — Martyred in Cyprus by the burning of their feet
Two Christians of Cyprus, whose names have not been transmitted, are commemorated on June 18. All that the synaxarion records of them is the manner of their death: their feet were burned, and they were perfected. The metrical couplet of the day sets the brevity of the torment against the length of its reward — having endured the burning of their feet for a single hour, the two martyrs rejoice eternally — and that antithesis is, in effect, the whole of what the Church has kept about them.
Nothing is transmitted: no names, no city, no persecutor, no reign, no century. The Greek notice for June 18 consists of the couplet and a single line of prose saying that the saints were perfected after their feet had been burned. Neither Nikodemos the Hagiorite nor the day-lists that depend on him add anything, and the Slavonic books do not carry them at all.
What can honestly be said is bounded by the couplet:
Καῦσιν ποδῶν στέξαντες εἰς ὥραν μίαν, αἰωνίως χαίρουσι Μάρτυρες δύω.
Having borne the burning of their feet for a single hour, the two martyrs rejoice for ever.
The torment named is a real and well-attested one: the burning or roasting of the soles of the feet — sometimes over coals, sometimes by the application of heated iron, sometimes by forcing the condemned to stand on a heated plate — belongs to the standard repertory of the Roman provincial governors and appears in a good many passions of the third and early fourth centuries. It was used to break a confessor without killing him quickly, which is why the couplet's "single hour" is pointed: the martyrs did not have to endure long, and it was enough.
Cyprus, evangelised from the first generation by Barnabas and Paul and heavily Christian by the third century, produced martyrs in every persecution; these two belong to that company without being attachable to any particular episode in it. This corpus makes no attempt to supply the missing information, in accordance with the rule that a saint known from one synaxarion line receives an honest short Life and not a fabricated long one.
Feast and commemoration
June 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 1). Greek and Cypriot usage; the notice stands fourth in the Greek order of the day, after Leontius and his companions, Aetherius, and the venerable Erasmus. The Slavonic books and the Russian calendars omit them. No proper service exists; where they are commemorated liturgically they are sung from the common of several martyrs.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
The fire that was set beneath your feet, O blessed pair, could hold you but an hour, and could not turn you back one step from Christ; wherefore, having run the short course, ye have entered into the rest that has no end. O holy martyrs of Cyprus, entreat the merciful God to grant our souls forgiveness of sins.
Iconography
No iconographic type exists for these two, and no image is known. Anonymous pairs of this kind, where they are painted at all, appear in the menologion registers as two standing figures in tunic and cloak with the martyr's cross, distinguished from their neighbours only by the inscription of the day; a painter following the couplet would show them barefoot, or with the fire at their feet. Nothing has been stored.
Disputed questions
- Whether "two" is a count or a corruption. Anonymous pairs are not rare in the synaxaria, but a bare numeral with no names and no place beyond the island invites the suspicion that the notice is a fragment — the residue of a fuller entry whose names have dropped out in transmission, or a doublet of some other Cypriot commemoration. No manuscript evidence is available to this entry either way, and the notice is recorded here as it stands.
- Not to be confused with the several named companies of Cypriot martyrs kept on other days, nor with the anonymous companies of June 16 — the Five Martyrs of Nicomedia and the Forty Martyrs of Rome — with which these two share only the convention of being counted rather than named.