Urban, Theodore, Medimnus and their Companions

The martyrdom of this company is among the best-attested of the fourth century, recorded within living memory by the church historians Socrates (Ecclesiastical History 4.16) and Sozomen (Ecclesiastical History 6.14). Under the emperor Valens (364–378), a committed Arian, the Orthodox of Constantinople were driven from their churches. When the Orthodox community put forward Evagrius as bishop, Valens exiled him and unleashed harassment and imprisonment on those who would not communicate with the Arian party. Driven to seek redress, the Orthodox chose a delegation of eighty men of clerical rank — the historians call them ecclesiastics, and the synaxaria men of priestly dignity — headed by Urban, Theodore and Medimnus (whom Socrates and Sozomen name Menedemus), to lay their grievances before the emperor, then residing at Nicomedia in Bithynia.

Valens heard them and concealed his fury. He ordered the praetorian prefect Modestus to put the delegates to death, but — fearing, the historians say, a popular uprising if so many were executed openly — the sentence was disguised. Modestus told the eighty they were to be sent into exile, and put them aboard a ship; the crew had secret orders. When the vessel stood well out in the gulf, the sailors set it afire and escaped in the boat, leaving the prisoners to the flames. Driven by the wind, the burning ship came ashore — the accounts name a place called Dacidizus (in the OCA's transcription, Dakizis) — and was consumed with all aboard, about the year 370. The historians record that the crime was followed, in the popular telling, by a great famine in Phrygia, read as divine judgment.

Because the deed was done at sea and in secret, the individual names of the seventy-seven companions were not preserved; the Church commemorates the company under its three leaders. No relics could be recovered from the burned ship, and their memorial has always been purely liturgical.