Zoticus the Orphanotrophos
The Holy Martyr Zoticus the Orphanotrophos, Presbyter of Constantinople
Hieromartyr · Priest · d. c. 350, at Constantinople
Commemorated 30 December — Martyrdom at Constantinople (Slavic and OCA usage; the Greek keeps him December 31)
Zoticus (†c. 350) was a Roman of noble birth and Christian piety who came to Constantinople in the reign of Constantine the Great, renounced his rank, was ordained presbyter, and gave himself and his wealth to the care of the poor, the orphaned, and above all the lepers whom the city cast out. When an imperial order condemned the lepers to be drowned in the sea, he bought them from the soldiers with money he had drawn from the treasury "to purchase pearls for the emperor," and sheltered them on a hill across the Golden Horn. Under Constantine's son Constantius, discovering the ruse, the emperor had Zoticus bound to wild mules and dragged over the stones until he died — whereupon, the tradition says, a spring of healing water broke from the ground and the emperor, repenting, raised over his grave the great orphanage and leprosarium that made "Orphanotrophos" a title of honour in Byzantium. He is called the Feeder of Orphans, and is kept on December 30.
From Rome to Constantinople
Zoticus was, the tradition holds, a Roman of senatorial or patrician rank, reared in wealth, learning, and Christian devotion. When Constantine the Great (306–337) founded his new capital on the Bosphorus and summoned the leading men of Rome to people it, Zoticus came among them and stood high in the emperor's favour, honoured for his gifts and given a place among the great officers of the Christian court. But the honours of the world held him little. In the settled version of his life he renounced his standing, gave his goods to the needy, and received ordination to the priesthood, that he might serve Christ in the person of the suffering poor — and it is as a presbyter and orphanotrophos, a "feeder of orphans," that the Church remembers him, though the earliest strands of his legend present him first of all as a courtier and philanthropist.
The feeder of orphans and lepers
Zoticus made the care of the destitute his whole work: he gathered orphans and the abandoned, the sick and the aged, and built for them houses of refuge. His special love was for the lepers — the most feared and shunned of the city's sufferers, whom law and custom drove outside the walls. He went among them without dread, tended their sores, fed and consoled them, and would not let them be treated as less than the images of God.
The heart of his story turns on an act of holy cunning. In the reign of Constantine — or, in the version that heightens the drama, under his son — an order went out that the lepers of the capital, as a danger of contagion, should be rounded up and drowned in the sea. Zoticus went to the emperor and asked for a large sum of gold from the treasury, saying he would use it to buy up precious pearls and stones worthy of the imperial dignity. With this money he went instead to the soldiers charged with the drownings and bought the lepers from them, ransoming them one by one; and he settled them on a hill across the Golden Horn, opposite the city, where he housed and fed them and cared for them as his own. There the first great leprosarium of Constantinople had its origin.
Martyrdom
The deception could not last. Under Constantius (337–361), Constantine's son — an Arian in religion and, in this account, harsher than his father — the truth came out: the "pearls" bought with the emperor's gold were a colony of lepers on the far shore. In some tellings the emperor, told that Zoticus had squandered the treasure, demanded to see the pearls, and Zoticus led him to the hill and showed him the ransomed sick, saying that these were the pearls and precious stones of the Kingdom, the treasure laid up in heaven. Enraged at the loss and the reproach, Constantius ordered Zoticus bound to wild mules (in other accounts, untamed horses or asses) and driven loose, so that he was dragged over the rocks and broken stones until his body was torn and he gave up his soul — a martyr's death for the sake of Christ's poor.
At the place where he died, the tradition adds, a spring of pure water welled up, and many were healed by it; and the emperor, stricken with remorse — and, some say, warned by the mules themselves halting and speaking, or by a vision — repented of his cruelty. In expiation he built over the martyr's tomb the great philanthropic complex that bore Zoticus's memory: the orphanotropheion and leprosarium of Constantinople, richly endowed, which became the foremost charity of the Eastern Roman capital and made "Orphanotrophos" — its warden — one of the honoured offices of the Byzantine Church and state for centuries after.
Veneration and the later cultus
The historical Zoticus stands at the head of a real institution. The Novella of the emperor Leo I (r. 457–474), issued about 469, names Zoticus as the first holder of the office of orphanotrophos and confirms the privileges of the house he founded; and the great Orphanotropheion of Constantinople, later attached to the church of Saints Peter and Paul, endured into the twelfth century as one of the wonders of the city's charity. The saint's cult grew with his foundation: he was honoured as Ζωτικὸς ὁ Ὀρφανοτρόφος, the model of Christian philanthropy, and his images multiplied in Byzantium and beyond. His legend gathered detail over time — the pearls and the lepers, the wild mules, the healing spring — but its core is firm: a man of rank who spent himself and, at the last, was killed for the poor whom the powerful wished to be rid of.
Feast and commemoration
Zoticus is kept on December 30 in the Slavonic and OCA calendars (church date; Old Calendar civil January 12), within the afterfeast of the Nativity, on the same day as Anysia of Thessalonica. The Greek books, however, commemorate him on December 31, together with Melania the Younger — a one-day difference of the kind common where a saint sits at the edge of two synaxarion days; the disagreement is recorded here, not resolved, and this entry follows the Antiochian and OCA placement on the 30th.
His title likewise varies. The OCA and the Greek style him simply Martyr (Μάρτυς) Zoticus; the Slavonic books style him Священномученик — hieromartyr, martyred presbyter — reflecting the tradition of his ordination; and the kontakion addresses him as преподобне, "O venerable one," for his ascetic renunciation. This entry classifies him as a hieromartyr and priest, following the ordination that the developed vita and the Slavonic title assert, while noting that the plain title "Martyr" is the older and the Greek usage.
He is not to be confused with the other saints of his name: the martyr Zoticus who suffered with Macrobius and Gordian at Tomis in Scythia (kept September 13), nor the martyr Zoticus of Knossos among the Ten Martyrs of Crete (December 23), nor the Zoticus of Comana. "The Orphanotrophos," the feeder of orphans, belongs to this Zoticus of Constantinople alone.
Hymns
Kontakion — Tone 2
For the love of Christ, O venerable one, thou didst cherish the poor and didst fill their need to the full; and now hast thou received the riches of heaven, O most-blessed Zoticus. Therefore do we all honour thee, keeping thy memory.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Zoticus is depicted as a saint of the diaconal or priestly charity — most often as an aged, bearded man in priestly or court dress, and in his narrative scenes in the act for which he is remembered: tending the lepers, or being dragged to death behind the wild mules. The stored image is the miniature appointed to his commemoration in the Menologion of Basil II (Constantinople, c. 985; Vatican, Vat. gr. 1613), which shows the martyr Zoticus, the Keeper of Orphans, in the settled Byzantine type (source, public domain, pd-old-work). A celebrated later cycle of his martyrdom survives in the illustrated menologia and in the Walters manuscript, depicting the saint bound to the beasts.