Theodore of Amasea

In 306, a Roman cohort wintering at Amasea in Pontus was ordered to sacrifice to the gods. One legionary refused and declared himself a Christian. The judges pitied his youth and gave him time to reconsider. He used the time to walk into the temple of the Mother of the Gods and set the altar on fire.

He is remembered as Theodore of Amasea, and the beast he is drawn killing has belonged to Saint George for so long that few people know where it came from.

The recruit of Amasea

Amasea was a city of Galatian Pontus, modern Amasya in Turkey, and Theodore’s cohort had been sent there for the winter. The persecution under Diocletian and Galerius was still running. When the sacrifice was ordered, Theodore stayed in his tent and told the soldiers who came for him that he served Christ alone.

The Passio has the court defer sentence rather than execute him at once. The delay is what produced the act he is remembered for. He burned the temple of Magna Mater, the Mother of the Gods, the deity the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 calls Cybele and the Serbian church calls Rhea. A verger caught him at it, and he went to the governor without resistance. What followed was the ordinary machinery of a martyrdom. He was hung by the heels and his body torn with iron claws, and when none of it moved him he was condemned to the fire. He died on 17 February 306, the day the menologies give as his feast. The Golden Legend gives 287 instead, and the later handbooks settled on 306.

The epithet needs a note. Tiron, also written Tiro, Tyron, or Tyro, comes from the Latin tiro, a newly enlisted soldier, and the Greek church reads it as a statement about his rank. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 gave a different explanation, that he had belonged for a time to a unit called the Cohors Tyronum, and credited the liturgical scholar Nikolaus Nilles. The rank reading holds today. The cohort reading rests on that older argument about a unit name nobody has otherwise recovered.

The dragon, and who had it first

A legend not younger than the late ninth century has Theodore kill a dragon near Euchaita, the village that held his relics. The version the Serbian Orthodox Church tells places it in the forest outside town, where the people of the district lived in fear of the beast. A Christian woman named Eusebia, the last occupant of an abandoned village, told him where the lair was. He armed himself with the sign of the Cross, found the creature, and drove his spear through its head.

Images of him killing the beast came early. A horseman bearing a draco standard appears on a relief at Vinica in North Macedonia that may be sixth or seventh century, though he is carrying the standard rather than killing anything. Dragon-slaying appears in the seventh century and certainly by the early tenth. The earliest certain image of Theodore spearing the beast is a relief at the church on Aghtamar in Lake Van, dated around 920. Cappadocian wall painting takes it up in the same century, and the twelfth-century equestrian panels in the Cappella Palatina at Palermo carry it into Norman Sicily.

George inherited the beast later, and the sources show when. The oldest certain images of George fighting a serpent are Cappadocian, from Saint Barbara’s church at Soğanlı, dated 1006 or 1021, and the motif moves onto him from there. Theodore had the beast on his icons two centuries earlier. The compendium’s article on the serpent and the slayer follows that whole inheritance, in which the dragon people now call George’s is a hand-me-down.

Two Theodores, one soldier

The tradition carries a second Theodore, the General or Stratelates, with a shrine at Euchaneia, a feast on 8 February, and a beheading at Heraclea Pontica under Licinius in 319. The two are named side by side for the first time in a ninth-century Laudatio by Niketas David of Paphlagonia.

Hippolyte Delehaye concluded in 1909 that the existence of the second Theodore had not been historically established, and Christopher Walter wrote in 2003 that Stratelates is a fiction. A friendlier reading takes him as a rank promotion of the same man, from recruit to general, and the conflicting legends about the martyr are the usual explanation for why the tradition chose a second saint instead of a correction. The modern western consensus settles on one Theodore, and the General keeps the same dragon in the same countryside: his version has the serpent on a precipice outside Euchaita, killed with a sword.

Byzantine painters kept them apart on the panel. Tiron carries one pointed beard, Stratelates two. The two are often shown standing together in three-quarter view with their hands raised toward a bust of Christ Emmanuel, who blesses them or hands them crowns, a composition known from the eleventh and twelfth centuries on lead seals, steatite icons, and frescoes. Churches honouring both men stood at Dobarsko, at Serres, in the Kuprianou monastery in Constantinople, and at Pergamon.

Euchaita, modern Beyözü in Çorum province, was identified as the ancient city by the Avkat Archaeological Project, an intensive survey run by Princeton University between 2006 and 2010 and published by Cambridge in 2018. The town was called Theodoropolis for a while and lived off the pilgrim traffic. After the Turkish invasion in the late eleventh century it emptied, and the shrine that Gregory of Nyssa had preached at in 381 was left in a village of farmers.

The boiled wheat and the first Saturday of Lent

Fifty years after the martyrdom, the story runs, the emperor Julian the Apostate ordered the food in the markets of Constantinople sprinkled with the blood of pagan sacrifices. Theodore appeared in a dream to Archbishop Eudoxius and told him to have the Christians boil the wheat they already had at home and eat it sweetened with honey. The historian Theodoret, writing not long after, records the polluted market and does not mention Theodore, the dream, or the wheat. Half the story has a near-contemporary witness and half of it travels in the liturgy.

The liturgy kept it. On the first Saturday of Great Lent the Orthodox churches chant a canon to Theodore composed by John of Damascus and the priest blesses kollyva, boiled wheat with honey and raisins, which is where the Serbian koljivo comes from. The Orthodox Church in America dates the commemoration to the middle of the fifth century, established under Patriarch Nektarios of Constantinople, and the Greek church reads two Lenten sermons that day, one by Gregory of Nyssa and one by Nektarios.

Louis Petit proposed another origin in 1899, in an article on the controversy over the kollyva. His suggestion was that the narrative was composed to move an older feast of Theodore from 17 February to the first Saturday of Lent, since 17 February often falls inside Lent, and feasts that fall in Lent are not celebrated unless they land on a Saturday or a Sunday. No critical edition of the Nektarios homily exists, so the question of how old the story is stands open.

Folk calendars took the saint and made him a horseman. In Serbia the first Saturday of Lent is Todorova subota, and Todor is the patron of livestock with a special charge over horses, which is why the day is also called Konjski dan, Horse Day. Horses are not put to work, or they are raced. A second nickname, Hroma subota, Lame Saturday, comes from the belief that Theodore leads a procession of white horses on that night with a lame horse at the front of it. In Bulgaria the same Saturday is Todorovden, Horse Easter, with the horse race called kushiya, animals groomed with tassels and flowers, and ritual breads shaped like horses or horseshoes that are blessed in church and fed to the animals. The folk Theodore rides out to ask God for the summer, takes off his furs, and drives a spear or a burning ember into the ground to warm it.

The Burgas Regional Museum’s account of the feast states that the holiday keeps a link to the Thracian Horseman, the mounted hunter of the old votive stones. Saints George, Demetrius and Theodore are the names the old rider was given in Christian art. The first Christians of the Balkans follows that substitution across the region, from the reliefs to the church walls.

The name travelled further than the feast did. In the Caucasus the Ossetian wolf-lord Tutyr carries a Christianised form of Theodore’s name, and the Ossetian festival of the Tutyrtae falls in the first week of Great Lent, which holds the kollyva Saturday. The borrowing came through the medieval Alan conversion, and the bestiary entry on the wolf-master notes what the Caucasus took from the martyr: the name of a soldier, and none of his duties.

The patron Venice replaced

The West took him as a soldier and kept him in that shape. Venice had Theodore as its patron saint before the relics of Saint Mark arrived in 828, and the doge’s chapel was his until the ninth century. A statue of him went up on the western of the two granite columns in the Piazzetta in 1372, and the present figure is a composite put together in the later fifteenth century from pieces of different dates, with a crocodile under his feet instead of a dragon. The original is indoors now and a replica stands on the column. The Catholic Encyclopedia listed the crocodile among his emblems in 1913, with the temple and the crown of thorns among the others.

Rome kept a church as well. San Teodoro al Palatino stands at the foot of the Palatine, round in plan, consecrated in the sixth or seventh century and made a collegiate church under Pope Felix IV. Romans called the saint San Toto and brought sick children to the building. Pope John Paul II gave the church to the Orthodox in 2000, and services began there in 2004. The body was claimed by Brindisi in the twelfth century and Theodore is the patron of that city; Gaeta claimed the head; Venice reported relics taken from Mesembria in 1257 and brought into the city in 1267. Chartres has a thirteenth-century window with thirty-eight panels of his life, which is the largest western cycle he got, and the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that his cult did not become common outside Italy.

Two more survivals sit far from the Byzantine world. In Russia he is Fedor Tiron, and the household prayers addressed to him ask for the recovery of lost or stolen goods, a devotion that grew out of the miracles in which he restores property to its owner. Russian spiritual verses, the dukhovnye stikhi collected from singers in Siberia and the north, make him a warrior who fights a dragon, which is the church legend reworked by people who never saw an icon of it. On Korčula, off the Croatian coast, he is the patron of the town and his feast is kept on 29 July, with one strand of the local material giving 27 July. The island dances the Moreška then, a costumed sword fight between Moors and Christians in the square. The dance has kept his name, and dropped the horse and the dragon both.

Sources

• Gregory of Nyssa, Encomium on Theodore the Great Martyr, preached at the martyr’s shrine in the winter of 381 (Patrologia Graeca 46, 736-748)
• Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Ecclesiastical History (the market food sprinkled with sacrificial blood under Julian, with no mention of Theodore or the wheat)
• Niketas David of Paphlagonia, Laudatio of Theodore, 9th century (the earliest text naming Theodore Tiron and Theodore Stratelates as two saints)
• The Passio of Theodore Tiron and the homily of Nectarius of Constantinople (CPG 4300, BHG 1768), read in Greek churches on the first Saturday of Lent
• John of Damascus, canon chanted on the first Saturday of Great Lent in the commemoration of the kollyva miracle
• Louis Petit, ‘La grande controverse des Colybes’, Échos d’Orient 2, no. 7 (1899), pp. 321-331
• Hippolyte Delehaye, Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Paris: Picard, 1909 (the oldest text of the Martyrium S. Theodori Tironis, and the case against a second Theodore)
• Christopher Walter, ‘Theodore, archetype of the warrior saint’, Revue des études byzantines 57 (1999), pp. 163-210
• Francis Mershman, ‘St. Theodore of Amasea’, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1913)
• Nikolaus Nilles, Kalendarium manuale utriusque ecclesiae orientalis et occidentalis, vol. 1, p. 105 (the Cohors Tyronum reading of the epithet, cited in the Catholic Encyclopedia)
• Serbian Orthodox Church, ‘Feast of the Holy Great Martyr Theodore the Tyron’ (arhiva.spc.rs), the Serbian account of the dragon and of the relics at Euchaita
• Orthodox Church in America, ‘1st Saturday of Great Lent: The Miracle of the Boiled Wheat’ (oca.org)
• Burgas Regional Museum, ‘St Theodore’s Day’ (Burgas, Bulgaria), on Todorovden, the kushiya horse race, and the link to the Thracian Horseman
• John Haldon, Hugh Elton, and James Newhard (eds.), Archaeology and Urban Settlement in Late Roman and Byzantine Anatolia: Euchaïta-Avkat-Beyözü and its Environment. Cambridge University Press, 2018
• Michail al-Dimashqi, icon of Saint Theodore of Amasea, 1716 (the reference for this entry’s hero plate)