Among the best-known and most revered saints of the Balkans are three who share the same name: Dimitrie. Although they lived in different eras, devotion to them within the Orthodox world has continued to grow. Beyond the folk customs and traditions that have developed over the centuries in the Balkan region at the local or ethnic level, the veneration and celebration of Saint Dimitrie—first as a martyr and later as a saint—have taken on particular significance, remaining to this day significant calendar landmarks throughout the entire Balkan region (Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania), such that the history of their lives and veneration reflects the history of all the nations in the aforementioned region.
As for the word Δημήτριος, its etymology, although not fully clarified, is directly related to the agrarian deity Demeter—Δημήτηρ (Ceres in Latin)—meaning “he who belongs to Demeter.” Etymologically, Demeter, in turn, derives from the terms μήτηρ (mother) and δη/δα/δω—scholars have not yet reached a consensus on the exact meaning of this particle, though the prevailing view holds that it means “earth.”
Saint Demetrius, the Myrrh-Giver, is among the host of saints who emerged from the chosen Christian community of Thessalonica, whose conversion to Christianity was marked by the presence of the Apostle Paul (around A.D. 48–52, cf. Acts 17:1–3), as attested above all by the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, which, through their inclusion in the New Testament canon, have given the city a name that will never be erased from the memory of the Church. Given the intense atmosphere of religious life in such a city, a natural question arises: To what is the widespread veneration of the great martyr due, who has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—uninterrupted veneration to this day, given that the saint has established himself over the centuries as the protector and patron par excellence of the city of Thessalonica, overshadowing the commemoration and presence not only of the other 12 local holy martyrs (many of whom were martyred during the same period, such as Domninus, celebrated on October 1, Florentius, celebrated on October 13, Nestor and Lupus, both celebrated on October 27, Theodoulos, Matrona, Agapi, Irina, Hionía, and others), already mentioned in the Constantinopolitan Synaxarion, as well as all the other local saints known and celebrated here (over 100), including apostles, bishops, theologians (Gregory Palamas, Nicholas Cabasilas, Simeon of Thessalonica), stylites (Euthymius the New), dendrites (David), myrrh-streamers (Saint Theodora, whose relics are said to stream myrrh before those of Saint Demetrius), and many others?
Having developed as a local phenomenon, the cult of Saint Demetrius gained significant prominence following the miraculous healings of the Thessalonian aristocracy, but especially thanks to the Christian community’s growing conviction that the saint is a living presence who intervenes every time in times of distress to save the lives of the entire city, which has faced countless dangers and hopeless situations (beginning in the 6th–7th centuries, these miracles and interventions were recorded in writing, and three collections of them have been preserved to this day). Thus, considering only the city’s recent history, it would have been entirely unnatural if, for example, the liberation of Thessaloniki from Ottoman rule—which took place on the very day of his feast— on October 26, 1912—when, following the Greek army’s entry into the city after the clashes with the Turks on October 19–20 at Giannitsá, the official protocols were signed—had not been attributed to his intercession…
In other words, both his basilica (whose origins date back to the second half of the 5th century A.D.), which became a well-known place of pilgrimage, and the ecclesiastical literature, which includes the two martyrologies (also from the 5th century A.D.), the synaxarion, the collections of miracles from the Byzantine period, and a significant number of encomia (39 in total), along with the rich Middle Byzantine hymnographic output dedicated to him (at least 17 canons), have fostered a rapid and lasting spread throughout the Balkans.
A soldier who chose death over worshiping pagan gods
Born around the year 280 into a noble family, Demetrius pursued a military career, quickly rising to the rank of hilarch (commander of a military unit of 1,000 soldiers), and then to ἀνθύπατος, proconsul (vir spectabilis), and thus a member of the Senate and bearer of the consular mantle. At the same time, having embraced the faith of Christ, he devoted all his virtues—as well as the fame he enjoyed—to its service, preaching the word of the Gospel and instructing those thirsting for the word of life, as we learn from his Martyrologies (in fact, one of the oldest iconographic depictions of the saint, a mosaic, is very well known, in which he is portrayed surrounded by children).
Forced at a young age to choose between faith in Christ and denying Him, Saint Demetrius the Great Martyr chose a martyr’s death. According to the two Martyrologies compiled in Greek and the one preserved in the Latin translation by Anastasius the Librarian, Saint Demetrius was martyred immediately after the successful military campaigns of Maximianus Herculius in the Balkans, when, between 303 and 304, as Lactantius tells us, “he conquered the Goths and the Sarmatians.” It is known that during that period the city, which had become a co-capital of the Roman Empire under the Tetrarchy, was flourishing; the construction and expansion of the baths—the very place where the saint was martyred—are, as archaeological discoveries show, works from that period.
Whoever stood in the place where the Martyr Demetrius was killed was healed
As we learn from the text of the Martyrologies, the body of Saint Demetrius was hastily buried right at the underground site of his martyrdom, where initially—probably immediately after the Edict of Mediolanum (313)—a small structure was erected, a very small chapel —one of those shrines that were built over the tombs of martyrs and were called Martyrion—the text of the Extended Martyrology (Passio altera) mentioning not a “shrine (οἶκος),” but a “dwelling, a very simple house (οἰκία).”
Saint Demetrius would return with great power to the life of the city for which he had sacrificed himself, bringing it to Christ a century later, when he would miraculously heal the proconsul Leontius (around 411–413), who had just returned from Dacia gravely ill and had stopped with the litter in which he had been transported right above the spot where the saint’s relics were buried.
With Leontius, therefore, the establishment and consolidation of the cult of Saint Demetrius in Thessalonica began. He succeeded in giving the cult of the holy martyr the necessary scope, by erecting the first basilica with three altars, which would later be expanded; as it grew in size, two additional altars were added, and it was described in written sources as “εὐκτήριος οἶκος” (house, place of prayer). This three-altar basilica burned down in the year 620. From the 15th century until the early 20th century, the basilica functioned as a mosque. In 1917, a fire ravaged the city, and most of the structure was destroyed. The current basilica—(inaugurated on October 26, 1949)—replicates the original 7th-century design and preserves some of the original mosaics; it is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
From what we know so far, it appears that Saint Demetrius’s healing power was never linked exclusively to the relics themselves, but rather, in general, to the site of his martyrdom, which covers the central area of the city of Thessaloniki —somewhere between the stadium (arena) and the public baths, near the portico of the bronze workers (which is still commemorated today by the church of the same name in the city’s central square, “Panagia Chalkon,” consecrated in 1028 and dedicated to the Mother of God) – and, in particular, by the basilica dedicated to the martyr at the site miraculously indicated by the martyr himself through the miraculous healing he performed there on Leontius.
Deacon Demetrius of Sirmium, another martyr for Christ
Despite historical and archaeological evidence and ecclesiastical tradition, the ethnic origin of Saint Demetrius and his cult has been called into question over the past century by fierce detractors, who have hypothesized that the holy relics—and, by extension, the cult of Saint Demetrius—were transferred from Sirmium to Thessalonica.
The first of these is H. Delehaye, who, in his work *Les origines du culte des martyrs* (Brussels, 1912, pp. 263–264), casts doubt on the information presented in the Greek martyrologies, arguing that the origins of the cult of Saint Demetrius are linked not to Thessalonica but to Sirmium, from where the relics were later moved to Thessalonica due to the invasions of Attila the Hun at the end of the 5th century (441) and the 6th century (582), when the city was completely destroyed, and the Roman administration withdrew to Thessalonica, as one of Justinian’s Novels (Novella 11, 1–2, from the year 535) informs us: “After the prefecture of Sirmium had been established long before (…), later, during the time of Attila, when the region was devastated, the praetorian prefect of the city of Sirmium, [the eparch] Apraeemius, was exiled to Thessalonica.”
The sources on which these opinions are based are the Syriac Breviary and the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, discovered in 1894, which mention only one Demetrius, a deacon, whom they place in Sirmium (one of the four capitals of the Roman Empire at that time): “In Syrmia, Demetrius the deacon,” where he was commemorated on April 9. It should be noted that the Breviarium Syriacum was translated into Syriac in 411–412, being a copy of a Greek text composed in Nicomedia by Arians (!), around the year 370, which was later (530) included in the Breviarium Syriacum.
What is certain is that, from an archaeological perspective, there is virtually no data or evidence to support the idea of the existence—much less the development—of the cult of Saint Demetrius in the Sirmium region on the same scale and scope as that in Thessalonica.
According to historical and archaeological data, as well as on the basis of ecclesiastical tradition (which in Thessalonica has been preserved without interruption from the 4th century to the present), we must accept the existence of two different saints named Demetrius, who were martyred in very close succession and are unmistakably distinguished from one another by their lives: the one from Sirmium was a deacon, while the one from Thessalonica, after pursuing a military and then political career, devoted himself to preaching the Christian faith in his city, a fact that led to his arrest and martyrdom.
Western historians are mistaken
Recent studies, such as those by Hajnalka Tamas (“Passio Pollionis [BHL 6869]: Introduction, Critical Text and Notes,” in Sacris Erudiri 51 [2013], pp. 9–35), which deal with the martyrdom of Pollio, use new evidence to argue for the existence of two different Demetriuses, the latter having been arrested by Probus under Diocletian, thereby refuting Delehaye’s hypothesis, which should be abandoned primarily due to a lack of evidence.
Contributing to the confusion was the apparently late development of the cult of Saint Demetrius in Thessalonica, alongside the prominence his cult gained both in Constantinople and, especially, in the Slavic world, extending beyond the borders of the Balkans and reaching, due to the forced emigration of local populations from Dacia north and south of the Danube, toward the south to western Europe, as far as Italy (Ravenna) and Spain, when, following the repeated destructions of Sirmium throughout history, local traditions adopted the cult of both saints, whom they conflated. Alongside Delehaye’s hypothesis, we should also mention here, for the first time, the one formulated by David Woods, who argues that Saint Demetrius was confused with the Hispanic Saint Emeterius (cf. “Thessalonica’s Patron: Saint Demetrius or Emeterius?”, in Harvard Theological Review, 93/3 [2000], pp. 221–234).
A decisive role in the spread of the cult of Saint Demetrius beyond Thessalonica—and, above all, into the Slavic world—was played by the founding of the city of Justiniana Prima, at the birthplace of Emperor Justinian (today the town of Caričin Grad near present-day Lebane), which appears to have been populated by residents of Thessalonica who, contrary to Delehaye’s hypothesis, would have carried the cult of Saint Demetrius from Thessalonica to the Sirmium region.
Added to this is the missionary activity, beginning in the 9th century, in the Slavic world of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who were also natives of Thessalonica and held the great martyr in special reverence. For example, one of the earliest Christian works in the Old Slavonic language is connected to Saint Demetrius, being, in fact, a liturgical order for his service (of which only a few troparia from the ninth ode and a few phrases have been preserved), likely composed by Saint Methodius.
The last person to mention the probable existence of the relics in Thessaloniki is the chronicler John Anagnostis, in 1430; however, he does not specify whether the holy reliquary containing the myrrh-streaming relics—which the Turks plundered in 1430— when they took control of the city, contained the entire body or only a part of it; nevertheless, he provides us with a very important testimony, namely that holy myrrh flowed abundantly from the holy relics.
Two centuries earlier, a Russian pilgrim, Dobrynia Iadreikovich—who later became Archbishop of Novgorod under the name Anthony—visited Constantinople and, in a detailed account of the capital’s churches and relics, mentions the presence of the relics of Saint Demetrius.
There are no other known references to the saint’s relics in Constantinople, but it cannot be ruled out that they were lost during the Fourth Crusade (1204). This would explain the 1978 discovery of a portion of Saint Demetrius’s relics at the Abbey of San Lorenzo in Campo, near Sassoferrato. Several documents from 1599 and 1779 indicate that the relics of the “illustrious Thessalonian martyr” were found on June 20, 1520, beneath the main altar (“Altare maggiore”). From the parish register, we learn that a portion of the relics was brought to San Lorenzo in Campo by a monk from “Thessaly,” as Thessalonica and its surroundings came to be known in the 9th century. The documents do not specify the date of the relics’ arrival. An inscription accompanying the relics was dated by Father Antonio Ferrua and Professor Campana in 1970, in their capacity as Vatican experts, as no older than the 12th–13th centuries. In 1978, the saint’s head and a significant portion of his remains were returned to Thessaloniki, while another portion remained at the Italian Abbey of San Lorenzo.
The martyr intervenes in the life of the city of Thessaloniki when dangers threaten it
His uninterrupted veneration, manifested in all these forms, takes on a unique, irreplaceable aura. Saint Demetrius stands out, beyond the individual instances of his ceaseless interventions, for his love for the city and his fellow citizens. In particular, the text of his Miracles, written by John, Archbishop of Thessalonica, at the beginning of the 7th century (Sophia/Metafraze Publishing House, Bucharest, 2020), proves that at pivotal moments—on which the fate of the entire city depended—the martyr’s presence is vivid, real, and historical, with Saint Demetrius distinguishing himself not merely as a simple miracle-worker in the individual, private lives of Christians, but, first and foremost, as a devoted guardian, protector, and deliverer of the city, as well as of the homeland. He heals the city’s wounds, ensures its unity and social cohesion, and directs it toward Christ, from whom, through his intercession, comes collective, universal salvation.
From this perspective, he is distinguished—unlike other military saints—not only by the heroic act of individually bearing witness to Christ before pagan military authorities at the cost of his life, but also as an awakener of consciences who always promotes the common good. This explains his adoption not only by the Thessalonians (in the face of the threat posed by migrating peoples, as well as the abusive intervention of imperial authority), but also by the Byzantine imperial authority, and by the Vlach-Bulgarians in their anti-Byzantine struggle led by the brothers Petru, Asan, and Ionita at the end of the 12th century, or even by the Crusaders.
A symbol of ecumenical, universal protection—as characterized by the troparion likely written in the 7th century—“The world has found in you a great defender in times of danger”—Saint Demetrius the Great Martyr and Myrrh-Giver has dominated the life of Thessaloniki over the centuries, ensuring the survival, during the most trying moments of Christian history, of this city, which became one of the most important pilgrimage sites of the Byzantine Empire and, at the same time, the nucleus that fostered the spread of the cult of Saint Demetrius the Great Martyr throughout the Balkans, at certain times also leaving its mark on the fate of the entire Byzantine Empire and remaining to this day a landmark for the living ecclesiastical consciousness.
A Model of Life in Christ
The Venerable Demetrius the New lived in the 13th century, nearly 1,000 years after the other Saints Demetrius. He was born in Basarabi, a village on the right bank of the Danube, and led a simple life, tending the village’s cattle until he entered monastic life and devoted himself to asceticism. The faith of this unknown monk—whom no one had recognized during his lifetime as a miracle-worker—brought forth unexpected blessings that became evident with the discovery of his incorrupt body, found in the waters of the Lom River, where it had lain for several centuries. His relics, housed in the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest, are venerated by Christians, and every fall, on his feast day, Saint Dimitrios welcomes pilgrims who come to pay him homage, bringing them comfort and healing.
The healings of those possessed by demons and the cures of the sick all speak to the power of prayer and Saint Dimitrios the New’s love for God.
The saints are close to us when we call upon them. We prevent them from working in our lives by sinning. What we are experiencing today—the pandemic and all the hardships associated with this virus—are the consequences of lawlessness, wickedness, lies, corruption, and debauchery, which are the bread and butter of contemporary society. We feed on them, we promote them, and they attract the sufferings and hardships we face.
And if we were to reflect, for example, on the past—on the times of Saint Demetrius, the Myrrh-Giver—we would see that everything we are experiencing today is by no means something new, but rather the pedagogical response of God’s love. Here is how Saint John of Thessalonica recounts, in The Miracles of the Holy Great Martyr Demetrius (ibid., pp. 59–60), a similar situation:
“You are surely aware, my dear ones, of the calamity sent by God, which not long ago befell not only our city but the entire region. I am referring to that insatiable plague [which occurred either in 586 or 597], all-devastating and exceedingly terrible, which surpassed in evil all the trials sent by God—for our eternal correction— but which was never less severe than our deeds, which rightly provoked His wrath (…). Yet, no matter how grave our sins may have been, the punishment seemed too great to us, if we were to consider our spiritual state, as those who had to endure it (…). And the waves of this scourge [the plague], which grew and came upon us ever more fiercely, were not only destructive to bodies but, because of our distress, also destructive to souls. For the soul of the sick person, weakened by all manner of unhealed bodily passions, but also by a diminishing remembrance of God, becomes even more negligent —as far as faith is concerned—falling from inner turmoil into anger, speaking irreverently against the One Who rebukes us (for our correction) and grumbling, if I may put it in the words of the prophet, “in anger, and not in judgment” (Ps. 106:39).”
Where the saints are called, deliverance also comes. Where God is not received, His enemy—and the enemy of man—enters. The saints are our helpers on the path to salvation, our intercessors before God, but also models of repentance. We have sinned; we must change our lives. Otherwise, we cannot recover. Is it perhaps too late?
ziarullumina.ro