Agathangelos of Florina

Holy New Martyr Agathangelos of Florina was a young Greek from Florina in Macedonia, working as a shoemaker at Monastir. He protested against the forced conversions to Islam practised during the three days of the Bayram festival after Ramadan. He went to Constantinople and obtained a firman forbidding these practices.

The Turks of his region, enraged, seized him, cruelly tortured him and beheaded him on 17 February 1727. His holy head is kept in a reliquary adorned with an engraved inscription: it tells that he suffered in 1727 because he could not bear that Christians met during the festival days were made Turks, and that, having been informed, he went to the capital and obtained the firman. The reliquary was adorned in 1827, in the days of Gregory of Pelagonia, by the priests of the time.

He is commemorated on 17 February (new style). A troparion composed by the hieromonk Athanasios of Simonopetra is sung in his service.