Ambrosios of Moschonisia

The holy hieromartyr Ambrosios of Moschonisia (1872-1922), in the world Ambrosios Pleiathidis (Plianthidis), was metropolitan of Moschonisia in Asia Minor from February to September 1922. He was killed by the Turkish army at the end of the Greco-⁠Turkish War (1919-1922). The Church of Greece numbered him among the saints in 1992 as a martyr of the nation, and his memory is kept on the Sunday before the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (7-13 September).

He was born in 1872 at Smyrna, in the Aidin vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, with paternal origins in Triantaros on the island of Tinos. He graduated in 1893 from the Evangelical School of his home city and then studied theology at the Theological School of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem and, from 1895, at the Theological Academy of Kiev. He was ordained deacon by Metropolitan Basil of Smyrna and priest on 6 August 1900 in the church of Christ the Saviour at Galata, Constantinople. He served as a priest in the Greek parishes of the Crimea: Feodosia, Simferopol and Sevastopol. In 1910 he returned to Smyrna and preached in the metropolis there under Metropolitan Chrysostomos. On 6 October 1913 he was consecrated titular bishop of Xanthoupolis, auxiliary of the metropolis of Smyrna, by Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Smyrna, with Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Philadelphia and Bishop Photios of Moschonisia. During the First World War and the Turkish persecutions of the Christians of Asia Minor, he stood in for Metropolitan Chrysostomos, who had been exiled by the Turks.

From 1919 he lived as exarch of the Patriarch of Constantinople on the island of Cunda (Ayvalık), one of the Moschonisia islands, opposite the city of Kydonies (now Ayvalık), which was then in the Greek-⁠controlled occupation zone of Smyrna. On 19 February 1922 he was elected metropolitan of the newly created metropolis of Moschonisia, based at Cunda. After the Greek defeat in the summer of 1922, the region passed under the Turkish national army. Most of the inhabitants did not leave with the retreating Greek army. Turkish soldiers arrested the remaining civilian population and sent it to labour battalions in the interior of Asia Minor.

On 15 September 1922, six thousand civilians, almost the whole population of the archipelago, were killed by Turkish troops and irregular bands, and Ambrosios, with nine other priests, was buried alive, after torture, in a pit outside the city of Kydonies. According to another version he was tortured, shod like a horse and cut to pieces on the march of deportation toward the interior of Asia Minor, and another writer says he was burned alive.

His canonization, together with that of the martyred metropolitans Chrysostomos of Smyrna, Prokopios of Iconium, Gregory of Kydonies, Euthymios of Zela and the martyrs of Asia Minor with them, took place in 1992. His name appears on streets in areas where refugees settled, and a bust of him stands at Triantaros on Tinos. A cousin of the saint was the father of the later Metropolitan Gregory Pleiathos of Chalkis.