Constantine of Kappua

Holy New Martyr Constantine of Kappua was the son of a Turkish official, was baptized a Christian, and in the year 1610 gave his life for Christ at Kappua in Thessaly. When he was a Muslim his name was Saim. At twenty he was instructed in the Christian faith by a learned monk of the Monastery of Saint Nicholas at Kappua. When the monk judged that the young man's faith in Christ was firmly established, he baptized him in the monastery and gave him the name Constantine.

His father's reaction was immediate and violent. He wanted to put the three monks of the monastery to death, but they managed to escape and took refuge at Meteora, where they asked the monks there for protection. The father's wrath grew, he set fire to the monastery and, enraged by his son's stance, ordered him thrown into a dungeon and not taken out unless he returned to his ancestral faith. The soldiers threw Constantine into a dark and mouldy dungeon and asked him morning and evening whether he repented. Constantine answered with gentleness and firmness: "I will never deny my Christ, whatever you do to me; I fear nothing; He is beside me and strengthens me." The father commanded harsher tortures and, if he still could not be persuaded, the gallows. Constantine answered once more: "Nothing can separate me from my Christ. I love Him so much that I do not care if I give even my life for His love."

The soldiers led him outside the town of Kappua, to the place where the present village of Kappa stands. They threw a rope over a thick branch of the "great plane tree" there and hanged him. A miracle took place: the rope broke three times, so that, on the order of his father, who was present, the executioners had to behead him. The Christians buried his honoured body near the place of his martyrdom, at the spot called "Three Trees".

The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in 2007. He is commemorated on 18 August, in the calendar of the Church of Greece (new style).