Dada and Gabdelas

Holy Martyrs Dada and Gabdelas were Persian nobles, killed in the year 368 for their faith in Jesus Christ. The Church commemorates them on 12 October.

The Persian Emperor Shapur II sent Dada, his ward, to be governor of a province of the vast Persian Empire. The emperor did not know that Dada was a Christian and that he would soon begin to use his position to spread the teaching of Christ. Hearing something of it, Shapur sent an envoy, Adramelech, to Dada's province to investigate the rumours. When Adramelech wrote to the emperor that Dada was indeed a Christian, the emperor sent him, through his son Gabdelas, a written order to punish and kill anyone he discovered to be a Christian.

Soon Adramelech brought Dada before the court, where he refused to renounce his faith. The judges ordered a great pyre to be lit and him thrown into it. When he came before the fire, Dada made the sign of the cross and prayed to God, and the pyre went out, and water flowed in its place. This intrigued the emperor's son Gabdelas, who wondered whether he too would be allowed to work such wonders if he renounced polytheism and worshipped Christ. He ordered another pyre lit, prayed to the God of the Christians, and the fire went out. At that moment Gabdelas fell at Dada's feet and confessed his faith in Christ, and the envoy Adramelech ordered the emperor to be informed.

Shapur appointed a certain Gargal to be judge of Gabdelas and the other Christians. He ordered four torturers to flog Gabdelas with knotted ox sinews; when they grew tired, four others came, but Gabdelas endured. Then Gargal ordered two straps of skin to be flayed from Gabdelas's body, but the prince endured this too. Gargal did not stop, and ordered a rod driven through his head, from ear to ear, his body torn with hooks and fish-⁠hooks, his shoulders pierced with hooks and he left hanging on them, his nails pulled out, the skin of his head flayed from the nape to the crown and drawn forward over his face, his legs crushed, red-⁠hot cannonballs put under his arms, that he be boiled in a cauldron of pitch and sulphur, crucified and shot with arrows, trampled by horses and roasted on a spit. According to the legend, Gabdelas endured everything and asked only to be baptized. When that was done, he finally died. Gargal ordered his dead body torn apart by horses, cut with swords and scattered in all directions, for the dogs to eat. Some pious men gathered and buried what remained of the prince.

On the same day, 12 October, the Church also commemorates the martyrs Dada, Gabdelas's sister Kazdia, who had often helped him while their father tormented him, and a certain sorcerer Gargal (not the torturer), who lay in the same prison with Gabdelas.