Gabinus and Crispulus

The Holy Martyrs Gabinus and Crispulus are counted as the protomartyrs of Sardinia. They suffered around 130, in the time of the emperor Hadrian, at Torres (now Porto Torres) in Sardinia, where they had preached the Gospel.

According to a twelfth-⁠century Passion, Gabinus was a Roman soldier set to guard a priest and a deacon imprisoned for their faith; they brought him to Christianity and all three died as martyrs. The saints' tomb is at Porto Torres, where stands the basilica of San Gavino, the largest and oldest of the Romanesque churches of Sardinia. Every year on 3 May three wooden statues of the martyrs are carried in procession to a small church that shelters three Roman tombs cut in the rock; the statues stay there until Pentecost, when the church becomes a place of pilgrimage, and are brought back in procession on the evening of Pentecost.

They are commemorated on 30 May, as saints of the West before the Great Schism (saints of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.