Gregory

Gregory Papatheodoros, Bishop of Methoni, Navarino and Neokastro, died in prison on 22 October 1825 in the fortress of Methoni after refusing to deny his faith before Ibrahim Pasha. He is honoured by the faithful as an ethnohieromartyr, without synodal canonization; he is commemorated on 22 October.

He was born in 1770 in the village of Albaina in Olympia, son of Theodoros Papatheodoros and Anastasia of the Sakelarios family. He learned his first letters in the village and completed his learning at the Monastery of Vytina, which then had a rich library. According to Grigoriadis he was a man of great education, spoke Turkish, Arabic and French, and a little Italian. He was ordained deacon on 16 May 1800, presbyter and chancellor on 9 April 1806, and Bishop of Methoni, Navarino and Neokastro on 12 August 1816 by Patriarch Cyril VI.

In 1817 he travelled to Russia and appeared before the tsar, to whom with rare eloquence he laid out the atrocities of the Turkish conquerors and the miserable condition of the enslaved Greeks, and asked help for the enslaved nation. He returned to Methoni in 1818 with a Russian warship. He was initiated into the Friendly Society on 22 October 1818 by the doctor Antonis Pelopidas, and again on 26 December 1819 by Anagnostaras Papageorgiou. He was the first of the hierarchs of the Peloponnese to join it, and his entry was greeted with enthusiasm by Alexander Ypsilantis. He catechized and initiated many patriots.

From the start of the Revolution of 1821 Gregory began military action, leading 150 men, with the chiefs Papatsoras, Grigoriadis, Papatsonis, Doufas, Papazafiropoulos and Constantine Peter Mavromichalis, in the siege of the castles of Methoni and Neokastro. After a six-⁠month siege the Turks surrendered, and Gregory signed the surrender agreement on 7 August 1821. The Turkish commander-⁠in-⁠chief, Mustafa Ali Basoglou, had to hand the keys of the castle of Methoni to the Greek commander, Bishop Gregory. On 29 March 1823 he signed the first minutes of the National Assembly of Astros, second after Theodoretos of Vresthene. In 1824, when the split occurred, Gregory was elected president of the Parliament and addressed the Panhellenic people on behalf of the House in the historic proclamation of 24 February 1824.

Ibrahim's landing at Methoni in 1825 and at Koroni found Gregory in the front line, defending Paleokastro. He mobilised the Messenian chiefs and on 26 April occupied Navarino. Ibrahim, with foreign officers as advisers, besieged the castle by land and sea and prevented water and ammunition from reaching the defenders. On 29 April, as the siege tightened, the defenders were forced to leave by night. Few were saved. Many were taken prisoner, among them the wounded Bishop Gregory. He was shut in a dark, sunless dungeon in the castle of Methoni.

Ibrahim called the captive bishop to embrace Islam. He refused, saying: "The Bishop of Methoni worships two things in the world: Almighty God and his homeland." His ordeal continued through May and all summer, a martyrdom lasting six months. The miserable conditions of his long imprisonment, torture and plague brought his end: he gave up his spirit on 22 October 1825, a Thursday. The Turks threw his body, ravaged by cholera, into the sea. The waves, however, swept it into the mouth of a sea cave. Captain Dionysios Fokas of Kefallonia later found it there and took it to Odessa, where he buried it with honours. The Diocese of Messinia erected his bust at the place of his martyrdom at Methoni; on 29 June 1960 the bust was unveiled by Metropolitan Chrysostomos (Daskalakis) of Messinia.