Ivkhirion of Mesukevi

Holy Martyr Ivkhirion of Mesukevi was one of the seventeen Georgians of noble birth who died on Mount Sukaketi for Christ, around the year 123, together with their leader, Saint Sukhius. They are commemorated on 28 April and on 22 November (a movable day), in new style.

As officials at the court of the ruler of Caucasian Albania, Sukhius and his sixteen companions came, in the retinue of his daughter Satenik, wife of the Armenian king Artaxias, to Artashat. There they heard the preaching of the Greek Chrysos, a priest ordained by the Apostle Thaddeus, believed in the Saviour and went with him to Mesopotamia, where they were baptized in the waters of the Euphrates, being granted to see the Lord Jesus Christ. The priest gave them new names, among them Ivkhirion, and they marked the place of baptism with a cross, called the "Cross of the Annunciation".

After the martyric death of Chrysos, Sukhius became the guide of the brotherhood, which withdrew to Mount Sukaketi, near the village of Bagrevandi, where they lived in strict asceticism, on greens and spring water. The new ruler, Datianos, sent his close associate Barnabas with soldiers to turn them back to the court and to idols, but they refused. Barnabas commanded that they be pinned to the ground in the shape of a cross and burned. The martyrs sang the twenty-⁠first psalm, and their bodies, cut in pieces, were scattered over the whole mountain, whence the name of martyrs of Mesukevi (more correctly, of Sukaketi). The remains lay unburied and uncorrupted until the fourth century, when the local Christians buried them, and their names were found written on the rock. Saint Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia raised a church there and founded a monastery, and later a healing spring burst forth in that place.