John the Goldsmith

Saint John the Goldsmith, New Martyr, was born in 1784 in the town of Shumen in Bulgaria, and was a goldsmith by trade. A young man of eighteen, handsome and of pure life, he was falsely accused by the daughter of a Turkish family who lived opposite his workshop and had tried in vain to lure him. The judge gave him a choice: to accept Islam and marry her, or to be beaten to death. John answered that he preferred to die rather than renounce Christ.

He was tortured without mercy: beaten, his body torn, his wounds burned with lit torches, and in the end he was beheaded on 14 May 1802. The hieromonk Nicephorus of Chios wrote his Martyrdom. He is commemorated on 14 May (new style, the calendar of the Church of Greece).