Jordan of Mesukevi

Holy Martyr Jordan of Mesukevi was one of seventeen Georgians of noble birth who, converted to Christ, received the crown of martyrdom on Mount Sukaketi together with their leader, Saint Sukhius. The Church remembers them on 28 April (new style).

Sukhius and his sixteen companions were high officials at the court of the ruler of Caucasian Albania, a state on the territory of present-⁠day Azerbaijan. Accompanying his daughter Satenik, wife of the Armenian king Artaxias (88-123), they reached Artashat, the ancient capital of Armenia. There the Greek Christian Chrysos was preaching, enlightened and ordained priest by the holy Apostle Thaddeus. The officials believed in the Saviour and resolved to give their whole life to the service of God. All seventeen went with Chrysos to Mesopotamia, and at the baptism performed by the priest in the waters of the Euphrates they were granted to see the Lord of glory, Jesus Christ.

At the place of baptism they raised an honoured cross, called the "Cross of the Annunciation". Chrysos then gave them new names: to the eldest, Sukhius, in place of Bagadras, and to his companions Andrew, Anastasius, Talale, Theodoritus, Ivkhirion, Jordan, Condratus, Lucian, Mimnenos, Nerangios, Polyeuctus, James, Phocas, Domentian, Victor and Zosimus. After the martyric death of the blessed Chrysos, Sukhius became the spiritual guide of the brotherhood. They moved to a wild place, on Mount Sukaketi near the village of Bagrevandi. There they led a life of severe asceticism, eating the scant plants of the mountains and drinking cold spring water.

The new ruler of pagan Albania, Datianos, learned that his former officials had become Christians and settled in solitude for prayer. He sent his close associate Barnabas with a band of soldiers to persuade them to return to court and to their former faith. Barnabas found them, but having vowed to serve God they rejected every appeal.

At Barnabas's command, Sukhius and his companions were pinned to the ground in the shape of a cross and burned. As he was dying, Saint Condratus, and then the other martyrs, sang the twenty-⁠first psalm. After the burning their bodies were hacked to pieces and scattered over all of Mount Sukaketi, from which the martyrs received the name "of Mesukevi" (more correctly, of Sukaketi). This took place in the year 123, by other reckoning in 130, while an eleventh-⁠century parchment manuscript of the Iviron monastery on Athos gives the year 100.

Their holy remains lay unburied and uncorrupted until the fourth century, when the local Christians placed them in coffins and buried them. The names of the martyrs were found written on the rock. Saint Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia († about 335) raised a church on that spot and founded a monastery, and later a healing spring appeared there. The saints are also commemorated on 22 November (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Alans.