Lambros

Saint Lambros the New Martyr was a merchant from the Peloponnese, put to death by hanging at Vrachori (today Agrinio) in the year 1786, together with Theodore and a third martyr whose name is not known. The Church commemorates them on 2 November (new style, the Greek calendar).

The three merchants had stayed a long time at Ioannina, where they had also learned Albanian. In 1786 they set out for their homeland, the Morea, and stopped for the night at Vrachori. At the entrance to the town stood the collectors of the head tax paid by Christians. To avoid paying, the three pretended to be Muslims and greeted them with the Muslim salaam. The collectors took them for Muslim Albanians and let them pass. In the evening, in a house where they were lodging, someone overheard them telling the host that with one salaam they had escaped the tax. The Turks seized them, dragged them before the judge and demanded they be questioned: if they had mocked the Turks' faith they should be punished, and if they had come to love Islam they should be circumcised.

The saints answered honestly that they had greeted in the Turkish way only to avoid the tax, not because they loved Islam. The judge told them to become Turks or be tortured and killed, and they answered that they could not deny their faith. They were beaten without mercy and imprisoned. In prison they strengthened one another, and the most learned of them said that they would endure for a short time and gain eternal life. After days of enforced fasting they were brought again to the judge, beaten, taken back, and after five days condemned. They were hanged, one on a plane tree near the market, another outside the church of Saint Demetrius, and the third at the edge of the square.

Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite mentions in his New Martyrologion (page 715) three new martyrs killed at Vrachori in 1786 without giving their names; the names of Lambros and Theodore were found by research by the late Father Gerasimos Mikragiannanites.