Meletios of Kitros

Meletios (in the world Meletios Kyriakou) was Bishop of Kitros in central Macedonia and died as a martyr at Thessaloniki in May 1821, at the start of the Greek Revolution. He is commemorated as a hieromartyr on 21 July, together with the thousands of Thessalonians killed then. The sources available do not show an act of canonization, only this commemoration.

The bishop

He was Bishop of Kitros and Katerini in central Macedonia from 1815 according to one Greek source, from 1812 according to a Bulgarian one. Under him the seat of the bishopric was moved from Kitros to Kolindros. He was known for sharpness and manliness. At the start of the Revolution of 1821 he was in Thessaloniki as deputy of Metropolitan Joseph of Thessalonica, who was in Constantinople at the work of the Synod, where he too received a martyr's death along with Patriarch Gregory V.

Events in Thessaloniki

At the end of February 1821 Alexander Ypsilantis, with the Philikoi, crossed the Prut and raised Moldavia and Wallachia, and on 25 March the uprising began in the Peloponnese. Massacres of Greeks followed across the Ottoman Empire, and on Pascha day, 10 April, Patriarch Gregory V was hanged at Constantinople. The governor of Thessaloniki, Seyyid Yusuf Pasha, began persecuting Greeks even before the revolt in the Peloponnese, after the arrest of the priest Ananias Markopoulos and six other members of the Society on whom compromising letters were found.

The chief judge, the mullah Hayrullah, asked the bishop to keep his flock at peace. Meletios accepted the appeal, but Yusuf Pasha did not wish the same: on 27 February he imprisoned the mullah himself, for leniency toward unbelievers, in Kanli Kule, the Bloody Tower (today the White Tower), and threw about four hundred Greeks, a hundred of them monks, into the cellar of his house. After the Greeks of the Chalkidiki peninsula rose, Yusuf Pasha began the massacre on 18 May. The mullah Hayrullah was released, but before his eyes half the hostages in the pasha's house were cut down. The Greeks sought refuge in the churches, and the Turks broke down the doors and killed about two thousand people. Father John, rector of the metropolitan church of Saint Demetrius, had his hands and feet cut off.

Martyrdom

The sources do not agree on his death. According to the Greek one, Meletios was hanged and then cut to pieces by the Turkish mob in the Kapani square of Thessaloniki (today Vlali square), on 18 May 1821; according to the Russian and Serbian, he was handed over to the mob in the same square before the mullah's eyes and cut to pieces, on 19 May. With him were killed leading men of the city, members of the Society, among them George Vlalis, Christos Meneses, churchwarden of Saint Demetrius, Christodoulos Balanos, George Paikos, Athanasios Skandalidis and others. The Bulgarian source wrongly gives 21 July as the day of his death. His commemoration is on 21 July, together with the two thousand Thessalonians killed.