Monastic Martyrs of the Monastery of Saint Sabbas

The Monastic Martyrs of the Monastery of Saint Sabbas were twenty monks of the Lavra of Saint Sabbas, killed by Saracens on Holy Thursday, 20 March, in the time of Patriarch Elias II of Jerusalem and the emperors Constantine and Irene (780-797). They are commemorated on 20 March.

At that time Palestine was ravaged by wars among the tribes of the Hagarenes, who plundered villages and cities. The Lavra of Venerable Sabbas, in which fathers pleasing to God by their hermit life lived under Abbot Basil, was also in danger, but the monks would not leave their holy home even to find safety from the barbarians in Jerusalem, saying that their wall was Christ and their arms were spiritual. For a long time the prayers of Venerable Sabbas kept them from harm, and the barbarians who came from Arabia did nothing to them.

But God allowed the trial, like gold in the fire. About sixty armed barbarians burst into the lavra near the end of Great Lent, in the week before Palm Sunday, demanding gold and silver. The monks answered that they were quiet and poor men, and the barbarians let fly arrows like rain and struck thirteen fathers mortally, wounding others. Abba Thomas, a skilled physician, drew out the arrows and dressed the wounds. Toward Palm Sunday they learned that the barbarians were gathering more companions, but they did not flee and prepared by prayer. On Thursday, 20 March, Holy Thursday, the barbarians burst in a second time, in greater numbers, and killed the venerable men without mercy, in many ways. The young John, the guest-⁠house keeper, they caught fleeing to the mountain, cut his sinews and dragged him over stones to the church. Venerable Patrick gave himself up for the others, so that the place where they hid would not be discovered. The barbarians gathered the fathers in the church and demanded four thousand gold pieces, then took them to the cave of Saint Sabbas, where they lit a fire and tormented them with smoke to make them reveal the treasury. Eighteen venerable men, among them John and Patrick, died in the smoke, and the names of the others, killed by smoke, sword and other torments, only God knows.

The remaining brothers brought the slain into the church, which had remained unburned, and kept vigil over them all night. The barbarians perished soon afterwards, without sword, in the wilderness. The passion was written at length, immediately after the event, by the monk Stephen the Sabaite, the verse writer.