Plato Aivazidis

Archimandrite Plato Aivazidis (or Aivazoglou, 1850 - 21 September 1921), hieromartyr, was a Greek priest and theologian from Patmos, who died a martyr at Amasya in 1921 and was placed among the saints by the Church of Greece. He is commemorated on 21 September, with the other Pontic priests hanged with him. The sources do not give the date of canonization.

Youth and ministries

He was born on the island of Patmos in 1850 (the Russian source gives 1852), of Nicholas, of Chian descent, and Maria. He studied at the Patmias School and, at fifteen, entered as a novice the monastery of Saint John the Theologian, where two of his uncles were monks. He remained in the monastery until the age of twenty-⁠five. He was ordained priest on Lemnos and took the office of protosyncellus (second in rank) under Metropolitan Athanasios Kaporalis. When Metropolitan Athanasios was transferred to Kastoria, in 1899, he took the protosyncellus Plato with him. After finishing the clerical school of Patmos he continued theological studies at the Great School of the Nation in Constantinople and then was in turn archdeacon at the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, protosyncellus of the metropolises of Lemnos, Samos and Kastoria. At Kastoria he served under Bishop Germanos, a notable figure of the Macedonian Struggle; the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle has a photograph from 1904 in which Plato and Germanos hold a memorial service at the grave of the Macedonian fighter Pavlos Melas.

Following Germanos, Plato went, after Macedonia, as protosyncellus to the Pontic diocese of Amasia, with its seat at Samsun (according to the Greek source, from 1910, as assistant to Bishop Germanos Karavangelis). From 1908 Germanos, with Plato, took an active part in founding Greek schools; they opened a gymnasium recognized by the University of Athens and, with it, the largest gymnasium hall in Turkey, with apparatus sent from Athens. In 1913 Patriarch Joachim III died; Germanos was among the three candidates, but stepped aside in favor of the aged Metropolitan Germanos of Chalcedon. In 1914, being in Germany, Germanos learned from Plato and other sources of the persecution begun against his flock; he succeeded in using the family ties of Queen Sophia of Greece with the German court and halting the persecution, but a few weeks after his return the First World War began.

The Turks mobilized the Greeks of Pontus between twenty and forty-⁠five into "labor battalions", sending them into the interior of Anatolia, where many died of hunger and hardship. In 1915 the Turks carried out the genocide of the Armenians, and Armenian families gave their children into the protection of the Greek metropolis, which in turn distributed them among Greek families. In 1916 the deportation of the Greek population into the interior of Anatolia began. Germanos' friendship with Marshal Vehip Pasha, who remembered the correct treatment by the Greeks when he was a prisoner in Athens in 1913 after the battle of Bizani, halted the deportation for a short time. The response of the Greek population to the repressions was the organization of self-⁠defense detachments, with the support of the metropolis, which came to number twenty thousand fighters. Germanos sent a letter to Yudenich, asking him to continue the offensive, take Samsun and save the Christian population. Having become a target of the Turks, Germanos was sent to Constantinople, imprisoned, but escaped death and was released on the intervention of the patriarch. Plato remained all the while serving in the metropolis as protosyncellus. After the war Germanos returned to Samsun. In 1919 Mustafa Kemal (the future Atatürk) arrived at Samsun and wished to meet Germanos, but the metropolitan ignored him. In 1920, after the start of the Kemalist movement, Germanos took an active part in forming a front of Turks, Kurds and Circassians opposed to Kemal. At the height of the Greek offensive in western Asia Minor, just after the taking of the city, Germanos arrived at Kütahya and proposed to the Greek command to send one regiment by sea to the Pontic region, to advance with local partisan detachments into Kemal's rear, toward Ankara; the answer of the general staff, General Dousmanis, was: "not one soldier, especially since in a month I shall be at Ankara".

Martyrdom

In Germanos' absence, the place of the bishop was taken by Fr. Euthymios (Agritellis), under whom Plato continued to serve as protosyncellus. In this time the Kemalists continued the destruction of the Christians of Pontus, begun by the Young Turks. Plato, seventy years old, spent eight months in the prison of Amasya with 69 priests and elders, but as long as the outcome of the war was unclear, the Turks did not dare to put them to death. As soon as the Greek army withdrew from Ankara, all seventy were hanged on 21 September 1921; at the same time Topal Osman Agha put to death fifteen hundred young men of Samsun. The Greek source says that Bishop Euthymios and the protosyncellus Plato were arrested with 68 other Greeks of the Amasia region by Kemal's Turks and executed by hanging on 21 September 1921, except Euthymios, who had died of hardship or typhus as early as 29 May. The protosyncellus Plato Aivazidis was placed among the saints by the Church of Greece; the memory of him and of the other priests of Pontus hanged with him is kept on 21 September.