Romanus of Karpenision

Holy Venerable Martyr Romanus of Karpenision, a schema-⁠monk, was born in the village of Andranova (today Aspropyrgos), near Karpenisi, in the Morea, in a family not wealthy. He was beheaded by the Turks in 1694.

Having gone to the Holy Land, he visited the monastery of St Sabbas, where he learned much about the martyrs for the faith and himself resolved to receive the crown of martyrdom. Arriving at Thessalonica, he boldly confessed before the Turkish judge his faith in Jesus Christ, the true God and Saviour of the world, and denounced Muhammad as a false prophet, for which he was subjected to cruel torments. The Turks wished to make him a slave and send him for life as an oarsman on the galleys, but the Christians, bribing the judge, rescued him and sent him to Athos, to Kapsokalyvia.

There Romanus visited the hermit Acacius of Kapsokalyvia, who, after a vision, tonsured him into the great schema and blessed him to receive the crown of martyrdom. Romanus wished to go to the Holy Land, but circumstances forced him to go to Constantinople, where he boldly confessed Christ as true God. The Turks seized him and threw him into a pit for forty days, then beheaded him.

The martyr's body was ransomed for five hundred silver coins by an English captain and taken to England. The cloth with the saint's blood is kept at the Docheiariou Monastery. St Romanus is commemorated on 4 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Athonite Venerables, in the new style.