Zacharias

Holy New Martyr Zacharias is one of the three new martyrs of Ano Moulia in Crete, Apostolos, Demetrios and Zacharias, killed in August 1867 during the Cretan uprising. A report of atrocities states that at Moulia, of twenty houses ten were burned and the church of the Holy Apostles was desecrated. In August 1867 the Turks seized Demetrios Manousakis, Apostolos Choiromouridakis and Zacharias Kornilakis, tied their hands, put out their eyes, cut off their hands, noses, ears and lips, and beheaded them.

According to local tradition, the Christian families of Moulia fled when the uprising of 1866 intensified and took refuge in a gorge above Zaros. At Mouliano Poros they ran into an Ottoman patrol. The three saints carried no weapons and started no fight. Demetrios and Apostolos were arrested at once; they refused to change their faith and were put to terrible tortures: beaten without mercy, their hands, noses and ears cut off, their eyes put out, and finally they were killed by the knife. Zacharias was left for last so that he would see the tortures of the others and give way, but he stayed firm. They tied a rope around his waist to the saddle of a horse and dragged him at speed over rocks and branches. He held on to the trunk of a wild pear tree, and they cut off both his hands with a sword and then killed him with seven blows on the head; the seven sword blows are still visible on the saint's skull.

The Christians buried all three in a stream bed, and every evening three lights appeared above the place. The course of the stream changed so as not to wash away the soil of the graves. In a dream shown to a villager, the saints asked that their relics be taken up and carried to the church of the Holy Apostles. The relics were put in a chest in the left apse, and in time an ever thicker spider's web appeared over the chest, on which the faces of the saints formed. A daughter of Zacharias, Papadia, who had been abducted and sold as a slave in Constantinople, saw her father in a dream telling her to dig in the church at the place where the relics had first been laid, because they would find holy water from which many cures would come. So it happened: at two metres' depth the holy water was found, and many sick people came from all over Crete and were healed.

Their life, service and supplicatory canons were printed in 2004 by the parish of Ano Moulia in a book compiled by Archimandrite Chrysostomos Papadakis. The three new martyrs are celebrated on the Sunday between 16 and 22 August (new style).