Zacharias

Zacharias, Bishop of Sitia in Crete, was killed at Heraklion in June 1821, in the church of St Menas, together with the Metropolitan of Crete and other bishops. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in the year 2000 as a hieromartyr. The Church commemorates him on 23 June with the other martyrs of Crete of 1821, and the Metropolis of Ierapetra and Sitia also remembers him on 26 June.

The sources we have say nothing of his life before he became bishop. He was shepherd of the diocese of Sitia when the Turks, learning of the uprising in the Peloponnese, ordered Metropolitan Gerasimos to summon the bishops of the island to Heraklion. At the synod in the church of St Menas, on 23 June, the Turks burst in and killed the metropolitan first, then the bishops of Knossos, Chersonisos, Sitia and Diopolis. Zacharias fell among them.

In the same days at Sitia the monastery of Toplou was laid waste, and the abbot and thirteen monks were killed on the night of 26 to 27 June. This is not connected with the bishop's death, but it shows the fate of the clergy in eastern Crete at that time. The Metropolis of Sitia keeps the memory of Zacharias as one of its sacrificed shepherds.