The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste

Today is traditionally the feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste (d. later 3d cent.) They appear to have drawn quite a bit of attention on the internet today.

There was an interesting post about their cult and its history from Gregory DiPippo on the New Liturgical Movement site, which draws a topical parallel with the recent Coptic martyrdoms in Libya. The post can be viewed at The Feast of the Forty Martyrs

Matt Heintzelman wrote on the Medieval Religion discussion group as follows:

Among the confessors, one yielded and, leaving his companions, sought the warm baths near the lake which had been prepared for any who might prove inconstant. One of the guards set to keep watch over the martyrs beheld at this moment a supernatural brilliancy overshadowing them and at once proclaimed himself a Christian, threw off his garments, and joined the remaining thirty-nine. Thus the number of forty remained complete. At daybreak, the stiffened bodies of the confessors, which still showed signs of life, were burned and the ashes cast into a river.

He also gives the link to the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_Martyrs_of_Sebaste)

John Dillon posted further about the Martyrs on the Medieval Religion discussion group:

Our principal sources for this group of military martyrs of ancient Sebaste / Sebasteia in Armenia Minor (now Sivas in the homonymous province of Turkey) are a Greek-language Passio that seems to have arisen in the earlier fourth century, though its standard form (BHG 1201) is a little later than that, and a set of fourth-century laudationes deriving from different forms of the Passio and written by, among others, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and an Ephraem who does not appear to be St. Ephraem Syrus and whose work is preserved in Greek among the many texts dubiously ascribed to his celebrated homonym. Though the Passio and many of its progeny set the martyrs' suffering in a provincial persecution under Licinius various reports of _inventio_ of their relics indicate rather a later third-century date.

According to these sources, the forty were soldiers who, having publicly professed their Christianity and having undergone official interrogation, were at Sebaste forced to stand together all night in freezing weather in the proximity of a bathhouse whose warmth might tempt them to recant. One did and promptly expired; his place was taken by an attendant. In the morning, when the forty were at the point of expiring, they were cast still breathing onto a fire and were burned to death. Their bodies were thrown into a local river. Later these were recovered (they are said to have gleamed miraculously) and were interred in a martyrial church at their place of suffering.

Although St. Basil says that the Forty suffered in the middle of the city, an early development, enshrined in BHG 1201 and later texts, had them spend the night on ice in the middle of the city's lake, then frozen over; during that time they received from heaven badges of their holiness that in the texts are called stephanoi. As a stephanos is most commonly a garland, the martyrs are often depicted receiving martyrs' crowns.

A separately transmitted Testament (BHG 1203) purporting to come from the martyrs, giving the names of each, and affirming their unity and resoluteness is usually thought to be genuine but could be an artefact of their cult at an early stage. The cult spread widely: in addition to various early testimonies in the Greek and Armenian churches there are also two Latin translations of the Passio (the later one is dated to ca. 900) and two in Georgian. Medievally, there were at least two churches to these martyrs in Constantinople and several in Rome, of which the earliest is the originally late antique oratorio dei Santi Quaranta Martiri Sebasteni adjacent to Santa Maria Antiqua in the Roman Forum.

According to its originally eleventh-century Hypotyposis (handbook of arrangements), at the Theotokos Evergetis monastery in Constantinople on only this feast and that of the First and Second Findings of the Head of St. John the Forerunner (24. February) would the monks break their fast during Great Lent.

Some medieval depictions of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste:

a) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in the remains of the eighth-century apse fresco of the originally late antique oratorio dei Santi Quaranta Martiri Sebasteni adjacent to the chiesa di Santa Maria Antiqua in the Roman Forum:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/srkD9JC6z1n3JvkcublQPw

b) The suffering of the Forty as depicted (above the portraits) in an eighth- or perhaps earlier ninth-century fresco in the oratorio dei Quaranta Martiri in the Catacombe di Santa Lucia in Syracuse:
http://tinyurl.com/ydu7t5z
Before restoration:
http://tinyurl.com/yczl6uf

c) The suffering of the Forty as portrayed on a tenth-century ivory panel from Constantinople now in the Bode-Museum in Berlin:
http://tinyurl.com/p4zwrln

d) The suffering of the Forty as portrayed on the central panel of an early eleventh-century wood and ivory triptych in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg:
http://www.wga.hu/art/m/master/zunk_z/00martyr.jpg

e) A set of expandable views of eleventh-century mosaic portraits of the individual Forty Martyrs of Sebaste in the cathedral of St. Sophia in Kyiv / Kiev starts on this page and ends on the one that follows it:
http://tinyurl.com/kg9teuw

f) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in the eleventh-century frescoes of the cathedral of St. Sophia (now Sv. Sofija) in Ohrid:
http://tinyurl.com/3wtju2a
Detail views (one for each side of the window):
http://tinyurl.com/lzxuug3
http://tinyurl.com/k58ojvb

g) The suffering of the Forty as depicted on a later eleventh-century portable icon in the Icon Gallery - Ohrid in Ohrid:
http://tinyurl.com/otuvbh8

h) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in an early twelfth-century fresco (1105-1106) in the church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa at Asinou (Nicosia prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/q79t7mz
Detail view:
http://tinyurl.com/pz53fkx

i) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in a perhaps early twelfth-century icon formerly in the church of St. George at Iphi and now in the Svaneti Historical and Ethnographical Museum, Mestia, Georgia:
http://tinyurl.com/k6c3m4j
Detail views (brief video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewg5x-72zfw

j) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in a twelfth-century fresco in the church of Agios Nikolaos tis Stegis at Kakopetria (Nicosia prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/3cnbwn3
Detail views:
http://tinyurl.com/4xfrc6b
http://tinyurl.com/3buyvxv

k) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in the early thirteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1205 and 1216) of the Surp Astvatsatsin church at the Akhtala Monastery in Akhtala (Lori pronvince), Armenia:
http://eurasia.travel/files/akhtala_monastery_683x1024_xys.jpg

l) Portraits of twenty of the Forty as depicted in one half of a double illumination in an earlier thirteenth-century Gospel lectionary (ca. 1220) in Syriac from the vicinity of Mosul in today's Iraq (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. syr. 559, fols. 93v-94r):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Fortymartyrs.jpg

m) A surviving fragment of the suffering of the Forty as depicted in the earlier thirteenth-century frescoes (1230s) of the church of the Ascension of Our Lord in the Mileševa monastery near Prijepolje (Zlatibor dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/y9s5qge

n) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in a thirteenth-century mosaic portable icon in the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Museum, Washington, DC (view greatly expandable):
http://tinyurl.com/k7dqx2z
Another view:
http://tinyurl.com/mpbnufo

o) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in a damaged later thirteenth-century fresco (ca. 1263-1270 or 1270-1272) in the north choir of the monastery church of the Holy Trinity at Sopoćani (Raška dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/2fpwzct

p) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century portable icon in St. Catherine's monastery, St. Catherine (South Sinai governorate), Egypt:
http://tinyurl.com/q6g8bmt

q) The suffering of the Forty as depicted (panel at upper left) in an earlier fourteenth-century set of miniatures from Thessaloniki for the Great Feasts (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 31r):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/31r.jpg

r) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in a late fourteenth-century copy (1396) of the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, Français 313, fol. 286r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84557843/f577.image

s) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in what remains of a fifteenth-century mural painting, now mostly in outline only, in the former church of Sts. Peter and Paul (1360s) in Famagusta in Turkish-dominated Northern Cyprus, as seen in a brief, English-language video from the World Monuments Fund on its restoration (images of the painting after restoration start at 17:51):
http://www.wmf.org/video/forty-saving-forgotten-frescos-famagusta

t) The suffering of the Forty as depicted on a fifteenth-century Novgorod School icon tablet now in the Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, CA:
http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/russian-icons/forty-martyrs-sebaste

u) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy (1463) of the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fol. 114):
http://tinyurl.com/4qsg4r3

v) The suffering of the Forty as depicted on a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century Novgorod School icon tablet now in the State Tretyakov Museum in Moscow:
http://www.icon-art.info/hires.php?lng=en&type=1&id=1600

w) The individual Forty Martyrs of Sebaste as depicted in the earlier sixteenth-century frescoes (1545 and 1546) by Theofanis Strelitzas-Bathas (a.k.a. Theophanes the Cretan) in the katholikon of the Stavronikita monastery on Mt. Athos and as shown here in expandable views (all of the single portraits on these three pages):
http://tinyurl.com/7lnru5y
http://tinyurl.com/7wgo47o
http://tinyurl.com/78lj8jx

x) The suffering of the Forty as depicted in the earlier sixteenth-century frescoes (1546/47) by George / Tzortzis the Cretan in the Dionysiou monastery on Mt. Athos (detail view):
http://tinyurl.com/nmlg3s5