Hieromartyr Theodore of Adjara (XVIII–XIX)

Saint Theodore of Adjara belongs to that host of many thousands of holy martyrs, natives of Adjara, a most ancient region of Georgia, who suffered for Christianity at the hands of the Ottomans.

Saint Theodore was born in the 1770s–80s. This was the time when the Ottomans had almost completed the forcible conversion of this region of Georgia to Islam, had almost entirely wiped out that part of the population which refused to accept Islam, and had begun to deport those families which, despite their outward profession of the Muslim faith, were still regarded as suspect in the eyes of the invaders. Some left their native region of their own accord and chose to live in a foreign land for the salvation of their souls. Saint Theodore was born into one such family; he saw with his own eyes the forced submission of the Georgian population, converted to Islam by force, to Muslim customs, and their secret Christian life.

It is not clear from the saint’s life for what reason his family came to be in Trebizond, or how many generations of them lived outside their homeland; it is known that Saint Theodore renounced Islam. He received the Christian faith, and since this was very dangerous, Saint Theodore took refuge in one of the Georgian monasteries in the city of Smyrna (Izmir); there he was tonsured a monk, and he also converted his brother’s son to Christianity. Soon Saint Theodore became the proigumen of this monastery as well.

In 1822 Saint Theodore decided to go to Athos, to the Georgian monastery. As is known, at this time the Ottoman Empire was seeking to drown in blood the Greeks’ struggle for national liberation. The Holy Mountain of Athos too was surrounded by Ottoman troops. It was they who seized the monk on his way to Athos and killed him after many kinds of torment and torture; the lawless threw the martyr’s body into the sea.