HOLY MARTYR HYACINTH OF AMASTRIS

On July 31, the Church remembers Saint Hyacinth of Amastris. Exactly two weeks before, the martyr Hyacinth of Rome was celebrated. These are completely different saints. But both bore names from pagan mythology. This indicates that they came from a polytheistic environment. Therefore, the anger of the pagans for their Christian conversion was uncontrollably cruel.

1 On the last day of July, the Orthodox Churches that adhere to the Julian calendar celebrate the memory of the holy martyr Hyacinth of Amastris. Saint Hyacinth is one of the rare “holy children,” that is, those saints of God whose ministry, and sometimes martyrdom for the faith in Christ, began very early. Among these saints are the holy martyr Musa, Saint Salsa of Carthage, and the martyr Gabriel the Child of Bialystok, Poland.

2 But even among these very rare saints, Hyacinth is exceptional. The life claims that he was only three years old, and one of his peers, who was standing next to him, fell dead. Hyacinth, like a child, boldly prayed to God, and the child came back to life. Usually, a miracle of such magnitude would have ended in some kind of sacred apotheosis, martyrdom, or some other outcome, but God prolonged the life of Saint Hyacinth and did not make him disappear.

3 Hyacinth lived to adulthood, became a preacher of the word of God, and ended his life as a martyr. Moreover, this occurred in very banal, even absurd, tragic circumstances, which made Hyacinth like… John the Baptist. Absurdity and tragedy are twin sisters, wrote the truly great theologian Albert Camus, who among others worked on Saint Augustine,. Saint Augustine was the most tragic of the Church Fathers. In addition to this commonality of thought, Camus, like Augustine, was originally from Algeria.

4 Saint Hyacinth lived and preached near Amastris, now Turkish Amasra, on the Black Sea coast. One day, deeply troubled by the behavior of his fellow citizens who venerated a sacred tree, Hyacinthus cut down the plant.

5 Amastris was a small town where everyone knew each other. The name Hyacinthus was of pagan origin. This meant that he or his parents had come to the faith through a conscious conversion. The pagans obviously remembered this; they were aware of his great boldness toward the one God, which he had demonstrated from childhood. Since, from a social point of view, his behavior was beyond reproach, they simply could not approach him before this public incident with the tree. They then took cruel revenge for everything that had happened in the past.

6 The pagans cruelly tortured the saint, knocked out his teeth, dragged him bound along the ground, and finally threw him in prison. He died from severe injuries. Unfortunately, the dates of the martyr’s life have not been preserved. In the following centuries, a special dust appeared at Hyacinthus’s burial site on his commemoration day. The local bishop collected it and distributed it to the faithful. In this unusual way, the Lord performed healings from the martyr’s tomb. The 10th-century Byzantine author, Niketas of Paphlagonia, a prolific jurist, hagiographer, and writer, testified to these miracles at the tomb of the ancient martyr in his panegyric sermon to Hyacinthus as an eyewitness.

7 How can we, in the 21st century, in the age of ecology, understand the anger of a martyr against a venerated tree? It’s very simple. Imagine a poisonous plant called giant hogweed, which grows very quickly and spreads like lightning in parts of Russia and Eastern Europe. We know the mechanism of its reproduction, the genesis of its origin, and for us, it is, in a way, “pure evil,” an accident. We live, as the philosophers say, in a “disenchanted nature.” But the pagans of antiquity would undoubtedly attribute a supernatural character to this natural phenomenon. They would deify this plant and, moreover, offer sacrifices to the giant hogweed. Since contact with its juices is a source of blindness, they would probably appease it by blinding their own enemies or even their children. Paganism is evil, it humiliates man, and the Bible does not call it murder and spiritual fornication in vain. In this perspective, the spontaneous testimony of Saint Hyacinth, who, like Don Quixote, poured out his anger on a plant, remains relevant. He speaks of the inviolability of human dignity and the inadmissibility of dehumanization, even under the most sacred pretexts.

8 Christianity knows only one sacred tree: the tree of the Holy Cross, symbolized, for example, by the Christmas tree, evergreen, but, like Christ the Redeemer, cut down in his Passion for innocent human joy and the memory of the Nativity.