Monastic Martyrs of Karyes

The Monastic Martyrs of Karyes were Athonite monks slain on Mount Athos during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (1259-1282), who had committed to a reunion with the Latin Church. They are commemorated on December 5. The synaxarion remembers them as monks of Karyes, the administrative center of the Holy Mountain, who refused the pressure to accept union with Rome and were killed for their resistance.

By tradition, the persecution followed the emperor's adherence to the Union of Lyons and the policy of his Latin-minded Patriarch, John Bekkos (1275-1282). Latin-minded representatives are said to have come to the Holy Mountain demanding that the monks concede to the union with the Papal Church and accept Latin doctrines. The monks of Karyes regarded this as a betrayal of Orthodoxy and refused, and as a result the company that had come with fire and sword fell upon them.

According to the account, the attackers burned and devastated the Church of the Protaton at Karyes — the oldest church on the Holy Mountain, built in the tenth century — and left no one alive. The Protos, the chief administrator of the Mountain, who had denounced the Latin teaching as heresy, was after much torture hanged before the Protaton at the place called Chalkos; those monks hidden in the caves around Karyes were cut down with swords. In the broader Greek tradition the Protos is named Kosmas, whose relics are said to have been recovered in 1981 and to rest in the narthex of the Protaton.