Blaise of Sebaste

Saint Blaise, known in Latin as Blasius and in various Eastern languages as Vlas or similar forms, is venerated as a physician, bishop, and martyr associated with the city of Sebastea (also called Sebaste; modern Sivas in Turkey) in historical Armenia Minor. Tradition places his martyrdom in the early fourth century, most often around the year 316, in the context of the anti-Christian measures of the emperor Licinius in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. No contemporary fourth-century historian or martyrology that can be dated with certainty records his name, and the narrative of his life and passion depends on later hagiographical Acts, of which the Greek recension is commonly assigned to about the eighth century, with Latin and other versions following. Those Acts present him as a Christian physician of Sebastea whose reputation for healing led to his election as bishop of the city.

When persecution threatened, according to the legend, Blaise withdrew from the city to a cave in the wilderness, often localized on Mount Argeus. There he lived in a manner reminiscent of the desert hermits: wild animals came to him without fear, and he healed their injuries. Hunters sent by the local governor, named in the texts as Agricolaus, found him surrounded by beasts and arrested him as a Christian. On the journey back to Sebastea several miracles were attributed to him. He is said to have commanded a wolf to return a pig it had stolen from a poor widow, who afterward brought him food and candles during his imprisonment. He is also said to have healed a boy who was dying because a fish bone had lodged in his throat, after the child's mother implored his help. This last episode became the principal narrative basis for his invocation against maladies of the throat and for the later custom of blessing throats with candles on his feast.

In prison Blaise refused to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods. The Acts describe a series of tortures, the most distinctive of which was the raking of his flesh with iron combs of the type used to card wool. That detail, whether historical or symbolic, later made him the patron of wool combers and of workers in the wool trade. He was finally beheaded. The instruments of his torture and the manner of his death, as told in the medieval legends, were widely depicted in Western art: the saint is often shown holding two candles or a wool comb, sometimes with a pig at his feet or with a child.

By the early Middle Ages the cult of Blaise was already established in both East and West. The Roman Martyrology and the Latin calendar keep his feast on 3 February; Byzantine and other Eastern calendars generally observe it on 11 February. From the fourteenth century he was counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, saints invoked especially in the German-speaking lands against a range of diseases and sudden dangers. In the Latin Church a blessing of throats, performed with two crossed candles, is still customarily given on or near 3 February. He is invoked for diseases of the throat, against choking, for wild and domestic animals, by veterinarians and physicians, by wool workers, and by various crafts associated with building and stone. The Dalmatian city of Dubrovnik took him as its principal patron, and a civic cult of considerable antiquity grew up around relics preserved there; Maratea in southern Italy likewise claims his body and maintains a major sanctuary.

Because the early documentary evidence is so thin, details that a modern biography would require—place and date of birth, family, education, and the precise year and circumstances of death—cannot be verified from reliable contemporary sources. What is historically secure is the existence of an early and geographically wide cult of a martyr-bishop of Sebastea named Blaise, the assignment of his feast to early February, and the later medieval elaboration of legends that shaped his iconography and his many patronages. Historians therefore treat the picturesque episodes of the cave, the animals, the fish bone, and the wool combs as hagiographical tradition rather than as recoverable fourth-century reportage, while still recognizing Blaise as one of the most popular saints of the medieval and early modern Christian world.