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Biography

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Saint Conon of Bidana, also called Conon of Isauria, is an early Christian holy man whose memory is preserved in Byzantine hagiography rather than in contemporary historical documents. The Greek synaxaria and related vitae identify him as a native of Bidana (Bidane), a village near the city of Isaura in the rugged highland country of Isauria in southern Asia Minor, a region of the Roman Empire that corresponds to part of present-day south-central Turkey. Tradition places him in the apostolic or immediately post-apostolic age, and some recensions even claim that Christianity had already reached his district through the preaching of the Apostle Paul. No independent source supplies a verifiable year of birth or death, and modern historians regard the narrative as legendary in outline, while still attesting a genuine local cult of an Isaurian ascetic and confessor.

According to the standard Greek Life, Conon was instructed in the Christian faith through visions of the Archangel Michael, who is said to have baptized him and to have clothed him in the monastic habit. Recensions differ on his family circumstances: some describe a marriage contracted at his parents’ insistence, after which he and his wife lived in continence; others omit any spouse and present him simply as a desert-dwelling monk and farmer. In all versions he works the land as a gardener or husbandman while leading an austere life and converting pagan villagers in the Taurus mountains, overturning idols and teaching the new faith. These episodes belong to the common stock of early Anatolian hagiography and cannot be confirmed outside the legend.

The passion narrative names a local governor, Magnus, as his persecutor. Conon is arrested and tortured; the episode most often repeated is that nails were driven into his feet and that he was forced to run before the governor’s chariot. The vitae attribute miracles to him during this ordeal, including an earthquake or the swallowing of Magnus and his escort by the earth. Unlike many literary martyrs of the same type, Conon is generally said not to have died under torture. After the death of his persecutor he is reported to have resumed preaching and ascetic labour and to have died in peace at an advanced age in his native region. Because of the sufferings he endured he is nonetheless commemorated as a martyr in the Eastern calendars.

He must be distinguished, though popular devotion has not always done so, from Saint Conon the Gardener, a martyr of Magydos in Pamphylia under the emperor Decius, with whom he has been confused because both are linked to gardening, to southern Asia Minor, and to a feast in early March. The principal commemoration of Conon of Isauria is 5 March in the Byzantine rite. He was never the object of a formal papal canonization; his cult belongs to the ancient, pre-congregational layer of Christian veneration. Beyond the existence of that Isaurian cult and a fully developed legendary biography, almost nothing about his life can be established by ordinary historical criteria.

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