Phocas

Saint Phocas, often called Phocas the Gardener or Phocas of Sinope, is a Christian martyr of the Roman East whose cult flourished from late antiquity, especially along the Black Sea and among Mediterranean sailors. Almost nothing about him can be established from contemporary records. The surviving Greek and Latin passions are late and heavily legendary, and hagiographers have long observed that several homonymous figures appear to have been fused or duplicated: a gardener living outside Sinope in Pontus, a bishop of the same city, and a martyr connected with Antioch. Traditional dates for his death therefore diverge. Some martyrologies place a bishop Phocas of Sinope under the emperor Trajan in the early second century; others assign the gardener's martyrdom to the Diocletianic persecution at the opening of the fourth century. A cautious historical account can say only that a Christian associated with Sinope was remembered as a martyr, and that his tomb and name became the focus of a popular cult by the fourth and fifth centuries.

In the form of the story that became most familiar, Phocas lived by cultivating a small garden near Sinope, on the southern shore of the Black Sea. He distributed vegetables and herbs to the poor and kept open house for travelers. When a persecution was decreed, soldiers or imperial agents arrived in the district with orders to find and kill a Christian named Phocas. He received them as guests, served them from his garden, and, after they had disclosed their mission, spent the night digging a grave among his own beds. In the morning he made himself known, urged them not to fail in their duty, and was beheaded. The tale was repeated as a model of hospitality extended even to one's executioners and of unresisting fidelity. A parallel tradition, commemorated on a different day, presents Phocas as bishop of Sinope, imprisoned and tortured for refusing to sacrifice, and put to death by fire or by immersion in a pit of burning lime.

Veneration of the saint is better attested than the details of his life. Sinope possessed a church and tomb associated with him, which attracted pilgrims. Relics, or claimed relics, were later reported at Constantinople, where a church of Saint Phocas stood, and in the West, notably at Vienne in Gaul. Seafarers of the eastern Mediterranean invoked him in tempests; miracle collections describe him appearing on ships, calming storms, or supplying food. Because the principal legend is set in a garden, he was adopted as patron of gardeners and of those who work the soil. Western liturgical books commonly keep his feast on 23 July; Eastern calendars often celebrate Phocas the gardener on 22 September and the bishop of Sinope on 14 July or 5 March. Like other martyrs of the pre-Constantinian or early Constantinian age, he was not canonized by a later papal process; recognition rested on ancient local cult and eventual entry into the martyrologies.

The martyr of Sinope is not to be confused with the Byzantine emperor Phocas, a Thracian centurion who seized the throne in 602 and was overthrown and killed in 610, and who was never honored as a saint. For the historian, Saint Phocas remains an obscure figure. The core of the tradition is a Pontic martyr whose name and burial place inspired a wide maritime and agrarian patronage, while the picturesque episodes of the garden, the unknowing guests, and the self-dug grave belong to the realm of edifying legend rather than recoverable biography.