Hieromartyr New Hieromartyr Raphael of Lesbos

Venerable Raphael (b. c. 1410 on Ithaca) became a monk and later abbot of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Karyes near Thermi on Lesbos, where he had withdrawn in 1454 together with Deacon Nicholas, a native of Thessalonica, fleeing Ottoman incursions in Thrace.

In the spring of 1463, a decade after the Fall of Constantinople, Ottoman raiders attacked the monastery. The monks and local villagers who had taken refuge there were tortured from Holy Thursday through Bright Tuesday. Raphael was bound to a tree and had his jaw/head sawed through while alive — by tradition, he called the site a "second Golgotha." Deacon Nicholas died from the shock of witnessing his elder's suffering.

The twelve-year-old Irene, daughter of the village mayor Basil, who had come with her family to warn the monks of danger, was tortured before her father's eyes: her arm was severed, and she was then placed in a large clay vessel and burned alive over a fire lit beneath it. Her parents, the teacher Theodore, and her fifteen-year-old cousin Eleni perished with her.

For nearly 500 years, local Lesbos villagers, not knowing the site's history, made an unexplained annual pilgrimage to the ruined monastery on Bright Tuesday. In 1959, while building a chapel on the ruins, Raphael's relics were uncovered (July 3); the saints began appearing to numerous islanders in visions, revealing their identities and burial sites. Nicholas's relics were found June 13, 1960; Irene's in 1961. Iconographer Photios Kontoglou painted their image from witness accounts of the visions; a liturgical service was composed. They were formally canonized by the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople on September 11, 1970; the monastery at Thermi is today a major pilgrimage site on Lesbos.