Martyrdom
When Diocletian's persecution of Christians began around 303, George gave away his wealth to the poor and confessed his faith openly before the imperial senate. Tradition records his confession in words to the effect that he was a servant of Christ his God and, trusting in Him, had come among them voluntarily to bear witness to the Truth.
Arrested, he is said to have endured a series of severe tortures, among them placement on a spiked wheel, entombment in lime for three days, iron sandals fitted with heated nails, flogging, and attempts at poisoning, with miraculous healing reported after each ordeal. He was beheaded on April 23, 303, before the defensive wall of Nicomedia.
By tradition his sufferings moved the Empress Alexandra and a pagan priest named Athanasius to embrace Christianity, and both subsequently became martyrs themselves.
Relics & Shrines
George's body was returned to Diospolis (Lydda) for burial, where Christians venerated him as a martyr. During the reign of Constantine the Great (306–337) a church was built in his honor and his relics were translated there; the November 3 feast commemorates this dedication and translation.
The Church of Saint George in Lydda, the modern Lod in Israel, houses a sarcophagus traditionally believed to contain his relics. Excavations there revealed a basement containing the tomb and fragments of relics.
Sources & Historical Record
The earliest comprehensive hagiographic account of George survives in a Syriac translation from around 600, based on fifth-century Greek texts. In 494 Pope Gelasius I listed George among the saints whose names are justly reverenced among men but whose deeds are known only to God.
George bears the titles Trophy-Bearer, Victory-Bearer, and Wonderworker (Megalomartyr). The earliest iconography depicts him as a Roman soldier; after the Crusades he is commonly shown mounted on a white horse, often paired with Saint Demetrius — the two likened in tradition to earthly reflections of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel.
Veneration Across the Churches
The Eastern Orthodox Church venerates George as a Great Martyr on April 23 (May 6 on the Gregorian calendar). When April 23 falls before Pascha, the feast is moved to Bright Monday.
The Russian Orthodox Church keeps additional commemorations: November 3, the consecration of the cathedral at Lydda built under Constantine, during which his relics were transferred; and November 26, marking a church dedicated to him in Kiev established around 1054. Russian rulers including Yaroslav the Wise and Yurii Dolgoruky honored him extensively, and Moscow's coat of arms depicts him as a horseman defeating a serpent.
Georgia maintains an extraordinary devotion to George: 365 Orthodox churches in the country are said to be named after him, one for each day of the year. The Georgian Orthodox Church commemorates the torture of the Great Martyr George in 303 on November 10, distinct from the April 23 and November 3 feasts. In Serbia the spring feast is called Đurđevdan, observed on May 6, and is a common slava, or patron saint day, among Serbs, marking the season of renewal and the movement of the flocks in Balkan lands.
The Dragon Legend
The famous dragon-slaying legend is absent from the earliest hagiographies. The earliest known record of it occurs in an eleventh-century Georgian source; it reached Latin Europe in the twelfth century and was popularized in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, which describes George saving a king's daughter from a dragon at Silene in Libya.
One Orthodox tradition places the dragon encounter at Beirut, where George is said to have slain a serpent terrorizing the region, leading to the conversion of a great multitude and the building of a church dedicated to the Theotokos and Saint George.
The narrative has been interpreted as a symbol of Christianity's triumph over Satan, and also as a Christianized form of older Indo-European dragon-slayer mythology, possibly connected to the Perseus and Andromeda myth located near Lydda.
