Martyr Antiochus the Physician of Sebaste

Antiochus was a Christian physician of Cappadocian Sebastea (Sebaste), commemorated on July 16 and venerated as a martyr of the early Church. The synaxarion remembers him as a healer who attended to the sick both in body and in soul, and as the brother of the Martyr Platon, who is commemorated on November 18. He is numbered among the unmercenary physicians of the tradition, a doctor who treated the afflicted while openly professing the Christian faith.

According to the accounts, Antiochus was discovered to be a Christian while caring for the sick, and was brought to trial and subjected to fierce tortures. The Greek tradition recorded by Sanidopoulos places his interrogation in Galatia before a governor named Adrian, and describes his being suspended on wood with his sides torn and burned, his imprisonment, and his being cast into a cauldron of boiling oil; the OCA account summarizes these ordeals as his being thrown into boiling water. Through all of these he was preserved unharmed.

When he was given over to wild beasts to be devoured, the animals would not harm him but, by tradition, lay peacefully at his feet, and the tradition relates that many miracles were worked through his prayers and the idols crumbled to dust. He was finally put to death by beheading. The tradition relates that as he was beheaded, blood mixed with milk flowed from his wound — a sign that moved one of the executioners, named Cyriacus (Kyriakos), to confess Christ before all. Cyriacus was beheaded as well, and the two were buried side by side.