Augustin Sokolovski
On June 8, the Church celebrates the memory of the holy martyr George the New. The saint suffered for Christ for refusing to convert to Islam. According to the tradition of venerating saints, for the sake of the similarity of the name and martyrdom with Saint George the Great Martyr, the Church named the sufferer for the faith George the New. The saint is venerated as a new martyr. This is how Orthodoxy calls saints who suffered for their faith in Christ during the period of Muslim rule, and later, communist power.
This name itself is very important and refers not so much to chronology as to the fact that, unlike the ancient martyrs, these saints were deprived of life as if not for Christianity itself, but because of contrived slander and other circumstances.
George lived in Sofia, Bulgaria. His parents had reached old age but had no children. George was given to them by God through fervent prayer. He received a good education and was raised in sincere piety.
The saint was slandered before the powers that be, accused of allegedly promising to accept Islam, but changing his mind, and thus renounced it. Apparently, this was a tried and tested method. After all, the Koran forbids forcing Christians to convert to Islam. The accusation of an alleged promise of abdication was obviously used to circumvent this direct prohibition. In a similar way, Saint John the New suffered at the same time, and Saint Argyria two centuries later, through an accusation of breaking a promise to renounce his faith, supposedly given in the presence of witnesses.
Saint George was beaten with sticks, tortured, held under arrest, and then burned alive. An aggravating circumstance of his murderers' malice was their attempt to burn the corpses of animals along with him, to make his body inaccessible for burial. But heavy rain stopped the flames, the saint's body was taken by Christians, and his relics were subsequently honored with veneration. Due to the peculiarities of the political domination of the Ottomans, his glorification as a saint had to be kept secret. This happened in 1515.
Having captured Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire rapidly expanded its possessions and subjugated more and more new territories. It seemed that no one could stop the Ottomans, who were followed by Islamization and discrimination against the Orthodox. Christian states were not yet able to stop the literal avalanche of these conquests. Another two centuries remained to wait until the emergence of a new formidable Northern Power, as the Ottomans perceived the Russian Empire, which, with the help of God and the will of the pious rulers, began to rise from strength to strength, eventually pushing back the Ottomans and protecting the Orthodox and Christian population in general.
“Blessed are the meek,” says the Beatitudes. In the visible helplessness of their Christian witness, the new martyrs of the Church of Christ, George the New, and many others, became a living prayer for the future liberation of their brothers and sisters in the original Christian territories. With their hands raised to God, the new martyrs preserve those who venerate them as their true brothers and friends in grace, from misfortune, danger and the temptation of any abdication. The Church, the Society of Believers, who accomplishes his pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem in earthly history, asks for the intercession of St. George the New to receive the greatest gift of perseverance. This is what the early Church called the grace to keep faith in Christ until one's very last breath.