The life of St Gregory V of Constantinople
In his final term, beginning in 1818, he faced the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. As head of the Orthodox community under Ottoman rule, he was pressed by the Sultan to condemn the uprising, and under that pressure issued a formal excommunication of the revolutionaries, an act later remembered with mixed feelings but done, by most accounts, in hope of shielding the wider Christian population of the capital from reprisal.
It did not spare him. On Easter Sunday 1821, immediately after celebrating the Divine Liturgy of the Resurrection, he was seized by Ottoman authorities, stripped of his vestments, and hanged at the central gate of the Patriarchate, where his body was left for three days. Greek sailors later recovered his remains from the sea and carried them to Odessa for burial. The gate where he died has remained sealed ever since. His death, on the holiest day of the Christian year, became one of the defining martyrdoms of the Greek struggle for independence.
