He was a slave for nineteen years and he was never freed. No rescue came. No ransom, no escape, no change of fortune. He died in the same stable he had been thrown into as a young man. And he is remembered as one who won.
Taken
He was born around 1690 in Little Russia — the Cossack lands, in what is now Ukraine. No village name survives. As a young soldier in the army of Peter the Great he was captured by Tatars during the Russo-Turkish war of 1711, sold on, and carried south into Cappadocia, to a town the Greeks called Prokopi.
His master was a Turkish cavalry officer. John was put to work in the stables, tending his horses. He was beaten with wooden rods, kicked, spat on, and his scalp was burned with a red-hot brass basin. They called him infidel. He answered the same way every time: “I was born a Christian and I shall die a Christian.”
The stable
In time his master relented and offered him better quarters. John refused them. He asked to stay in the stable, and said that the cave where Christ was born had been no better.
So he slept on the straw beside the horses, under an old coat. He ate little. He kept vigil through the night, often outside the church of Saint George nearby, and received Communion on Saturdays. The household that had tortured him began, slowly, to revere him. The Muslims of the town came to call him a holy man.
Τίς ἡμᾶς χωρίσει
ἀπὸ τῆς ἀγάπης τοῦ Χριστοῦ;
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”
Romans 8:35 · the words on the scroll in his icon
The dish sent to Mecca
His master went on pilgrimage to Mecca. At a banquet in his absence, the officer’s wife said aloud how she wished her husband could share his favourite dish. John asked for a plate of pilaf, saying he would send it to him. The guests laughed at him.
He carried the plate to the stable and prayed over it. It vanished. When his master returned, he described finding the dish waiting in his locked room in Mecca, still steaming — and produced the copper plate, engraved with his own mark, which the whole household recognised.
The apple
He fell ill in the spring of 1730, aged about forty. A priest came to bring him Communion, but feared to carry the Gifts openly. He hollowed out an apple, lined it with beeswax, and brought the Eucharist to the stable inside it. John received, and died the same day — 27 May 1730.
His Muslim master, who had once burned him, laid a costly carpet over the coffin of the slave who would not become one. Three years later he was exhumed, and his body was found whole and fragrant. It has never been buried again.
Carried out
For nearly two centuries he lay in the church where he had prayed as a slave. Then in 1924, in the population exchange, the Greeks of Prokopi were forced out of Asia Minor for good.
They took him with them. His relics left Prokopi wrapped in a kilim and declared at the customs post as “clothes and food” — by ox-cart, then by train to the coast, then by ship. The refugees who had lost everything carried the body of a man who had never owned anything.
They settled on the island of Evia, in a village they renamed Nea Prokopi — New Prokopi — after the home they would not see again. He rests there still, and hundreds of thousands come to him every year. In Greece he is called the saint of the refugees.
In May 2024, a portion of his right hand — kept by one Cappadocian refugee family for a hundred years — was returned by their grandchildren and reunited with his body.
Apolytikion · Tone 4
ἐκ γῆς ὁ καλέσας σε πρὸς οὐρανίους μονάς, τηρεῖ καὶ μετὰ θάνατον ἀδιαλώβητον τὸ σκῆνός σου ὅσιε‧ σὺ γὰρ ἐν τῇ Ἀσίᾳ ὡς αἰχμάλωτος ἢχθης, ἔνθα καὶ ὕκειώθης τῷ Χριστῷ Ἰωάννη‧ αὐτὸν οὖν ἱκέτευε, σωθῆναι τὰς ψυχὰς ἡμῶν.
He who called you from the earth to the dwellings of heaven keeps your body unbroken even after death, O righteous one. For you were carried into Asia as a captive, and there you were made a friend of Christ. Therefore, O John, entreat Him that our souls may be saved.
The Greek is the traditional dismissal hymn. The English is our own rendering.
Dates
Read further
- Orthodox Church in America — his lifeoca.org
- The shrine at Nea Prokopioir.gr — the official site of his shrine, in Greek
- OrthodoxWiki — John the Russianorthodoxwiki.org