Hagiography icon of Agios Minas

Hagiography icon of Agios Minas

Agios Minas was born in Egypt in the middle of the 3rd century AD. by pagan parents. However, the pagan environment in which he grew up, failed to harden his heart which, when the time came, he skipped listening to the voice of the “heart and kidneys” (Psalm 7:10) God and so the teenager, Minas he became a Christian. Growing up, he chose to pursue a career in the Roman army.

Minas was distinguished for his wisdom but also for his bravery and for that reason he was appreciated in the military. Unfortunately, three centuries after the coming of Christ, the old world still did not want to accept the redemptive message of the Resurrection.

Diocletian and Maximian ordered a persecution against the rational sheep of Christ, a persecution that lasted from 303 to 311 AD. This was the first critical moment when Minas was called to say “the big yes or the big no”. The Saint could not bear it, threw his military belt on the ground, thus stripping himself of the status of soldier-persecutor of Christians, and escaped to the adjacent mountain.

So, at the age of about fifty, after a divine revelation that the time of martyrdom had come, he went down to the city, on a day of pagan festivals, and with parsimony, in the midst of the raging pagans, confessed Christ as the one and true God, mingling deaf and unconscious idols. He was arrested and dragged in front of Pyrrhus, the commander of the city.

There, speaking with courage, he revealed his name, his origin, his military past and, of course, he boldly and unwaveringly proclaimed his faith in Christ. He was taken to prison and the next morning, he was presented again before the ruler who accused him of insulting the gods and even in front of him and that he had fallen from the army.

The saint accepted the accusations without hesitation. Pyrrhus ordered him to be subjected to unbearable torture. The executioners whipped him so much that his whips were changed two or three times. They hung him and skinned him until the internal organs of the Saint began to appear. Then, as if that were not enough, they rubbed his stunned body with a hairy cloth and at the end dragged him naked and mutilated on metal thorns. In fact, at the time of his martyrdom, some of his old soldiers urged him to sacrifice to idols, saying that his God would justify him by seeing the tortures to which he was subjected.

The Saint resolutely refused and replied that he was offering a sacrifice even to Christ, who empowered him to endure wounds. The ruler, admiring the aptness and wisdom of the Witness’s answers, asked him in astonishment how it was possible for a rude soldier like him to be able to answer in this way.

And the Saint, with the enlightenment of God, answered him that this ability is given to his martyrs by Christ, as promised in the Gospel: ἀπολογήσησθε ἢ τί εἴπητε. Τὸ γὰρ⁇ γιον Πνεῦμα διδάξει ὑμᾶς ἐν αὐτῇ τὴ ὥρα ἃ δεῖ εἰπειν »(Λουκά ιβ ‘, 11-12). Then, desperate, the tyrant ordered that he be beheaded.

He was beheaded on November 11 at the beginning of the 4th c. A.D. (probably in 304 AD) and so his soul flew happily to the Savior Christ whom the Saint followed so much and for whom he sacrificed himself.