Origins and Family
John was born in 1785 in Thessaloniki to Macedonian parents who were Greek and Orthodox. According to the recorded account, his father came from the village of Avret Hisar — identified with old Gynaikokastro in the prefecture of Kilkis — while his mother came from the village of Lokovi, today's Taxiarchis, in Halkidiki. He had an elder brother named Theodore, and John was the younger son.
The family worked as cobblers, and John learned the trade as an apprentice in his father's shop. The sources relate that he loved to hear his brother Theodore read aloud from the lives of the saints, particularly the accounts of the New Martyrs, and that he came to desire martyrdom for Christ himself.
Apprenticeship and Martyrdom at Smyrna
At the beginning of 1802 his father brought him to Smyrna to continue his apprenticeship. There, at the age of seventeen and without telling his family, John resolved to provoke his own martyrdom. He left his father's shop, took work with a Turkish cobbler, and declared that he renounced Christianity; the Turks circumcised him and gave him the name Mehmet.
Within a few days he went before the Turkish judge, the kadi, and openly retracted, declaring that he would not be called Mehmet and that his name was John. He was condemned and taken to the Soan Bazaar, where, on Thursday, May 29, 1802, the executioner made him kneel and cut off his head with a sword.
Veneration and Sources
The sources relate that a few days after the martyrdom a first miracle occurred: a gravely ill woman was restored to health through cotton wool that had been soaked in the new martyr's blood. His body was acquired and given an honorable burial by a wealthy Russian Greek named Panagiotes Panagiotopoulos.
His martyrdom was set down by his near-contemporaries — Saints Makarios Notaras, Nikephoros of Chios, and Athanasios of Paros — in their New Miscellany, a collection of the lives of the New Martyrs, published in 1819. The Church commemorates him on May 29, the day of his death.
