Blessed Christodoulus was born in the village of Kassandra in Halkidiki, Macedonia. He was a young tailor in Thessaloniki during a period of occupation by Ottoman Turks. Seeing local Christians giving in to pressure and proclaiming themselves Muslim, Christodoulus took a cross and went into the streets to encourage Christians, as well as into the coffee shops were the ‘ceremony’ of conversion would take place, and offered them the cross to kiss as a sign of their faith, urging them to recover, repent, and stand strong in the love of Christ. Most courageously, he would make the Sign of the Cross over crowds of Turks as well as the dreaded Janissaries, the most fanatical muslim warriors of all, the elite bodyguard of the Sultan. Janissaries who were themselves once Christian, before being enslaved by the Ottoman emperors as youth.
Enraged by this, the Turks imprisoned and tortured Christodoulus. They urged him to deny the Faith, but in return he urged them to turn away from the false religion of Islam. Driven to an excess of hatred by this, the Turks tortured him gruesomely and then hung him in front of a church in 1777.
AnaStpaul 