Saint George
Christian saint and martyr (died 303)
b. 275 · d. c. 23 Apr 303
Saint George, also George of Lydda, was an early Christian martyr who is venerated as a saint in Christianity. According to holy tradition, he was a soldier in the Roman army. Of Cappadocian Greek origin, he became a member of the Praetorian Guard for Roman emperor Diocletian. During the Diocletianic Persecution, he was sentenced to death for refusing to recant his Christian faith. He became one of the most venerated saints, heroes, and megalomartyrs in Christianity. Since the Crusades, he has been venerated especially as a military saint. He is respected by Christians, Druze, as well as some Muslims as a martyr of monotheistic faith.
Related people
- Polychronia child of · traditional
- Gerontius child of · traditional
Events
Commemorated
Places
- Caesarea in Cappadocia birth
- Lydda death
- Nicomedia death
How we know
A figure the record marks as legend — kept, and marked. Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints: an Introduction to Hagiography — p. 145 — the warrior saints, of whom 'the only literary monuments in which we can inform ourselves concerning most of them are documents of the same class as those which constitute the legend of Procopius'
- Roman Martyrology 1 claim — martyrdom of Saint George
Written about
Glosses
- How a passion gets written A martyr’s story is rarely a report and usually a composition, and Delehaye — a Bollandist, writing about the corpus his own order had spent three centuries editing — set out how the composing works. The first move is…