Every year, on the first day of August, our Church honors the memory of the Holy Seven Maccabean Children, their mother Solomone, and their teacher Eleazar. For most people, the profound significance of this feast remains unknown. Yet this commemoration is not only an opportunity to remember the martyrs of our faith who lived before the time of Christ; it is also a foundational key for understanding our identity as Orthodox Christians, as the New Israel, while at the same time illuminating, in a unique way, our path through the spiritual and historical crossroads of our own age.

The story of the Maccabees, as preserved in the books of the Old Testament bearing their name, unfolds in the 2nd century before Christ—a time of unbearable spiritual pressure upon the People of God. Antiochus Epiphanes, ruler of the Hellenistic Seleucid kingdom, violently sought to impose the assimilation of the Jews, to eradicate their ancestral piety, and to replace it with the idolatry and syncretism of his time. He forbade the observance of the Mosaic Law, circumcision, and the reading of the Scriptures; he desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem, transforming it into a place of worship of Olympian Zeus.

In the midst of this dark spiritual landscape emerged a refusal to submit and a bold confession of the true faith. The elderly Eleazar, his seven young disciples, and their courageous mother Solomone refused to break their covenant with God, saying no to the order that they eat forbidden pork. This was an act of supreme spiritual resistance. They knew full well that surrendering at this point would amount to a complete denial of their faith. They preferred death—fire and torture—over spiritual alienation.
“We are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers” (2 Macc. 7:2), thundered the firstborn, a voice that resounds across the centuries. And their mother—heroic, like the Theotokos who would stand beneath the Cross of her Son—encouraged them in their martyrdom, placing eternal life above the earthly and temporal.The text contains explicit references to the resurrection, as in:
“… It is better to pass from men’s hands, trusting in the hope God grants, that He will raise us up again. (2 Macc. 7:14),
or in her words to her youngest child:
“…accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may receive you back with your brothers” (2 Macc. 7:29).

For the Hebrews, the Maccabees symbolize the struggle for national and religious survival and their resistance against assimilation. The uprising that followed their martyrdom, led by Judas Maccabaeus, brought about the liberation of Judea, the cleansing of the desecrated Temple, and its rededication in 164 B.C.—an event celebrated to this day as the feast of Hanukkah. The Gospel itself makes an indirect reference to this feast, where we read in John 10:22–23:
“At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem; it was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon.”
Thus, Christ Himself was present in the Temple during this celebration.

For us Orthodox Christians—for us, the New Israel—the significance of the Maccabees runs very deep. History is one, and God is One—unchanged and indivisible in both the Old and New Testaments. The God of the Old Testament is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity: Christ, the Divine Logos, unincarnate until the Annunciation of the Theotokos and incarnate from then on for all eternity. We approach the mystery of the Holy Trinity through Christ.

Likewise, the People of God are one: those human beings who live close to God. Israel continues in us, the baptized Orthodox—the New Israel. The people of the true God are united and journey through history with their own identity and mission, unfolding their radiant path toward the Last Things. The Maccabees are martyrs of the faith before the Incarnation of Christ, forerunners of the countless holy martyrs of the Church that would follow His coming in the flesh. The faith is one: the faith in the Second Person of the Trinity, the faith in Jesus Christ.

Crucially, the events of the Maccabees also help us understand the fundamental distinction between the Orthodox Romeos and the Greek. The notion of the Romeos is far broader than the notion of the Hellene. The Romeos is above all a Christian, an Orthodox believer—beyond ethnic, racial, or linguistic distinctions, which are entirely secondary. Romeosyne reflects the universal dimension of the Gospel, the encounter of the nations in Christ—founded upon the Helleno-Roman (Greco-Roman) oikoumene, yet transformed by it from within. The Romeos is therefore a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, the bearer of the Apostolic and Patristic Tradition, just as the Maccabees safeguarded the covenant of Moses.

And today, our situation is not far removed from the world Antiochus sought to impose—only now his challenge takes new forms. The text of 1 Maccabees (1:41–42) reads: “King Antiochus wrote to his whole kingdom that all should be one people, and that each should abandon his own customs.”
This is precisely what is demanded of us today: that we abandon our identity and unique character, that we dissolve into the mass, that we be fully assimilated, ceasing to exist as a distinct collective and holy otherness—becoming instead one uniform, easily managed cultural pulp.

It is a new “globalization,” a new syncretism that seeks to erase everything particular, to relativize every truth, and to turn the Orthodox Faith into a harmless private opinion or an impersonal piece of cultural folklore. The new “pork-eating” is the acceptance of a Christ-less way of life: submission to the tyranny of the passions, forgetting sin and repentance, replacing the saving relationship with the God-Man with barren relationships involving every kind of idol.

The Maccabees stand before us as signposts—as a compass. They remind us that faith is not negotiable, that there are boundaries we cannot cross without betraying our identity. Their struggle tells us clearly that true freedom is not lawlessness, but obedience to the Law of God. They call us to ask ourselves:
Are we ready not to conform to this world?
Do we have the courage to confess Christ—not only with our lips, but with the entirety of our being—even when the cost is very great?

The memory of the Holy Maccabees is for us Orthodox Romeoi a living call to spiritual vigilance. It is a voice summoning us to rediscover our deep Romeiko mind and heart, so that we may walk our radiant path “from glory to glory,” toward the Last Things—and beyond.
Ioannis K. Neonakis
Head of the Romeosyne Section of NIKI
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Labels: Romeosyne, Orthodoxy, Maccabees, Ioannis Neonakis.