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or several days he dangled over the doorway of the church he served and all who saw his body could only hope he would be granted a new one as he passed over to his or whoever’s God’s Heaven, as surely this one—blued and blackened, elongated and stretched from the base of the skull, rope merged into the decay and rot—was no longer suitable.

The Ecumenical Patriarch Gregorios V, the primus inter pares of the most holy men in the Eastern Orthodox Church, was hanged in 1821 outside the Patriarchate in Constantinople on Easter Sunday. He was put to death by Sultan Mahmud II to smother the embers of a months-old Greek revolution before they grew to inferno. His All Holiness disavowed the movement publicly, and yet still the Ottoman king fired a warning shot at merely the suggestion of a revived Greek state.

          After a swift mention of the subsequent success of the Greek War of Independence, the story ends in the tradition; unabridged the story continues with the Patriarch waking on a chipped rock pellet shore following his death. Beside him was a dugout, monoxylon boat turned over on a beach below high, exposed bluffs, cut off from any other land.

          Disoriented, and dead, he dragged himself up and saw a church built into a cave nearing waterborne dilapidation. In front of the church’s door was a gate. He walked to the gate and found it was locked. He sat down in front of the gate for a while until he was tired, and he slept there.

          When the sun woke him, he sat up and noticed his crushed neck was healed. He determined he was brought to this church on this beach for a purpose he did not yet understand. So he reclined again to rest his eyes and awaited a sign.

          After some time, a sheep bleated him from his daze. Behind him, the gate and the door to the church were open. Inside the chapel was a woman lighting a candle in a bowl of oil. When she noticed he was awake a gale blew and she disappeared.

          He sat on the beach and prayed on the vision, never growing hungry or thirsty or tired, not once eating or drinking or sleeping. He suspected the woman tended to him.

          She appeared to him again days later and told him of the details of his death: The Sultan ordered his murder and commanded his corpse stay on the rope for three days. Then he relinquished his remains to locals who dragged them out to the edge of the sea. As she spoke, he noticed blood on her white gown and he understood who she must be. He asked her name and at this question she vanished. He immediately became drowsy and gave into sleep.

          He dreamed.

          In his dream were three men, vague and ambiguous, shaped like water, and the Sultan, turbid and defined, shaped like ice, standing with him on the beach. He tried to demand forgiveness, but his words would not come.

          He had the same dream for five nights.

          On the sixth night they were joined on the beach by the woman, precise and real, shaped like a woman. He asked if her name was Markella and she told him yes and he knew that to mean she was the martyred saint from the island of Chios—the Aegean island she protected—who had been raped, shot with bow and arrow, and beheaded among the funeral pyres on the rocks by her father years and years ago. She told him she was there to guide him. He asked where and she said from this place to Heaven. He asked what he needed to do and she said forgive and he said he had and she said he had not and he woke in a wild sweat.

          The day he had woken wildly into was the first day there were clouds since his execution. A tempest stood off in the sea, hung from strings of lightning held by something colossal above the darkness. He was hungry and thirsty, eventually became starved and sere, and, in a fit that felt like death all over again, he fell into a delirious sleep.

          Markella was in his dream again and she asked him to conjure the men and the Sultan. He would not, he could not, and said as much, and he was jerked awake by his body thrashing in dark, violent waves. He panicked and fought the impossible swells until they took him and plunged him deep, and when he was out of air again, dying for the third time, he was brought back into his recurring dream. Markella motioned toward the men and he forgave them and he awoke on the beach with the sun in his face.

          He sat up and saw Markella floating above the sparkling water in the distance beyond the edge of all becoming. He nodded at the sign, and he stood and walked out into the foam and water until he could no longer feel the ground beneath him and closed his eyes and welcomed the end of his interlude.

          In Heaven he watched as his martyrdom stoked the flames of revolution. He would appear to soldiers and generals in visions to discourage battle and bloodshed and killing, and the men would carve Gregorios into their swords and fight still. Within a year, the rebellion found itself overmatched on the shores of Chios. Brimstone and fire from Ottoman Empire ships bathed the island, leaving the ashes of fifty thousand innocent dead behind as the gears of imperialism turned for the purposes of people possessed by power.

          For in the soul of man lies wickedness even two saints cannot overcome. And not once has this ever been denied for even a thought of a breath.