The Twenty Thousand Martyrs of Nicomedia

The Twenty Thousand Martyrs of Nicomedia were a great multitude of Christians of every social class — by the traditional count, some twenty thousand, though the actual number is unknown — who suffered together at Nicomedia in the early fourth century during the most savage phase of the Diocletianic persecution. The catastrophe took place on the Nativity of Christ, around the year 302 or 303, when a great gathering of Christians of the city had assembled in the cathedral for the Liturgy of the feast.

Maximian, learning of the gathering, ordered the doors of the cathedral barred from the outside and the building set on fire. The whole congregation — bishops, priests, deacons, and laity, men, women, and children gathered for the Nativity — perished together in the flames. Among those identified by name in the synaxarion: the bishop Anthimus (separately commemorated on September 3, who escaped this day and was martyred later), the priest Indes, the deacon Glycerius, the imperial chamberlain Mardonius, the eunuchs Migdonius and Peter, the noblewoman Domna, the soldier Gorgonius. The general body of the congregation is commemorated as the twenty thousand without distinction.

Their joint feast is kept on December 28 — the closing days of the Nativity octave commemorating not the celebration of the Lord's birth but the very congregation that died for that celebration.