Some time after this, a correspondence took place with friends in London, which resulted in a grant being made by the late Hon. East India Company’s Board of Directors, for the purpose of erecting a more suitable monument to the memory of Henry Martyn, to be placed with his remains in the Mission Burying-ground. The monument was cut out of native marble, and made by native workmen at Tokat. The remains were removed under the inspection of the missionary physician, and though it was difficult positively to identify them, there can be no doubt that what was found once formed a portion of the earthly tenement of the devoted and lamented missionary. There were no remains of a coffin; Orientals never use them, and he was doubtless laid in immediate contact with the soil, literally ‘dust to dust.’ The monument under which we laid these remains was the first grave in our little cemetery, and well might it be said that it became sacred ground. The obelisk has four faces, on each of which the name, encircled with a wreath, is cut, severally in English, Armenian, Persian, and Turkish. The four sides of the base contain the following inscription in the same languages:
REV. HENRY MARTYN, M.A.
Chaplain of the Hon. East India Company,
Born at Truro, England, February 18, 1781,
Died at Tokat, October 16, 1812.
He laboured for many years in the East, striving to
Benefit mankind both in this world and that to come.
He translated the Holy Scriptures into Hindostanee
and Persian,
And preached the God and Saviour of whom they testify.
He will long be remembered in the East, where he was
known as a Man of God.
The grave now lies in a spot every way adapted to foster the holy memories which it recalls. It stands upon a broad and high terrace, overlooking the whole city for whose salvation we cannot doubt that he offered some of the last petitions ‘of the righteous man, which avail much.’ It is a solitude, immediately surrounded by the thick foliage of fruit trees, among which tall walnuts are conspicuous. We ourselves planted by its side the only weeping willows which exist in the whole region. The place is visited by many, who read the concise inscription and further inquire into the good man’s history. It has always been a favourite place of resort of our students and native Christians, and they have many a time sat under its shade and expounded to wondering strangers the very doctrines to propagate which that model of a missionary had sacrificed his life.
TOMB OF HENRY MARTYN
Tokat is now for ever memorable as the centre which links the names of Basiliscus, the martyr, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and Henry Martyn. The cloud-crested fortress points almost straight up from the Jeshil-Irmak river, the ancient Iris, which, rising in the Anti-Taurus range of Pontus, finds its way to the Black Sea with a breadth and volume of water second only to the Halys. Still, as of old, the town crowds about the foot of the two spiral crags and straggles out with towered church, mosque and minaret, into the valley. The ruins of the embattled walls crowning every pinnacle of the insulated rocks of which they seem to form a part, tell of the days when Greek and Roman passed along the ‘royal road’ from Amisos or Samsoon on the Euxine to Sebaste, Caesareia, and Central Asia; and when the Saracens beat off the Emperor Michael (860) from what was then called Daximon.[96] The time is coming when there shall once more be here a highway of civilisation after the barren centuries of the Moslem.
Tokat represents Komana Pontica, six miles off, the oracle and emporium of the royal road, described by Strabo as a little Corinth for vice and traffic. Another step, and the Apostle Paul himself might have visited it from Galatia. In 312, in the persecution under Maximin, Basiliscus, the bishop of Komana, was martyred, being shod with red-hot iron shoes, beheaded, and thrown into the Iris. The Acta picture the saint as led on foot by soldiers along the road without food for four days, till he reached Komana; ‘and the road was much the same as the modern way, Tokat to Amaseia,’ along which Henry Martyn was violently hurried by his Tartar. In the martyrium, built a few miles out of Komana, in memory of Basiliscus, Chrysostom found rest in death, and a grave.
Basilius, the bishop of Caesareia, belonged to the neighbouring province of Cappadocia, but his missionary influence, and that of his bishop brother, Gregory Nyssen, and his sister, Macrina, spread all over Pontus, while Gregory Nazianzen was his fellow-student at Athens, and his admiring friend, as Julian also, the future Emperor, was for a time. Like Martyn, Basil owed to his sister his conversion, his call to the ministry, and his self-sacrifice all through life. It was on the banks of the Iris above Tokat that, secluded for five years, the great Father laid the foundation of the monastic communities of the Greek Church, and learned to be the future defender of orthodoxy against the Arians, and of the unity of the Oriental Church.
But it is the exile and death of John Chrysostom, just fourteen centuries before, that form the most touching parallel to the sufferings of Henry Martyn. Never has there been a greater missionary bishop than the ‘golden-mouthed’ preacher of Antioch and Constantinople. The victim first of a cabal of bishops, and then of the Empress Eudoxia, whose vices and sacrilege he rebuked, he was driven from Constantinople to the scorching plains of Cappadocia in the midsummer heat. His guard drove on the venerable man day and night, giving him no rest. When a halt was made, it was always in some filthy village where good water was not. Fever and ague were provoked, but still he was forced on to Basil’s city of Caesareia, to find Basil’s successor his bitter enemy. Taking a physician with him he reached his destination at Kokussos, where the Empress had hoped that the barbarians would make an end of him. As it seemed likely to prove his Tabreez, he was once more driven forth on foot, under two guards selected for their brutality. It took him three months to reach Komana—one long, slow martyrdom to the fever-stricken old man. ‘It was evident that Chrysostom’s strength was entirely worn out,’ writes Canon Venables, in words which exactly describe the experience of the young Henry Martyn. ‘But his pitiless guard hurried him through the town “as if its streets were no more than a bridge,” without a moment’s halt.’ Five miles farther on they halted at the chapel of the martyr Basiliscus, of whom Chrysostom dreamed that he saw him and heard him say: ‘Be of good cheer; on the morrow we shall be together.’ Canon Venables continues, unconsciously, the parallel with the experience of the nineteenth-century saint of the Evangel: