FAR TO THE EAST OF CONSTANTINOPLE, near the town of Sinope on a thumb-shaped peninsula sticking out into the Black Sea, lived Phocas the Gardener—animum simplicem, hospitalem, a simple soul and hospitable, as a fourth-century hagiographer said of him. Nobody knows when he lived, but many know how he died. He became the Christian patron saint of the garden, because he composted himself
This is the story.
A persecution arose against the Christians. Phocas was denounced as one of the banned sect, and a pair of Roman soldiers were dispatched to find him. “Don’t worry about evidence, don’t worry about a trial, don’t worry about a confession,” they were told. “When you find him, kill him.”
The soldiers had hard traveling to reach Sinope, over thickly wooded mountains that to this day isolate the coastal port from the Turkish interior. Already, in the early fourth century, the town had declined from its peak of prosperity a century before, when it had been the terminus of a caravan route to and from the interior steppes and the preferred provider of the ochre derived from so-called “synopic” red earths. But the caravans were no more. Then as now, dangerous roads traversing passes at over four thousand feet in elevation had made the trip a chancy one, scarcely worth the rewards it could bring.
So the soldiers were not in a good mood as they descended the steeps, catching sight of the broad uplifted thumb of Sinope’s little peninsula. It was a surprisingly fertile land. Its igneous bedrock, covered with fine coastal alluvium, had been uplifted by tectonic forces, forming both a sheltered port and a fine coastside farming belt, with a mild climate and temperate rains scattered throughout the year. Phocas had not chosen his homestead badly. In the region, he could easily have grown everything from grains to grapes, from filbert nuts to cabbages.
The weary pair trudged northeast onto the isthmus, bearing for the town, where they might ask directions to Phocas’s house. Night overtook them near a farmhouse, where a pleasant man of no particular age greeted them.
“You are tired,” he said. “You must stay the night with me.” When they began to protest that they had a pressing errand, he responded definitely, “I won’t take no for an answer.”
Over the evening meal, the soldiers told their host that they were looking for a dangerous man named Phocas. The host assured them that he knew the man very well and could quickly point him out to them. As they were so weary from their journey, however, he suggested that first they rest for the night.
While his guests slept, the host took his spade and dug a broad, deep hole in the middle of his garden. Come morning, the man fed the soldiers a hearty breakfast. Then, he told them that they might capture Phocas whenever they wished. He knew just where to find him.
To have come out of the wilderness to such a welcome had been pleasure enough. Now, this kind host had simplified their duty for them, saving them hours, maybe even days of asking hard questions, getting evasive answers among a surly, uncooperative people, probably half of them Christians and the other half brigands.
They thanked him for his thoughtfulness and asked to be taken to Phocas, wherever he might be.
“He is here,” said the farmer. “I myself am the man.”
Their jaws dropped. Their minds froze. What a trap! How could they behead this man, who’d treated them so well?
But Phocas led them to the hole he’d dug in the garden, and there, with his consent, they chopped his head off.
That’s how the story goes, but to take it a step further, we must imagine the soldiers carefully covering the hole with soil, as well they might have. It was the least they could do for a man who’d taken such good care of them. And we must imagine the thoroughness of Phocas’s simple and hospitable soul, which took such care to return to the garden the body that had taken sustenance from it.
The fungi colonized it first, hydrolizing the tissues without disturbing the form. Then the white worms and the maggots and the mites took over, breaking off larger chunks, ingesting these, themselves defecating and dying. And this increasingly diverse pile of remains was attacked by wave after wave of further bacteria and fungi, until at last Phocas’s mortal part had been completely oxidized.
The nitrogen of his protein and nucleic acids was fixed as nitrate or released as ammonia or other nitrous gases. His carbon went largely into the air as CO2. Iron and phosphorus and other elements remained in the soil combined with oxygen. In short, his tissues rejoined the cycles of elements from which they had been briefly extracted.
The strongest and most lasting thing about Phocas was his soul. The kindness that he did has kept him alive for almost two thousand years now, while the carbon and nitrogen that once held his body together have been recycled billions of times. (If you want to do the calculation, figure that oxygen takes a seventh of a second to recombine, and carbon dioxide takes one five-thousandth.)
The hagiographer Butler claims that Phocas “found in his garden an instructive book and an inexhaustible fund of meditation.” I would say rather that he found lessons in simplicity, economy, and hospitality, the three virtues most often found in gardeners. There is no need to suggest anything about Eden. If Phocas had meditated on any story from the Bible, it might have been on the parable of the seed that was planted on stony ground, the other planted where the birds could take it, and the third planted in a good soil so that it brought forth fruit. To make that soil, Phocas did not spare even his own body.
Hospitality is the fundamental virtue of the soil. It makes room. It shares. It neutralizes poisons. And so it heals. This is what the soil teaches: If you want to be remembered, give yourself away.