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Sabbas the Goth
Born	341, Buzău river valley, Romania
Died	372, Buzău river valley, Romania
Venerated in	Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church
Feast	12 April
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Sabbas (Sava or Savva) the Goth, also known as Sava the Romanian, is the earliest known native born martyr on Romanian soil. He was born in 334 to Christian parents in a village in the Buzău river valley and lived in Wallachia in what is now Romania, and his Act of Martyrdom states that he was a Goth by race. It is known that he was a church reader there, though how he gained his interest in Christianity and was eventually converted is not known.

In the year 372, a Gothic ruler began a pogrom of his Christian subjects. When he came to the village where Sabbas lived and asked if there were any Christians about, Sabbas stepped forward and said, “'Let no-one swear an oath on my behalf. I am a Christian.” The leader dismissed him, saying, “This one can do us neither good nor harm.” The next year, a priest came to the village and celebrated Easter with Sabbas. The pagans of the village reported this, and the leader returned a second time to arrest Sabbas. They dragged Sabbas naked through thorn bushes, bound him and the priest to trees and forced them to eat food that had been sacrificed to idols. Both men refused to touch the meat.

The pagan Gothic prince Athanaric, at war with Emperor Valens of Rome, sentenced Sabbas to death, and he went off with the soldiers praising God the whole way, denouncing the pagan and idolatrous ways of his captors and scorning them. The commander ordered Sabbas to be thrown in a river, tying a rock around his neck and his body to a wooden pole.

His relics were taken by St Sansala and hidden by the Christians until they could be sent for safety to the Roman Empire. Here they were received by Bishop Ascholius of Thessalonica.

Basil the Great requested of the ruler of Scythia Minor, Junius Soranus, that he should send him the relics of saints and so the Dacian priests sent the relics of Sabbas to him in Caesarea, Cappadocia, in 373 or 374 accompanied by a letter, the 'Epistle of the Church of God in Gothia to the Church of God located in Cappadocia and to all the Local Churches of the Holy Universal Church'. This letter is the oldest known writing to be composed on Romanian soil and was written in Greek, possibly by St Vetranion of Tomis.

In response Basil replied with two letters to Bishop Ascholius where he extolled the virtues of Sabbas calling him an 'athlete of Christ' and 'Martyr for the truth'.

His feast day is on the date of his martyrdom, April 12. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him as "the holy, glorious, and right-victorious Great-martyr Sabbas."

Martyred in the reign of Valentinian, he is commemorated on April 12 in the Eastern Orthodox Churches and April 14 in the Roman Martyrology.

• Sava the Goth from OrthodoxWiki
• (Italian) San Saba il Goto

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