Martyrdom and Relics
By the fuller account preserved in the Greek tradition, Romanus was held at Constantinople in a dry well for forty days without food before his death, and was beheaded on January 5 or 6, 1694 (he is also commemorated on February 16). The tradition relates that after his beheading his body fell toward the east and that a light was seen over it for three days. His relics were afterward taken by ship to England, where an English captain is said to have carried them.
Romanus belongs to the wave of New Martyrs of the Ottoman period who, often after ascetic preparation on Mount Athos under a spiritual elder, went deliberately before Muslim authorities to confess Christ. The brief OCA synaxarion records the core facts — his birth at Karpenisi, his time as a monk on Mount Athos, his beheading at Constantinople in 1694, and the removal of his relics to England — while the Greek hagiographic tradition preserves the fuller narrative of his two confessions and his elder.