Bishop Aetherius of Chersonesus at the Second Ecumenical Council

Christianity took root in Crimea first in the Bosporan Kingdom. The earliest objects with Christian symbols from the east of the peninsula, of the mid- and later 3rd century, are linked with Christian captives whom the Goths brought back from their raids on Asia Minor. The earliest dated Christian tombstone of Panticapaeum (Kerch), the limestone slab of a certain Eutropius marked with a cross, bears the year 601 of the Bosporan era, that is 304. In 325 Cadmus, bishop of Bosporus, took part in the Council of Nicaea, as did Theophilus “of Gothia”, whose see most scholars place on the lower Danube and some in Crimea; in 358, the church historian Sozomen reports, an unnamed bishop “from the Bosporus” died in the earthquake at Nicomedia. After the Hunnic devastation of the 370s nothing is known of the Bosporan see in the late 4th and early 5th centuries.

In Chersonesus, in the southwest of the peninsula, the first bishop known for certain is Aetherius, who attended the Council of Constantinople in 381. Scholars date his arrival to the reign of Valens (364–378); his predecessors probably preached there in the second and third quarters of the century, and his successor Capito took over the see between about the mid-380s and the early 390s, under Theodosius I. The Lives of the bishops of Cherson, whose original is dated anywhere from the late 5th to the 9th century, tell a more heroic story: the missionaries sent from Jerusalem under Diocletian — Basil, Eugenius, Agathodorus and Elpidius, in some versions also Ephraim — were killed by the pagans, until Aetherius, with the help of Constantine the Great and soldiers from Constantinople, drove out the pagans and built a church; he died on an island at the mouth of the Dnieper on his way back from the capital. Historians see here events compressed and moved back in time to link the victory of Christianity with Constantine; the Church venerates these bishops as the Holy Hieromartyrs of Cherson. The earliest church in Chersonesus dated by archaeology, a small single-aisled building in the southern cemetery, is no older than the mid-5th century.