ABSTRACT
Christianity has long been credited with the origin and formation of the martyr cult. Since ancient times, it has harbored strong traditions of worshipping martyrs in images and text collections, martyr acts, and legends. Christianity also knows long periods of martyrdom, such as during antiquity, the Reformation, and on modern missionary campaigns, as well as during the communist and Nazi tyrannies of the 20th century. The popular notion of the martyr was born in Rome, so it is the Latin church of the West that gave it its final shape and established the secularized forms that survived the schism of the Reformation unscathed. Martyrs make a connection with the unconditional and voluntary devotion of the sacrifice. In modern Turkish, there is a linguistic distinction between sehit, a soldier who dies on the battlefield, and sahit, a witness, but both are martyrs and figures of the same rank.
