Cocussus

From the Catholic Encyclopedia

(Cocusus, Cocussus, Cocusus).

A titular see of Armenia. It was a Roman station on the road from Cilicia to Caesarea, and belonged first to Cappadocia and later to Armenia Secunda. St. Paul the Confessor, Patriarch of Constantinople, was exiled thither by Constantius and put to death by the Arians in 350 (Socrates, Hist. Eccl., II, xxvi). It was also the place of exile to which St. John Chrysostom was banished by Arcadius; his journey, often interrupted by fever, lasted seventeen days (Sozomen, Hist., eccl., VIII, xxii). The great doctor was received most kindly by the bishop and a certain Dioscurus. He lived three years at Cocussus (404-407), and wrote thence many letters to the deaconess Olympias and his friends. The Greek panegyric of St. Gregory the Illuminator, Apostle of Armenia, attributed to St. John Chrysostom (Migne, P.G., LXIII, 943), is not authentic; an Armenian text, edited by Alishan (Venice, 1877), may be genuine. Cocussus appears in the "Synecdemus" of Hierccles and in the "Notitiae episcopatuum", as late as the twelfth century, as a suffragan of Melitene. The name of St. John Chrysostom's host is unknown. Bishop Domnus was represented at Chalcedon in 451. Longinus subscribed the letter of the bishops of Armenia Secunda to Emperor Leo in 458. John subscribed at Constantinople in 553 for his metropolitan. Another John was present at the Trullan Council in 692 (Lequien, I, 452). The army of the first crusaders passed by Cocussus. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were Armenian bishops of Cocussus. It is today a village called Guksun by the Turks, Kokison by the Armenians, in the caza of Hadjin, villayet of Adana. The site is most picturesque, but the climate is very severe during winter, owing to the altitude, 4000 feet above the level of the sea.

Ramsay, Hist. Geogr. Of Asia Minor, passim; Alishan, Sissouan (Venice, 1899), 217-21.

S. PÉTRIDÈS