The account runs like this. In the persecution under the Emperor Decius, around the year two hundred and fifty, seven young men of Ephesus, soldiers or courtiers of good family, confessed themselves Christians and would not sacrifice. They were stripped of their rank and given time to reconsider. They gave away what they had, went up into a cave on Mount Ochlon above the city, and prayed. The emperor, returning, ordered the mouth of the cave sealed with stone, and it was.

They fell asleep, and slept for something close to two hundred years.

The Menaion gives their names as Maximilian, Jamblichus, Martinian, John, Dionysius, Exacustodianus, who is also called Constantine, and Antoninus.

In the reign of Theodosius the Second, in the fifth century, the stones were taken away by a landowner who wanted them for building. The seven woke, believing they had slept one night. One of them, Jamblichus in most versions, went down into Ephesus to buy bread, keeping to the walls out of fear of the persecution, and found crosses over the gates of a Christian city. He offered a coin of Decius at a baker's stall and was arrested for treasure hunting.

The bishop and the governor came up to the cave, and the seven told what had happened, and the emperor himself came to Ephesus to see them. The account says they lay down again after that and died, and were buried where they were.

The reason the story was told and retold in exactly those decades is that a dispute over the resurrection of the body was live in the Church at the time. Some in Syria and Asia were teaching that the soul rises and the body does not. The waking of the seven, an event that could be pointed at and a set of witnesses that could be questioned, was received as an answer given in fact rather than in argument: these bodies had been laid down and were standing up again.

A cemetery and a church of the Seven Sleepers on the slope of Mount Panayir above Ephesus are real, were excavated in the nineteen twenties, and contain hundreds of graves and inscriptions dedicated to the seven, dating from the fifth century onward. That the veneration existed at Ephesus in the fifth century is documented fact. The sleep itself is the tradition of the Church, held as tradition, and this app does not present it as anything else.

The story traveled further than almost any other Christian legend of late antiquity. It is in the Syriac, the Greek, the Latin, the Coptic, the Ethiopic and the Armenian; it is in the Qur'an, in the chapter called the Cave; and it turns up in medieval Europe in a dozen languages.

The Church keeps their memory on the fourth of August and again on the twenty second of October. In the hymns of the day they are not called wise or eloquent. They are called sleepers, and the point being made is that this is what the Church calls the dead.