8th Sunday of Pascha: Feast of the Holy Trinity

Saints commemorated

• St Tycho, Bishop of Amathus

• Holy Martyrs Tigrios and Eutropios (404)

• Ferreolus and Ferrutio

  Ferreolus and Ferrutio — Ferréol and Ferjeux in French — were brothers, a presbyter and a deacon, sent from Lyons to evangelise the Sequani of the upper Doubs and ordained, by the tradition, at the hands of St Irenaeus of Lyons himself. They preached around Besançon for some thirty years, were at length arrested, tortured and beheaded, about the year 212. Their bodies were hidden and forgotten, and were found — so the account runs — in a cave outside the city in 370, when the bishop Anianus enshrined them; the cave and the church built over it are the origin of the two great Besançon dedications that carry their names. They are among the earliest martyrs of eastern Gaul, and their commemoration on June 16 carries a direct line from Smyrna and Polycarp, through Irenaeus, into the forests of the Jura.

• Five Martyrs of Nicomedia

  Five Christians, whose names the tradition has not kept, who were beheaded at Nicomedia in Bithynia and are commemorated together on June 16. Nothing survives of them beyond the bare synaxarial notice that they were martyred by the sword, and a two-line epigram which likens them to a five-towered fortress shaken down by the sword of the executioner. They belong to the long roll of the martyrs of Nicomedia, the eastern imperial capital where the persecutions of Diocletian and Maximian were pressed hardest.

• Forty Martyrs of Rome

  A company of forty martyrs of the city of Rome, unnamed in the tradition, who were burned alive and are commemorated on June 16. The Greek synaxarion gives them a single line — that they were perfected by fire — and a riddling couplet which counts their number out in fives, twenty and twenty, rather than naming it: a memorial in arithmetic for a company whose names were lost. They are among the anonymous Roman companies which the Byzantine calendar received from the martyrologies of the West and kept without further detail.

• Hermogenes of Tobolsk

  Hermogenes (Georgy Yefremovich Dolganev, born 1858) was a lawyer's student turned monk who became rector of the seminary of Tiflis, bishop of Saratov, and — after five years of disgrace for his public war on Rasputin — bishop of Tobolsk in the year of the revolution, while the deposed imperial family was held in that city. Fearless, combative and wholly unwilling to be silent, he denounced the Bolshevik persecution of the Church from his cathedral, was arrested in the spring of 1918, and on the night of 16 June 1918 was drowned in the river Tura with a stone tied about him, near the village of Pokrovskoye. Four men who had gone to plead for him or shared his imprisonment died in the same days: the priests Ephrem Dolganev, Michael Makarov and Peter Korelin, and the layman Constantine Minyatov. All five were glorified by the Russian Church in 2000.

• Kaikhosro the Georgian

  Kaikhosro was a Georgian who was tortured to death by Shah Abbas I in 1612 for refusing to give up the veneration of the holy icons. His memory survives by a narrow thread: the commemoration books and the painted figures of the Monastery of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem — the Georgian house outside the walls of the city — where he was inscribed among the benefactors and the martyrs, and the eighteenth-century researches of Archbishop Timote (Gabashvili), who catalogued what he found there and carried the name into the Georgian tradition. He is commemorated on June 16.

• Mark of Apollonias

  Mark of Apollonias — the apostle of the Seventy whom the New Testament names as "the cousin of Barnabas" (Colossians 4:10) — is counted by the Byzantine tradition among the Seventy and made bishop of Apollonias. He is commemorated on October 30 together with the apostles Tertius, Justus and Artemas of the Seventy, and with all the Seventy on January 4. He is one of the three apostles named Mark whom the synaxaria carefully distinguish — Mark the Evangelist (April 25), Mark "also called John," bishop of Byblos (September 27), and this Mark, bishop of Apollonias — while much of the source tradition, and modern scholarship, tangles the three together.

• Mnemonios of Amathus

  Mnemonios was bishop of Amathus in Cyprus in the second half of the fourth century, the predecessor of Tychon of Amathus, whom he ordained deacon. He is commemorated on June 16, the day of his successor, and everything known of him is contained in that successor's Life: the Greek books state that Mnemonios ordained Tychon to the diaconate and that Tychon was chosen to his see on his death. Nothing else of his life, his deeds or the manner of his repose has come down.

• Moses of Optina

  Moses (Putilov) — Timothy in the world, born at Borisoglebsk in 1782 — was the superior who made Optina what it became. Formed at Sarov, where he knew St Seraphim, and then for ten years among the hermits of the Roslavl forests, heirs of the school of Paisius Velichkovsky, he was brought out of the woods in 1821 by Bishop Philaret of Kaluga to build the skete of St John the Forerunner beside the Optina monastery. From 1825 until his death in 1862 he governed the whole house as superior: he raised its buildings, its library, its lands and its numbers, and — the decisive act — he received the elders Leonid and Macarius, shielded them from the opposition their eldership provoked, and put himself under their direction while remaining their abbot. From that arrangement the Optina eldership grew, and through it a century of Russian religious life. He reposed on 16 June 1862; his relics were found incorrupt, and he was glorified with the Optina elders in 2000.

• Tigrius and Eutropius

  Tigrius, a presbyter, and Eutropius, a reader, of the church of Constantinople, were clergy of John Chrysostom who stood by their archbishop when he was driven from the city in 404 and paid for it with their lives. When the Great Church and the senate house burned on the night of Chrysostom's expulsion, his party — the "Johannites" — were charged with arson; under the city prefect Optatus the two clerics were interrogated and tortured. Eutropius, a young man conspicuous for chastity, was hung up and scraped with iron, thrown into prison, and died in a second session of torture; his body, cast out to the dogs, was recovered by the faithful at night, and the tradition says that angelic singing was heard over the burial. Tigrius, a gentle and open-handed pastor, was scourged, stretched by hands and feet, and banished to Mesopotamia, where he died. They are among the earliest of that company of confessors whose crime was loyalty to a bishop, and their memory is kept on June 16.

• Tikhon of Amathus

  Tychon — Tikhon in the Slavonic and Russian books — was bishop of Amathus on the south coast of Cyprus in the last years of the fourth century and the first quarter of the fifth, and reposed in 425. Born in the city he would afterwards govern, he was known for wonders from boyhood: his Life tells how the bread he gave away out of his father's bakery was repaid with a granary filled to the roof, and how a dry vine-cutting he planted and prayed over took root and bore grapes of extraordinary sweetness, from which wine was pressed for the Eucharist in his lifetime and long after. Reader and deacon under Bishop Mnemonios, he was chosen bishop by the whole city and consecrated by Epiphanius of Cyprus; as hierarch he threw down what was left of the island's idolatry, pulling down the temple at Amathus and turning its people to Christ. He is honoured as a wonderworker throughout the Orthodox world, with a particular cultus in Cyprus, where the village of Agios Tychonas by Limassol still bears his name, and in Russia, where his name passed to a whole line of saints.

• Tikhon of Kaluga

  Tikhon of Medyn and Kaluga (†1492) was a monk of the Chudov monastery in Moscow who left it for the forests of the upper Oka and lived as a hermit in the hollow of a great oak by the little river Vepreika, drinking from a spring he dug himself. Discovered there by Prince Vasily Yaroslavich of Borovsk, whose hunting grounds he had settled on, he was ordered off the land and threatened with the whip — and the raised arm withered on the spot. The prince begged forgiveness, was healed at the saint's prayer, and became the founder's patron: Tikhon built a wooden church of the Dormition of the Theotokos on the site and was first abbot of the community that grew round it, the house known ever since as Tikhonova Pustyn. He reposed in extreme old age in 1492, having received the great schema, and was given all-Russian veneration by the council of 1584. His oak stood for three centuries after him and his well is a place of pilgrimage still.

• Tikhon of Krestogorsk

  Tikhon of Krestogorsk — also called Tikhon of Vokhma — was a monastic of the far north-east of the Vologda country in the second half of the seventeenth century, who in 1679 founded the Krestogorsk hermitage on the river Vokhma, some sixty versts from Nikolsk, at the place called the Cross Hill from which the house took its name. The hermitage was always poor and held almost no land; it was reduced to a parish church in the reforms of 1764, and the parish endured for another eighty-five years. Of the founder himself almost nothing survives beyond the fact of the foundation. He is commemorated on June 16 in the Vologda calendar and in the synaxis of the saints of Vologda; his name is absent from the general Russian menologia, and it is Metropolitan Evgeny (Bolkhovitinov), the compiler of the Vologda hagiography, who secured his place among the saints of that land.

• Tikhon of Lukhov

  Tikhon of Lukhov (†16 June 1503), called Timothy in the world, was a nobleman in military service in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania who in 1482 left his country rather than accept the union with Rome, crossing into Muscovy in the train of Prince Feodor Belsky. He refused the rewards of his new service, gave away what he had, took the habit with the name Tikhon, and settled in the forest of the Lukh country on the border of the Kostroma land. There he lived by the work of his hands — a skilled copyist of books and a turner of wooden vessels — refused ordination to the priesthood out of humility, and formed with two companions, Photius and Gerasim, the community that became the Nikolo-Tikhonov monastery. He died so poor that his disciples had nothing to bury him in until the bishop of Suzdal sent a vestment. His relics were found incorrupt in 1569, and the healings that followed established the veneration of one of the most-loved wonderworkers of the Kostroma and Ivanovo country.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Cettin, bishop (5th C)
• St. Colman McRoi, abbot of Reachrain (5th C)
• St. Curig, bishop of Llanbadarn (6th C)
• St. Ismael, disciple of St. Teilo (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings