8th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Holy Martyr and Archdeacon Euplus of Catania

  Euplus was a deacon of the church of Catania in Sicily who was put to death in the year 304, at the height of the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian, for refusing to surrender the books of the Gospels. His trial before the governor Calvisianus is preserved in an unusually sober and circumstantial passion, surviving in both a Greek and a Latin recension, which is counted among the small handful of genuinely authentic acts of the martyrs: it records the interrogation almost as a court clerk would have taken it down. Ordered to explain why he possessed writings the emperors had commanded to be given up, Euplus answered that he was a Christian and that it was not lawful for him to hand them over. He was tortured, imprisoned, and finally led out to execution with the Gospel-book hung about his neck, reading and expounding it to the crowd as he went, and was beheaded. He is honoured as a patron of Catania beside the city's great martyr Agatha.

• The Holy Martyr Susanna the Virgin, and those with her (295-296)

  Susanna was a Roman virgin, daughter of the presbyter Gabinus and niece of Gaius, bishop of Rome, who was beheaded in her father's house about the year 295, in the last years before the Great Persecution, for refusing marriage into the imperial house and refusing to sacrifice. Her passion — a Roman narrative of the sixth century attached to the ancient church that bears her name near the Baths of Diocletian — makes her the centre of a whole company of martyrs: the imperial envoys Claudius and Maximus, sent to negotiate the marriage and converted instead, with Claudius's wife Praepedigna and their sons Alexander and Cutias, all burned at Ostia and their ashes cast into the sea; and, afterwards, her father Gabinus and her uncle Gaius. The Byzantine calendar keeps the whole company with her on August 11, the day the Latin Church also keeps.

• Saint Niphon, Patriarch of Constantinople (1508)

  Niphon II (born Nicholas in the Morea, c. 1435–40; †11 August 1508) was three times elected Ecumenical Patriarch in the first generation of the Church under Ottoman rule, and is the one patriarch of that century whom the Church venerates as a saint. A monk from Epidauros and then a copyist of manuscripts on Mount Athos, he became Metropolitan of Thessalonica and then Patriarch (1486–88, 1497–98, and again by election in 1502, which he declined); between the tenures he was deposed, imprisoned, and freed at the intercession of Radu the Great of Wallachia, whose Church he reorganised from 1503 to 1505 — giving the Romanian lands the metropolitan and diocesan structure they kept for centuries — until he rebuked the prince over an uncanonical marriage and was driven out. He returned to Athos and hid himself, concealing his patriarchal rank and serving as a common labourer at the Monastery of Dionysiou, where he was recognised only by revelation, and where he died. He was glorified in 1517, nine years after his repose — one of the swiftest canonisations in Orthodox history — at the instance of his spiritual son Neagoe Basarab.

• Repose of Fr Georges Florovsky (1979) (July 29 OC)

• Anastasius Paneras and Demetrius Begiazes

  Anastasius and Demetrius were two young basket-weavers from Lesbos, working in the Anatolian interior, who were put to death for the faith of Christ at Kasaba in Lydia in 1816 — some accounts say 1819. Anastasius Paneras, of the village of Asomatoi, was twenty years old; Demetrius Begiazes, of Agiasos, was eighteen; the sources suggest they were kinsmen. They are among the last of the long roll of new-martyrs of the Ottoman period, and among the most typical: obscure working men of no education, denounced on a charge that carried the death penalty for a Christian, offered life at the price of the faith, and refusing it. Their memory is kept on August 11, above all on their own island.

• John the Recluse of Svyatogorsk

  John the Recluse (born Ivan Kryukov at Kursk, 20 September 1795; †11 August 1867) was the great ascetic of the Svyatogorsk monastery on the chalk cliffs above the Donets, and the best-known Russian recluse of the nineteenth century after Theophan of Vysha. A merchant's son who spent half his life trying to reach the monastic state and being sent back to the world, he came at last to the Holy Mountains when the ruined house was restored in 1844, was tonsured, and about 1850 entered the reclusion in a cell hollowed out of the chalk of the cliff, where he remained some seventeen years — in cold, damp and darkness that destroyed his health and finally his sight — receiving no one but his confessor and living on a diet that his biographers found scarcely credible. He reposed on 11 August 1867, was glorified in 1995, and his relics are venerated in the Sviatohirsk Lavra.

• Mary Syncletica

  Mary is a saint of the Byzantine calendar for August 11 known from a single sentence: a woman of senatorial rank — which is what the epithet Syncletica means, and it is a rank and not a surname — who was healed by the Image of the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands at the time when that image appeared, in the reign of the emperor Tiberius (578–582). Nothing else about her is transmitted: not her city, not her illness, not her family, not the year or manner of her death. She is remembered because a miracle of the acheiropoietos image happened to her, and her commemoration is in substance a commemoration of the image.

• Neophytus, Zeno and Companions

  Six martyrs — Neophytus, Zeno, Gaius, Mark, Macarius and Gaianus — stand in the Greek synaxarion for August 11 under a single line: they were perfected by fire. Neither country, nor persecutor, nor year, nor the relation between them is transmitted. One further notice attaches to their memory, and it is topographical and Constantinopolitan: their synaxis was kept in the church of the Holy Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian. That detail is the whole of their history and also the key to the chief question about them, since three of the six names — Neophytus, Gaius and Gaianus — stand together again on May 5, likewise with a synaxis at a church of Cosmas and Damian, and there perfected not by fire but by the sword.

• Passarion of Jerusalem

  Passarion was one of the founding figures of Palestinian monasticism in the generation before the great laurae: a monk of Jerusalem who built a poorhouse outside the city walls and a monastery on Holy Sion, was made chorepiscopus — a country bishop, a suffragan without a city — and served as archimandrite of all the monks of Palestine, the head under the bishop of the whole monastic body of the province. He was the friend and, in the older accounts, the teacher of Euthymius the Great, and it is in Cyril of Scythopolis's Life of Euthymius that he chiefly survives: in 428 he went out into the Judaean desert with Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem, to consecrate the church of Euthymius's laura, and died in that same year. His day is August 11.

• Theodore and Basil of the Kiev Caves

  Theodore and Basil were monks of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev who were tortured to death in 1098 by Prince Mstislav Svyatopolkovich over a hoard of buried treasure that Theodore had found, renounced, and reburied — and whose hiding-place God had taken from his memory. Their story, told at length in the Paterikon of the Caves, is one of the most sharply drawn narratives of early Russian monasticism: an account of the demon of avarice working first through a lie and then through a prince, of a friendship that held under torture, and of a dying man's prophecy that the arrow shot into him would return to the archer. Within a year the prince was killed by that arrow at the walls of Vladimir-Volynsky. The two rest in the Near (Antony's) Caves and are commemorated on August 11.

• Theodore of Ostrog

  Theodore, Prince of Ostrog in Volhynia, was the founder of the house of Ostrozhsky and one of the great Orthodox magnates of the fifteenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania: a soldier of the wars against the Teutonic Order and in the Hussite campaigns, a builder of churches, and — at a moment when Latin pressure on the Orthodox of Volhynia and Galicia was at its heaviest — a lay defender of his people's faith who had the standing to be heard. About 1441 he laid down his principality, went to the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, and was tonsured with the schema-name Theodosius, living out his years as a monk. He reposed in the second half of the century, by tradition about 1483, and his relics were found incorrupt in the Far (Theodosius's) Caves, where they rest. He was venerated as a saint by the end of the sixteenth century, and is commemorated on August 11.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Attracta (Athracht) the Healer (6th C)
• St. Lelia of Limerick and Kerry

Troparia & kontakia

Readings