Nine Martyrs at Cyzicus

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Nine Martyrs at Cyzicus

  Nine Christians of differing rank and trade — Theognis, Rufus, Antipater, Theostichus, Artemas, Magnus, Theodotus, Thaumasius and Philemon — were arrested together at Cyzicus in Mysia, on the southern shore of the Propontis, in the persecutions of the later third century, and after imprisonment and torture were beheaded with a single sentence when none of them would consent to sacrifice. Their bodies, buried outside the walls, were taken up when the Church gained peace under Constantine and laid in a church built for them in the city, where the healing of the sick and of the mentally afflicted made the martyrs' company famous. In Russia they became the patrons invoked against fever and pestilence, and a monastery was raised in their honour near Kazan to house particles of their relics.

• St Basil, bishop of Ostrog in Montenegro (Serbia) (1671)

  Basil of Ostrog (Sveti Vasilije Ostroški, born Stojan Jovanović, c. 1610–1671) was the Serbian hierarch of Zahumlje and Skenderija who shepherded the Orthodox of Herzegovina and Montenegro under Ottoman rule and Venetian-Latin pressure, and who, after the Turks destroyed his monastery of Tvrdoš near Trebinje, withdrew to the cliff-face hermitage of Ostrog above the valley of the Zeta, where he lived out his last years in prayer and died on 29 April 1671. Seven years later his body was found incorrupt and fragrant and was enshrined in the little rock-cut church of the Presentation in the Upper Monastery. He is one of the most fervently venerated saints of the Serbian lands: Ostrog is the greatest pilgrimage place of the western Balkans, and Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims alike come to his relics for healing.

• Diodorus and Rhodopianus

  Diodorus and Rhodopianus were deacons of the church of Aphrodisias in Caria, on the south-western coastlands of Asia Minor, who were stoned to death by their own townspeople in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 302. The synaxarion notice is short and gives no dialogue and no magistrate: the two were known in the city as Christians and as preachers of Christ among the pagans, were seized by the soldiery, endured insults and scourging, and were finally killed with stones — the mob's death rather than the executioner's, and one of the few martyrdoms by stoning in the Byzantine calendar after the age of the Apostles. The Greek books keep them on May 3 and the Slavonic books and the OCA on April 29; this entry, following the Greek placement, is primary on May 3 and secondary on April 29.

• Memnon the Wonderworker

  Memnon was an ascetic of the Egyptian desert who from his youth gave himself to the monastic life, was set over one of the Egyptian monasteries as abbot, and became famous for the gifts that followed his labours: clairvoyance, and a wonderworking power over the calamities of the countryside. The synaxarion remembers three of his miracles in particular — a spring of water opened in the waterless wilderness at his prayer, a plague of locusts destroyed as it stripped the harvest, and shipwrecked men saved who called on his name at sea — and adds that after his death the mere invocation of his name drove away locusts and broke the deceits of the demons. He is commemorated as "Memnon the Wonderworker," and no fuller Life of him has come down.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Dictinus the Swineherd, of Ulster (5th C)
• St. Endellion, Virgin recluse in Cornwall (6th C)
• St. Fiachan of Munster (7th C)
• St. Senan, hermit of North Wales (7th C)
• St. Swithbert the Younger, bishop and missionary (807)
• St. Wilfrid the Younger, archbishop of York (744)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings