Virgin Martyr Theodosia of Tyre; Rep. Bl. John of Ustiug

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Virgin Martyr Theodosia of Tyre

  Theodosia was a nun of the monastery of the Martyr Anastasia at Constantinople who, when soldiers of the emperor Leo III the Isaurian came to take down the venerated image of Christ that hung above the great bronze Chalke Gate of the imperial palace, ran with other women of the city, shook the ladder until the officer on it fell to his death, and was seized, beaten through a week of imprisonment, dragged to the Forum of the Ox and killed by a ram's horn driven into her throat. She is honoured as the first martyr of the iconoclast persecution — a monastic woman who met the first act of official iconoclasm with her own hands — and her shrine at the church of St Euphemia en to Petrio, afterwards renamed for her, became one of the great healing-shrines of Byzantine Constantinople. She is not Theodosia of Tyre, the maiden martyred in Palestine in 307, with whom the calendars constantly confuse her.

• Saint of the day

  

  Rep. Bl. John of Ustiug

  John of Ustyug (†29 May 1494) is the second of the two great fools-for-Christ of Great Ustyug in the Russian north, and one of the purest examples of the type: a young man of peasant stock who fasted from childhood, went barefoot and in rags through the Ustyug winters, slept on dung-heaps, prayed the nights through in a hut beside the city's Dormition cathedral, and bore the mockery of the town as his ascetic labour. He died young, and his tomb by the cathedral at once became a place of healing; the Russian Church honours him as a wonderworker and as an intercessor in the wars and invasions of the northern lands. He is the direct successor in that city of Procopius of Ustyug (†1303), the first Russian holy fool, with whom he is venerated as one of the Ustyug wonderworkers.

• Commemoration of the First Ecumenical Council (325)

• The Fall of Constantinople (1453); "Blessed Constantine XII, last of the Byzantine emperors, martyred by the Turks (1453)"

• Alexander of Alexandria

  Alexander, archbishop and pope of Alexandria from 313 until his death, is the hierarch who first identified and condemned the heresy of Arius — a priest of his own city and of his own clergy — and who thereby began the struggle that produced the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 and the Creed of the Church. He deposed Arius in synod, circulated encyclical letters that put the whole episcopate on notice, went up to Nicaea as the chief accuser, and left as his successor his deacon and secretary Athanasius the Great, whom he had formed. He reposed within a few years of the Council, and the Church keeps his memory on May 29, close by the commemoration of the Fathers whose work he began.

• Hypomone the Empress

  Hypomone — "Patience" — was the monastic name of Helena Dragaš, the Serbian-born empress of Manuel II Palaiologos, mother of two Byzantine emperors and grandmother of none, who after her husband's death took the veil in the convent of Kyra Martha at Constantinople and lived out her life there as a nun while remaining the moral centre of the imperial house. She bore John VIII and Constantine XI, the last emperor, who took her family name and reigned as Constantine Dragases Palaiologos; she governed as regent in the interval between their reigns; and she held firmly against the union of Florence. She died on 23 March 1450, three years before the City fell, and the Greek Church keeps her memory on May 29 — the day of the fall — so that the mother is commemorated with the son and the end of the empire.

• Luke of Simferopol

  Luke of Simferopol — in the world Valentin Felixovich Voino-Yasenetsky (1877–1961) — was one of the foremost surgeons of the Russian twentieth century and, at the same time, a bishop who spent eleven years in Soviet prisons and exile for refusing to be silent. He pioneered regional anaesthesia, wrote the Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections that trained generations of Russian surgeons, operated in a cassock with an icon in the theatre, was tonsured and consecrated in secret in 1923, was arrested three times, ran the military hospitals of Krasnoyarsk as an exile through the Second World War, was given the Stalin Prize in 1946 and gave most of it away, governed the see of Simferopol and Crimea from 1946, went blind in his last years and went on preaching, and died on 29 May (civil 11 June) 1961. His relics were uncovered in 1996 and he is venerated with extraordinary warmth in Russia, Ukraine and above all in Greece, where he is invoked before surgery as the physician-hierarch of the modern world.

• Martyred Fathers and Mothers of Atchara

  The Martyred Fathers and Mothers of Atchara are the Christians — men and women, and by the name of the commemoration chiefly the elderly — of the mountainous Georgian province on the Black Sea coast who, through the long generations of Ottoman rule, were put to death for refusing to renounce Christ and accept Islam. They are venerated as a company rather than as named individuals: the hangings and beheadings were carried out village by village over roughly a century, with the year 1790 transmitted as the culminating persecution, and the bridge over the Atcharistsqali river — the medieval "Bridge of Queen Tamar" — remembered as the chief place of execution. The Georgian Church canonised them collectively, and keeps their memory on May 29.

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