Leavetaking of Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Leontius and Companions

• Aetherius of Nicomedia

  Aetherius is a martyr of the Diocletianic persecution, kept on June 18 in the Greek and Slavonic books beside the martyrs of Tripoli. Of his life the synaxarion transmits nothing but the fact of his constancy: arrested, offered the usual mixture of threats and promises, and then beaten, scourged and left bleeding, he would not yield, and died faithful. His name — from αἰθήρ, the upper air — supplied the hagiographer with the one thing the notice really contains: the couplet of the day says that he endured many torments and received their reward in the breadth of the aether.

• Hypatius and Theodulus

  Hypatius, a tribune, and Theodulus, a soldier under him, were sent by the governor Hadrian to arrest the Christian officer Leontius at Tripoli in Phoenicia, and were converted on the road: Hypatius, struck down by fever, was healed after calling three times on "the God of Leontius" as an angel had told him in his sleep, and Theodulus was won by what he had watched. They came into the city as catechumens instead of captors, were baptised by the man they had come to seize, and when Hadrian tried them refused to sacrifice. Hypatius was torn with the iron claws and Theodulus beaten with rods; both were then beheaded, dying before Leontius, who was beaten to death after them.

• Leontius of the Kiev Caves

  Leontius, called the Canonarch, was a boy or very young monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra in the fourteenth century who was given the office of canonarch — the singer who intones the verses and gives out the tone for the choirs — because of the unusual beauty of his voice. He was taught the Scriptures, kept the office faithfully, and died young. His relics rest in the Far (Theodosian) Caves, and he is commemorated on June 18, the day of his heavenly patron Leontius of Tripoli, and with the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Leontius of Tripoli

  Leontius, a Greek by birth and an officer of the Roman army stationed at Tripoli in Phoenicia — the coastal city that is now Ṭarābulus in Lebanon, and to this day a metropolitan see of the Patriarchate of Antioch — is the great soldier-martyr of the Antiochian patriarchal territory. The Passion makes him a commander of exemplary courage and open-handed charity who turned many of the city from idols; the governor Hadrian, sent to suppress the Christians, dispatched the tribune Hypatius and the soldier Theodulus to arrest him, and they were converted on the road and baptised by his hand. All three were tortured; Hypatius and Theodulus were beheaded, and Leontius, hung up with a stone about his neck and beaten, gave up his soul under the blows. His martyrion at Tripoli became one of the notable shrines of the Phoenician coast: it was there, in 488, that the future patriarch Severus of Antioch was baptised.

• Leontius the Athonite

  Leontius, born at Argos in the Peloponnese in 1520, took the monastic habit at seventeen in a hermitage of the Argolid, and after the Turkish capture of Nauplion in 1540 crossed to the Holy Mountain and entered the Monastery of Dionysiou. There he remained for sixty years without once passing outside the monastery's gate — the detail on which his whole tradition turns — and there he was given the gifts of discernment and of prophecy. He reposed on 16 March 1605, aged eighty-five; his relics streamed myrrh, from which he is called Myroblytes, the Myrrh-streamer. He is commemorated on June 18, the day of his patron the martyr Leontius of Tripoli.

• Leontius the Shepherd

  A monk called Leontius the Shepherd, commemorated in the Greek books on June 18 — the fourth Leontius of a day that is crowded with them — of whom the synaxarion records only that he reposed in peace. The Greek heading places his monastery or cell beyond the city (πέραν τοῦ ἄστεος), and the couplet of the day plays his epithet against the Chief Shepherd before whom he now stands: being a shepherd, thou standest now before the Shepherd, before the Chief of shepherds, O right-minded Leontius.

• Two Martyrs of Cyprus

  Two Christians of Cyprus, whose names have not been transmitted, are commemorated on June 18. All that the synaxarion records of them is the manner of their death: their feet were burned, and they were perfected. The metrical couplet of the day sets the brevity of the torment against the length of its reward — having endured the burning of their feet for a single hour, the two martyrs rejoice eternally — and that antithesis is, in effect, the whole of what the Church has kept about them.

Troparia & kontakia

Readings