Martyr Polyeuctus of Melitene in Armenia; Hieromartyr Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Martyr Polyeuctus of Melitene in Armenia

  Polyeuctus (†c. 259) was a Roman soldier of Melitene in Lesser Armenia and the first martyr of that city — one of the most celebrated martyrs of the early Church in both East and West. A pagan of upright life, he was brought to Christ by his fellow-soldier and bosom friend Nearchus and by a vision in which Christ stripped off his soiled military cloak and clothed him in a shining garment. Enkindled with zeal, he tore down the imperial edict commanding sacrifice and smashed the idols carried in procession; neither the pleadings of his father-in-law the magistrate Felix nor the tears of his wife Paulina could move him, and he went to his beheading rejoicing — baptised in his own blood, for he died before receiving the water of Baptism. A great church rose over his tomb under Constantine, and his fame spread so far that the West made him the patron of vows and oaths and Pierre Corneille built his tragedy Polyeucte (1642) upon his memory. He is kept on January 9.

• Saint of the day

  

  Hieromartyr Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow

  Philip (1507–1569), born Theodore Kolychev of a great Moscow boyar family, was the hierarch-martyr who rebuked Ivan the Terrible to his face and paid for it with his life. Forsaking the court in his thirtieth year, he became a monk and then the renowned builder-abbot of the Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea before Ivan drew him, against his will, to be Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia (1566). From the cathedral pulpit he denounced the murders of the Oprichnina and refused to bless the Tsar in his blood-guilt; for this he was deposed in the midst of the Liturgy, stripped of his vestments, and exiled to a monastery in Tver, where in December 1569 the oprichnik Malyuta Skuratov strangled him in his cell. His relics were carried to Solovki in 1591 and, in 1652, translated in triumph to the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin, the Tsar sending a letter of repentance for his forebear's crime. He is venerated as a hieromartyr and wonderworker, the very type of the pastor who lays down his life against tyranny, and is kept on January 9.

• Saint of the day

  Saint Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow (1569)

• Saint Peter II, Bishop of Sebaste (4th c.)

• Venerable Eustratius the Wonderworker (9th c.)

  Eustratius the Wonderworker (c. 751 – c. 846) was a monastic saint of the ninth century, abbot of the Agauros Monastery on Mount Olympus of Bithynia, the great monastic mountain of Asia Minor. Born in the Bithynian village of Tarsion, he left home at twenty to enter the monastery where his own kinsmen were monks, and there gave himself to a life of extreme asceticism — bread and water, and nights passed in prayer and prostration. Chosen abbot, he ruled as the humblest of the brethren, sharing their labour by day. When the iconoclast persecution was revived under Leo V the Armenian, the community was scattered and Eustratius himself imprisoned; only after the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 842 could he gather his monks again and resume his rule. Renowned for a great abundance of miracles and for a boundless charity, he reposed in deep old age, about ninety-five years old, and is kept on January 9.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Adrian of Canterbury, abbot and scholar (710)
• St. Berhtwald, 8th archbishop of Canterbury (731)
• St. Foellan of Strathfillan (8th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings