Beginning of the Great Fast

Saints commemorated

• St Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem

  Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313 – 386) was Archbishop of Jerusalem for some thirty-five years and one of the great catechists and teachers of the early Church. His Catechetical Lectures — a set of instructions delivered in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to those preparing for baptism at Pascha, together with the five Mystagogical Catecheses given to the newly baptised in Bright Week — are the fullest surviving witness to how the fourth-century Church initiated her members: the renunciation of Satan, the threefold immersion, the anointing with holy myron, and above all the celebration of the Eucharist, with the earliest clear description of the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts. Ordained in the years of the Arian storm, Cyril was thrice driven from his see by the Arians and their allies and spent some sixteen years in exile, yet at the last he stood vindicated as a confessor of the Nicene faith and took his seat among the fathers of the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381. He reposed at Jerusalem in 386 and is kept on March 18. He is not to be confused with Cyril of Alexandria, the Christological doctor.

• Rep. St Nikolaj of Zhicha

• St Ananias (Aninus) the Wonderworker (?)

• Saint Nikolai (Velimirovic), Bishop of Ochrid and Zica, Serbia (1956)(March 5 OC)

  Nikolai Velimirović (1880/81 – 1956), Bishop of Ohrid and of Žiča, was the most celebrated Serbian churchman of the twentieth century — preacher, poet, theologian, and missionary, called in his own lifetime "the Serbian Chrysostom" for his golden eloquence. Rising from a peasant family of western Serbia through the seminaries of Belgrade and the universities of Europe, he became a monk and bishop, the tireless renewer of Serbian Orthodox piety, and the author of the Prologue of Ohrid, a synaxarion and daily devotional read across the Orthodox world, and of the lyrical Prayers by the Lake. Interned by the Nazis and in 1944 imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp, he survived to emigrate to America, where he taught in the Orthodox seminaries and reposed at South Canaan, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1956. His relics were translated to his native Lelić in 1991, and he was glorified by the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2003. He is commemorated on March 18.

• Aninas of the Euphrates

  Aninas the Wonderworker (fifth century) was a hermit of the Syrian frontier, venerated for a life of extreme asceticism and an abundance of miracles. Born at Chalcedon into a Christian family, he withdrew at the age of fifteen into a monastery and afterwards into the deep solitude of the desert by the Euphrates, the river that there divides Syria from Mesopotamia, where he lived in a small cell beside a well he had dug. The tradition surrounds him with wonders — a wild lion that came to serve him and to carry water for his guests, healings and deliverances from demons, and a gift of foreknowledge — and tells that he reposed at the great age of a hundred and ten, an angel or, some say, the Prophet Elijah having forewarned him of his end. He is kept on March 18; some Greek notices mark him also on March 13 and 16.

• Edward the Martyr

  Edward the Martyr (c. 962 – 978) was King of the English for less than three years, and a saint of the undivided Church of the West before the Great Schism. The elder son of the reforming King Edgar the Peaceable, he came young to the throne in 975 amid a bitter succession dispute, and on 18 March 978 was murdered at Corfe in Dorset, at the estate of his stepmother Ælfthryth — cut down by armed retainers as he sat unsuspecting on his horse, having ridden to visit his young half-brother Æthelred, who succeeded him. Buried without honour at Wareham, his body was found incorrupt and translated with great reverence to Shaftesbury Abbey, which became the centre of a fervent cult; miracles were reported at his tomb, and within a generation the murdered king was venerated throughout England as a martyr. The Orthodox Church keeps him on March 18, honouring him among the passion-bearers — an innocent whose unjust death was borne, and crowned, as a witness. He is not to be confused with Edward the Confessor (†1066), the later English king-saint.

• Ten Thousand Martyrs

  The Ten Thousand Martyrs are a company of holy martyrs commemorated on March 18, of whom the Greek synaxarion records only that they were beheaded for Christ — "the Holy Ten Thousand Martyrs, whose necks were cut through." Neither their place, their persecution, nor the year of their suffering is transmitted; the number, in the manner of such collective commemorations, expresses the greatness of the company rather than a counted roll. The Church keeps their memory with the other martyrs of the day.

• Trophimus and Eucarpion

  Trophimus and Eucarpion (died c. 300) were soldiers of Nicomedia in the reign of the emperor Diocletian, commissioned to hunt down and arrest the Christians of the city in the great persecution. According to their martyrdom, while they were engaged in this pitiless work a vision of divine light and a heavenly voice overtook them, and the two persecutors were converted on the spot: renouncing their commission, they confessed Christ, gave themselves up in place of those they had been sent to seize, and were put to death by fire. The Church keeps their memory on March 18, together with the other martyrs of the day.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Egbert of Ripon, Confessor (c.720)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings