Unmercenary Wonderworkers Cosmas and Damian

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Unmercenary Wonderworkers Cosmas and Damian

  Cosmas and Damian of Rome (†c. 284) are the second of the three pairs of holy unmercenary brother-physicians of that name whom the Byzantine calendar keeps, and the only pair the tradition places in the West. Brothers born at Rome, they practised medicine in the reign of the emperor Carinus, taking no fee and telling those they cured, "it is not by our own power that we heal you, but by the power of Christ the true God." Denounced and arrested, they were delivered when the emperor, struck blind at their word, was healed at their prayer and released them with honour. They died not by the state's sentence but by private envy: the aged physician who had taught them their art led them up a mountain on pretext of gathering herbs and stoned them to death there. They are commemorated on July 1, and are not to be confused with the unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Mesopotamia (November 1) or of Arabia (October 17).

• Angelina of Serbia

  Angelina was an Albanian nobleman's daughter who married the blinded and dispossessed despot Stephen Branković of Serbia, followed him through exile in Venetian Albania and northern Italy, buried him there, and then — twice widowed of a country, since Serbia itself had fallen to the Turks in 1459 — brought her sons and her husband's body north into Hungarian Syrmia to begin again. Both sons, George and John, are numbered among the saints; George became the monk and metropolitan Maximus, and with him Angelina founded the monastery of Krušedol in the Fruška Gora, the house that became the spiritual centre of the Serbs of the Danube for two centuries. She ended her days there as a nun, about 1520, and is venerated as Prepodobna mati Angelina, "our venerable mother Angelina" — the matriarch of the last Serbian ruling house and of its exile.

• John of Rila

  John of Rila (c. 876–946) is the greatest of the Bulgarian saints: the shepherd of Skrino who fled into the Rila wilderness, lived in a hollow oak and a bare cave on herbs and wild chickpeas, refused the visit of Tsar Peter while returning his gold, gathered the disciples who became the Rila Monastery, and left them a Testament of poverty, prayer and freedom from kings. His relics travelled for five centuries — Sredets, Esztergom, Tarnovo, and home to Rila in 1469 — and his monastery became the ark of Bulgarian faith and letters through the Ottoman night. Heavenly protector of the Bulgarian people, he is celebrated above all on October 19, with further feasts on August 18 (his repose) and July 1 (the return of his relics).

• Leontius of Rădăuți

  Leontius (in the world and in his first monastic tonsure, Lawrence) was a priest-monk of northern Moldavia who founded a hermitage near his native Rădăuți, became the spiritual father of a generation of Moldavian ascetics — among them Daniel the Hesychast — and was drawn out of it by the prince Alexander the Good to be bishop of Rădăuți, the senior see of the principality, whose cathedral was the old princely church of Bogdana. Late in life he laid down the episcopate, withdrew to the wilderness, received the great schema with the name Leontius, and reposed soon after, about 1432. His body was found incorrupt and his tomb became a place of healing; the Romanian Orthodox Church glorified him formally in 1992, and his relics are venerated in a chapel of the Bogdana monastery at Rădăuți. His feast is July 1.

• Peter the Patrician

  Peter was a patrician of Constantinople and an officer of the imperial army who was taken prisoner in the catastrophic Bulgarian campaign of 811, in which the emperor Nikephoros I was killed; released from his captivity, the tradition says, by the Apostle John the Theologian, who appeared to him in the night and loosed his chains, he returned to the City, gave up rank and career, and was tonsured a monk on Mount Olympus in Bithynia. There he lived thirty-four years under the direction of Joannicius the Great in extreme austerity — perpetual fasting and vigil, a hair shirt, and bare feet — and passed his last eight years in Constantinople, where he founded a monastery and a church of St Euandrus. He reposed in 854, aged about seventy, and is commemorated on July 1.

• Potitus

  Potitus was a boy of the second century who was baptised at thirteen against his pagan father's will, converted that father by his constancy, and then spent what was left of his short life travelling and preaching. The tradition gives him two great cures — the senator's wife Kyriake, healed of leprosy at her baptism in Epirus, and the demon-possessed daughter of the emperor Antoninus Pius — and makes the second of them the cause of his death: the emperor credited the healing to his own gods, and, when the boy refused to sacrifice, had his tongue cut out and his eyes put out and then had him beheaded, about the year 160. Between the cures he lived alone among the wild beasts on Mount Garganus. His cult passed early into southern Italy, where he is patron of Tricarico and Ascoli Satriano; the Byzantine books keep him on July 1.

British Isles and Ireland

• Holy Julius and Aaron, Protomartyrs of Wales (c.304)
• St. Servanus (Serf, Sair), Apostle of Western Fife (6th C)
• St. Lunaire (Leonorious), bishop
• St. Cewydd of Anglesey (6th C)
• St. Juthware of Devon (7th C)
• St. Veep (Veepus, Veepy, Wimp, Wennapa), patron saint of St. Veep, Cornwall (6th C)
• St. Gwenyth of Cornwall (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings