Martyr Myron, Presbyter of Cyzicus

Saints commemorated

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  Martyr Myron, Presbyter of Cyzicus

  Myron was a presbyter in Achaia who was seized at the altar on the feast of the Nativity of Christ and put to death in the persecution of the emperor Decius, about the year 250. The synaxarion remembers him for the particular character of his martyrdom: he suffered not for a private confession but for standing between the governor Antipater and his own congregation, whom the soldiers had come into the church to arrest. Scourged with iron, thrust into a heated furnace which did not consume him, flayed with thongs — one of which he flung back into his tormentor's face — and exposed to beasts which would not touch him, he was at last carried across the Aegean to Cyzicus on the Propontis and there beheaded. He is styled hieromartyr in the Greek books, and his epithet is taken from the city of his death rather than the province of his ministry.

• Holy Martyr Patroclus (late 3rd c.)

  Patroclus was a wealthy and devout Christian of Tricassae — the city that is now Troyes in Champagne — who was beheaded for his faith in the third century, by the common reckoning under the emperor Aurelian (270–275). The Passio remembers him for his charity, for a plain exchange with the emperor in which he called the man on the imperial throne a pauper, and for a wonder at his execution: the soldiers taking him to the sandy ground beyond the Seine were struck blind for a moment, and the martyr walked across the water. He is one of the very few saints of Roman Gaul carried by the Byzantine synaxaria, and the medieval West kept him with great honour after his relics were carried to Soest in Westphalia in 964, where the cathedral still bears his name.

• Alypius the Iconographer

  Alypius (†17 August 1114) is the first icon-painter of the Russian Church whose name is known, and the founder of its whole tradition of painting understood as an ascetic craft rather than a trade. A boy of Kiev given by his parents to the Monastery of the Caves, he was apprenticed to the Greek masters who came from Constantinople to decorate the Dormition church in 1083, was tonsured by the igumen Nikon, and was afterwards ordained priest. He painted without payment for the rest of his life, dividing what he was given into three parts — materials, the poor, and his own necessity — and never allowed the work to displace the services. The Kiev Caves Paterikon preserves a cycle of wonders around him: icons of his hand that survived a fire unmarked, a leper cured with the paint from his brushes, and, on his deathbed, an angel who finished the icon he had been unable to paint and then received his soul.

• Demetrius of Samarina

  Demetrius was a monk of Samarina, the high Vlach village of the Pindus in Epirus, who was tortured to death by Ali Pasha of Ioannina on 17 August 1808. After the crushing of the rising led by the priest Euthymios Vlachavas in 1808, he left his monastery to go among the terrified villages, preaching and strengthening the people in their faith. Ali Pasha's men took him for a conspirator and demanded the names of the plotters. He gave none — through nails driven under his fingernails and toenails, an iron band tightened around his skull, and suspension head-downward over a fire — and at the last was walled up alive with only his head left showing, dying after ten days. A Turk who watched him was converted by what he saw and was himself martyred.

• Paul and Juliana of Ptolemais

  Paul and Juliana were a brother and sister martyred at Ptolemais (Akko/Acre) on the coast of Phoenicia under the emperor Aurelian (270–275), about the year 273. When the emperor came to the city, Paul openly made the sign of the Cross at the passing of the pagan procession, and was seized; his sister Juliana, seeing him tortured, cried out against the judge and confessed Christ at his side. After cruel torments — in the course of which, the tradition holds, several of the soldiers set to torture them were themselves converted by the constancy of the martyrs and put to death — Paul and Juliana were beheaded, receiving together the crown of martyrdom. They are commemorated on March 4.

• Straton, Philip, Eutychian and Cyprian of Nicomedia

  Four Christians of Nicomedia — Straton, Philip, Eutychian and Cyprian — who made the city's circus their pulpit. Going in among the crowds gathered for the games, they preached Christ where the pagan festival was thickest, argued the emptiness of the idols to men who had come for entertainment, and converted so many that the attendance at the spectacles visibly fell away. It was that fall in the takings, not a denunciation, that brought them before the governor. Refusing to renounce Christ, they were thrown to wild beasts which would not touch them, tortured, and at last burned alive. Their memory is kept on August 17.

• Theodoritus of Kola

  Theodoritus (c. 1481 – 17 August 1571) spent twenty years among the pagan Lapps of the Kola peninsula, at the very edge of the inhabited world, learned their language, translated the prayers of the Church into it, and baptised them — the first sustained Christian mission to the Sámi, and one of the very few missions of the Russian sixteenth century that proceeded by persuasion and translation rather than by the arm of the state. A Solovki monk from the age of thirteen and the disciple of the elder Zosimas, he founded a monastery at the mouth of the Kola river, was made archimandrite, and later served as the envoy of Ivan the Terrible to Constantinople in 1558 — the embassy that obtained the Patriarch's recognition of the Russian tsardom. He reposed, in old age and stripped of everything he had ever been given, back at Solovki, where he had begun.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. James the deacon of York (7th C)
• St. Drithelm of Melrose (c.700)
• Holy Martyr Hiero (Jeroen ) (885)

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