Martyrs Menas, Hermogenes, Eugraphus

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Martyrs Menas, Hermogenes, Eugraphus

  Menas Kallikelados ("the fair-spoken"), Hermogenes and Eugraphus were three martyrs of the early fourth century, commemorated together on December 10. Menas, a Christian of great eloquence, was sent by the emperor from Athens to Alexandria to quiet the strife between Christians and pagans, but instead preached Christ openly and won many converts. The imperial official Hermogenes, despatched to try him, was himself converted by the martyr's endurance under torture and his miraculous healing; and Eugraphus, Menas's own secretary, confessed Christ on witnessing their steadfastness. The emperor, unmoved by their constancy and by the miracles wrought among them, put all three to death.

• 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.

• Gemellus of Paphlagonia

  Gemellus was a Christian of Paphlagonia who, about the year 361, openly rebuked the emperor Julian the Apostate for his renunciation of Christ, and for this confession was seized and cruelly tortured. A red-hot iron belt was fastened about his waist, and he was compelled to follow the emperor on his march eastward; at Edessa in Mesopotamia he was racked, pierced with stakes, and mangled, yet went on reviling the impiety of Julian. Released half-dead, he found a priest and was baptized, whereupon his wounds were healed. Learning of the miracle, Julian ordered him crucified, and so he gave up his soul to God. He is commemorated on December 10.

• Joasaph of Belgorod

  Joasaph of Belgorod (1705–1754), born Joachim Gorlenko of a noble Ukrainian family, was a monk and bishop of the Russian Church renowned for the austerity of his personal life and the strictness of his pastoral zeal. Formed at the Kiev Academy and tonsured young, he rose through the monastic offices to be igumen of the Mgarsk monastery and vicar of the Trinity–Sergius Lavra before his consecration as Bishop of Belgorod and Oboyan in 1748. In six years of ascetic and exacting episcopate he laboured for the moral reform of his clergy and people. His body was found incorrupt after his repose, and he was glorified in 1911; he is commemorated on December 10, the day of his death.

• Thomas of Bithynia

  Thomas Dephourkinos was a monk of Bithynia in the ninth and tenth centuries, who from his youth loved the monastic life and rose to govern a monastery newly founded on the river Sangarios before withdrawing into the wilderness to labour in solitude. Overcoming, the tradition says, many assaults of the devil, he was glorified by God with the gifts of healing and of prophecy, so that the emperor Leo VI the Wise sought his counsel. He is commemorated on December 10.

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