Martyrs Hermylus and Stratonicus

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Martyrs Hermylus and Stratonicus

  Hermylus and Stratonicus (†c. 315) were martyred at Singidunum — the Roman fortress-town on the Danube that is now Belgrade — during the persecution of the emperor Licinius. Hermylus was a deacon of the city, arrested and cruelly scourged for refusing to sacrifice to the idols, which he called deaf and blind things of wood; Stratonicus was his friend, a keeper of the prison who had secretly held the faith and could not hide his grief as he watched his companion tortured, and so confessed Christ and shared his fate. Bound together in a net — in some accounts a wicker basket — the two were cast into the Danube and drowned; their bodies were recovered downstream after three days and buried near the city. Their heads were later treasured at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. They are kept together on January 13, within the afterfeast of the Theophany.

• Our Holy Father Maximos Kavsokalybites (the Hut-burner) (1365)

  Maximus the Hut-burner (c. 1270 – c. 1365) was one of the great hesychast fathers of Mount Athos in the fourteenth century. Born Manuel at Lampsakos on the Hellespont, he became a monk in his youth, and after years of wandering ascesis came to the Holy Mountain, where for a long time he lived as a fool-for-Christ, feigning madness to hide his sanctity and roaming the wilderness without a fixed dwelling: whenever he built himself a hut of branches he would burn it and move on, whence his surname Kavsokalyvites, "the Hut-burner." Granted, at the summit of Athos, a vision of the Mother of God, he received the gift of unceasing prayer and of clairvoyance. When Gregory of Sinai came to the Mountain he saw through the pretence and called Maximus "an earthly angel," and persuaded him to give up his wandering and to teach; thereafter emperors and monks sought his counsel. He reposed about 1365, and is kept on January 13.

• Our Holy Father Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers (369)

• Irenarchus of Rostov

  Irenarchus the Recluse (1548–1616) was a Russian ascetic of the Borisoglebsky (Saints Boris and Gleb) Monastery near Rostov, remembered for an extreme struggle in chains and for the part his prophetic word played in Russia's deliverance during the Time of Troubles. Born a peasant in the village of Kondakovo and baptised Elias, he was tonsured a monk in his thirtieth year and took up a life of enclosed asceticism, loading himself with iron crosses, chains, and fetters — the "bonds" of Christ he wore for some twenty-five years. Foreseeing the Polish-Lithuanian invasion and the desolation of Moscow, he wept and warned Tsar Vasily Shuisky; and in the darkest hour of the interregnum he blessed the liberators Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin, sending them his own cross for the campaign that freed Moscow. He reposed in 1616 and is commemorated on January 13.

• James of Nisibis

  James of Nisibis (†c. 350) was the first known bishop of Nisibis, the great Roman frontier-city on the edge of the Persian empire, and one of the most revered fathers of the fourth-century Syrian Church. An ascetic from his youth, he lived as a hermit in the mountains around the city — under the open sky, clothed in goatskins, feeding on wild plants — before his fame drew the people of Nisibis to make him their bishop. He was numbered among the 318 Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, a firm opponent of Arius; he founded and taught in the school of Nisibis, where his most famous pupil was Ephrem the Syrian, who revered him as father and teacher; and he was celebrated as a wonderworker whose prayers were believed to have delivered Nisibis from the armies of the Persian king Shapur II. He reposed in peace about the year 350, and is kept on January 13.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Kentigern (Mungo), 1st bishop of Glasgow and Strathclyde (603)
• St. Erbin of Cornwall (6th C)
• St. Elian (6th C)

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