Leavetaking of Pascha / Forefeast of Ascension

Saints commemorated

• St Nicetas, Bishop of Chalcedon

  Nicetas, bishop of Chalcedon on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople, was one of the hierarchs who lost their sees for the holy icons in the second period of Byzantine Iconoclasm, under the emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820). The synaxarial notice remembers him twice over: for a bishop's charity — he kept an open house for travellers, maintained the poor, took the part of orphans and widows, and made himself the advocate of anyone who had been wronged — and for the plainness with which he told his flock that the images of Christ, of His Mother and of the saints were to be venerated, when the emperor had forbidden it. He was tortured and sent into exile, where he reposed early in the ninth century; healings were reported at his relics. He is one of a crowded family of holy Nicetases and is frequently confused with them.

• St Ignaty, Bishop of Rostov

  Ignatius (†1288) was bishop of Rostov for twenty-six years, in the second and third generations of the Mongol yoke, and is one of the very few Russian saints whose veneration began at his own funeral. A monk of Rostov who rose through the city's Epiphany monastery to be its archimandrite, he was consecrated bishop in 1262 and spent his episcopate holding together a principality that the Horde and its own princes were pulling apart: he reconciled the feuding brothers Dmitry and Konstantin Borisovich, went himself to the Golden Horde on the Church's business, sat at the reforming council of Vladimir in 1274, and once — notoriously — passed sentence on a dead prince by removing his body from the cathedral. He reposed on 28 May 1288, and at his burial, in the sight of the people, his hand was seen to rise from the bier to take the prayer of absolution; he was never lowered into the ground but laid openly in the Dormition cathedral of Rostov, where his relics have rested ever since. He is one of the three founding hierarchs of Rostov, with Leontius and Isaiah.

• St Nicetas the Confessor, bishop of Chalcedon (9th c.)

• Eutychius of Melitene

  Eutychius is remembered in a single line of the synaxarion: a co-worker of the holy apostles who was bishop of Melitene in Armenia Minor and who suffered for Christ there in the first century. Nothing further about him has been transmitted — no passion, no account of his preaching, no name of a persecutor, not even a manner of death. The Church keeps him on May 28 as a hieromartyr of the apostolic generation, and the whole of what can honestly be said about him is that the memory of a bishop-martyr of Melitene from the very first age of the Church was preserved at Constantinople and passed into the Menaion under that description.

• Germanus of Paris

  Germanus (c. 496–576) was bishop of Paris for the last twenty years of his life and the most respected churchman in the Frankish kingdoms of his generation: a Burgundian of Gallo-Roman family, abbot of St Symphorian at Autun before his elevation, and thereafter a hierarch who spent his episcopate trying to restrain the Merovingian kings from murdering one another and their subjects. He fed and ransomed the poor on a scale that emptied his own house, presided at the councils of Paris and Tours, went so far as to excommunicate a reigning king for his marriages, and was appealed to by St Radegund for protection against her husband. The great abbey he founded beside the Seine, dedicated to the Holy Cross and St Vincent, took his own name after his burial in it and is known to this day as Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He is one of the pre-schism fathers of the West received into Orthodox commemoration, and is kept on May 28 in both the Greek Great Synaxaristes and the OCA calendar.

• Heliconis of Thessalonica

  Heliconis was a Christian woman of Thessalonica who, in the middle of the third century, went of her own accord to Corinth during a persecution and preached openly in the city against the worship of idols. Arrested and brought before the governor, she endured a long and inventive series of torments — the furnace, the flaying of her scalp, the burning of her head and breasts — and then, feigning consent to sacrifice, had herself led in procession to the temple, where she was left alone and broke every idol in it. Beaten and imprisoned, she was healed in the night by a vision of Christ with the Archangels Michael and Gabriel; thrown to three lions, she was not touched by them; and at last she was beheaded, in the year given by the tradition as 244. She is one of the boldest of the women martyrs of the Greek synaxarion, and among the very few whose passion is built around a deliberate, premeditated destruction of a pagan sanctuary.

• Helladius the Hieromartyr

  Helladius is remembered in the books as a bishop "in the East" — that is, somewhere in the vast Roman Diocese of Oriens, the territory of the Antiochene patriarchate — who was thrown into a fire for his faith in Christ and came out of it unhurt, and who died afterwards of the beating inflicted on him. His service adds one further detail, and it is the one his commemoration is really built on: that the Lord Jesus Christ came to him in his prison and healed his wounds. Neither his see nor the name of his persecutor has been transmitted, and the sources are divided over his century, some placing him among the Christians who suffered in the Persian invasions of the Roman East, others four centuries later. He is a saint of whom the Church has kept the substance — a bishop, a fire, a scourging, a visitation — and lost every circumstance.

• Sophronius the Bulgarian

  Sophronius — Stephen before his tonsure — was a Bulgarian hieromonk of the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the village of Penkovtsi in the Sofia region, who served in the monastery of Penkovo near Sofia until word came that the Ottoman troops were about to fall on it. He fled north across the Danube into Wallachia, settled in a monastery on the river, and gave the rest of his life to fasting, vigil and prayer in the monastic community of Rusensk — a house associated in the tradition with St Joachim, Patriarch of Trnovo. He was known for almsgiving and for care of the poor, and reposed on 28 May 1510; some accounts say he was murdered by a servant, and that his relics were found incorrupt three years afterwards. He belongs to the small company of Bulgarian monastic saints of the first Ottoman century, whose lives were lived out largely in exile north of the Danube.

• William of Gellone

  William (c. 755–812) was a Frankish count and duke of Toulouse, a kinsman of Charlemagne and one of the commanders who held the Pyrenean frontier of Christendom against the emirate of Córdoba — he was in the field at the disaster on the Orbieu in 793 and at the capture of Barcelona in 801 — who then laid down his arms, founded the monastery of Gellone in the wild gorge of the Hérault in 804, enriched it with a relic of the True Cross given him by the emperor, and in 806 entered it himself as a simple monk. He died there on 28 May 812 and was formally canonised at Rome in 1066; the abbey and the village that grew around it are called Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert to this day. He is among the pre-schism saints of the West received into Orthodox commemoration, and he is the historical seed of an enormous cycle of medieval French epic, the Geste de Guillaume d'Orange, which buried the real man under a legendary one.

Troparia & kontakia

Readings