Ven. Isaac, Founder of Dalmatian Monastery

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Isaac, Founder of Dalmatian Monastery

  Isaac (died c. 383) was a Syrian ascetic who left the desert for the capital in the crisis year 378 in order to stand in the road before the Arian emperor Valens as he rode out against the Goths, and to demand of him three times that the churches be given back to the Orthodox — foretelling, when he was refused, that the emperor would not come back but would perish by fire. Valens had him flung into a thorny ravine and then held under guard; within weeks he was dead in a burning farmhouse after the catastrophe at Adrianople, and the monk who had prophesied it was released a vindicated man. Under Theodosius the Great Isaac became the conscience and the spiritual father of Constantinople, and the monastery raised for him outside the walls by the officer Saturninus was the first great monastic house of the city — known ever after by the name of Isaac's successor Dalmatus, whence Isaac's own epithet "of Dalmatia". He is honoured as venerable and confessor on May 30, and again on August 3 with the fathers of his monastery.

• St Macrina, grandmother of St Basil the Great (4th c.)

• Cyprian the Righteous of Antioch

  Cyprian is a saint of the Greek synaxarion of May 30, entered with two facts only: that he was of Antioch, and that he reposed in peace — that is, that he was not a martyr. No office, no century, no place of burial and no history of any kind is transmitted. Given the two celebrated Cyprians with whom the notice inevitably collides — Cyprian the bishop of Carthage, and Cyprian the former magician of Antioch who is commemorated with Justina on October 2 — the entry is best treated as a distinct commemoration of the Church of Antioch which the Constantinopolitan books preserved without its story, while recording frankly that a doubling of one of the great Cyprians cannot be ruled out.

• Emmelia

  Emmelia (late third century – c. 375) was the mother of one of the most remarkable households of saints in the history of the Church. Herself the daughter of a martyr, she married Basil the Elder, a Christian rhetorician of Cappadocia, and bore ten children, of whom the Church numbers five as saints: Basil the Great, Archbishop of Caesarea; Macrina the Younger, teacher and monastic mother; Gregory of Nyssa, the theologian; Peter of Sebaste, bishop; and, in the ascetic tradition, Naucratius (June 8). Widowed, she gave herself under her daughter Macrina's guidance to the ascetic life, turning the family estate at Annesi in Pontus into a household of prayer, and died there in Macrina's arms. She is honoured as a righteous mother whose sanctity bore the fruit of a whole company of saints; the Greek Church keeps her on May 30, and she is commemorated on January 1 together with her son Basil.

• Euplus the Martyr

  Euplus is a martyr of the Greek synaxarion of May 30, known from a single line which records one thing about him beyond his name: he was wrapped or sewn into an ox hide and left exposed to the sun until he died. Neither the place, the reign, the year, the judge nor the burial is transmitted. The punishment named, however, is a real and documented one of the Roman East, and it is the whole of what survives of this martyr's passion.

• Natalius the Martyr

  Natalius is a martyr of the Greek synaxarion of May 30 of whom nothing at all is transmitted except his name and the manner of his death: he was perfected by the sword (ξίφει τελειοῦται). No place, no reign, no year, no interrogation and no relics are recorded. He stands in the Byzantine calendar as one of that considerable class of saints whose entire surviving memory is a name in a list — a witness that the Church kept, and keeps, the names of martyrs whose stories she has lost.

• Romanus, Teletius and Christina of Nicomedia

  A company of martyrs of Nicomedia in Bithynia — Romanus, Teletius (also transmitted as Meletius) and Christina, together with what the Greek notice calls "the multitude of the saints burned at Nicomedia" — who were perfected by fire. No year, no judge, no interrogation and no burial is recorded: the synaxarion gives the place, the names, the manner of death, and one rubric of cultus, that their synaxis was celebrated at the martyrion of Saint Euphemia at Constantinople. Two of the same company, Eusebius and Charalampus, entered the books again under the following day, May 31, and are commemorated there; some manuscripts add Aphrodisius and Agapius to the roll of May 30. They are commemorated on May 30.

• Venantius of Gaul

  Venantius was a young nobleman of Gaul, the elder brother of Honoratus, the founder of the great island monastery of Lérins, who with his brother and their spiritual father Caprasius abandoned rank and inheritance and sailed from Marseilles for the East, meaning to see the holy places of Palestine and to live under the ascetics of Syria and Egypt. He died on the voyage, at Methone in the Peloponnese, before reaching the desert he had set out for; his brother turned back and founded Lérins instead. He is one of the very few saints of the Latin West whom the Greek synaxarion receives in its own right, keeping him on May 30 as "Venandios" who was born in Gaul and "fell asleep in peace in Greece."

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Walstan of Bawburgh, confessor (1016)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings