Martyr Lucillian and His Companions

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Lucillian and His Companions

  On June 3 the Church keeps six martyrs of a single passion: Lucillian, an aged pagan priest of Nicomedia who in his old age was persuaded of the emptiness of the idols and confessed Christ; the four young boys Claudius, Hypatius, Paul and Dionysius, whom he found already imprisoned for the faith and who were beheaded before his eyes; and the virgin Paula, who had made her whole life the service of the confessors in prison — feeding them, dressing their wounds, burying their bodies — and who, having taken up Lucillian's body from his cross, was seized in her turn and beheaded. They suffered under Aurelian (270–275), first at Nicomedia and then at Byzantium, on the ground where Constantinople would rise within two generations, and their memory is among the oldest local commemorations of that city.

• Hieromartyr Lucian (2nd c.)

  Lucian, first bishop of Beauvais (Bellovacum) in northern Gaul, is one of the apostolic missionaries of the Gallo-Belgic country and the only Western martyr of June 3 whom the Byzantine calendar has taken into its own books. The tradition makes him a Roman named Lucius, converted and baptised by the Apostle Peter, sent west by Pope Clement in the company of Dionysius the Areopagite to evangelise Gaul, and, with the presbyter Maximian and the deacon Julian, the apostle of the Beauvaisis, where nearly the whole country is said to have been baptised at his preaching. Under a persecution the notices place in the reign of Domitian (81–96), Maximian and Julian were beheaded, and Lucian after them; a cephalophore legend has him rise, carry his own head across a river, and lie down at the place he chose for burial, at which some five hundred pagans believed. He is commemorated on June 3, and the martyrs Marcellinus and Saturninus are named with him.

• Holy Martyr Dimitri, Tsarevich of Russia (1591)

  Demetrius (Dimitry) Ivanovich, youngest son of Ivan IV the Terrible, was born at Moscow in 1582 and died at Uglich on 15 May 1591, aged eight, of a knife-wound in the throat: his mother's family cried murder, the government's commission of inquiry found that he had fallen on his own knife in an epileptic fit, and the question has never been settled. The consequences were enormous — his name was taken up by a succession of impostors who carried the Time of Troubles to the walls of Moscow — and the Church's answer was to glorify him. On 3 June 1606, three weeks after the first false Demetrius was killed, his body was raised at Uglich and carried to the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael in the Kremlin, where it remains. He is honoured not as a martyr for the faith but as a passion-bearer, an innocent child who suffered a violent death without guilt, and as a wonderworker at whose shrine healings were recorded from the day of the translation onward.

• Athanasius the Wonderworker

  Athanasius the Wonderworker is a monastic saint of the Greek synaxaria, commemorated on June 3 and known from a single short synaxarion notice: a man who gave himself from boyhood to the preaching and the practice of the Gospel, received from God the gift of healing bodies and souls so that people came to him and fetched him to their houses, entered a monastery on the river Sangarios whose abbot had been a senator in the world, was asked by that abbot to recover a community grown slack, and did it by preaching, by his own blameless example, by brotherly entreaty and by praying all night; afterwards he went to the monastery of Traianos, where he was ordained priest and lived by copying books, selling them and giving the money to the poor, and where he reposed in peace at a great age. Nothing further is transmitted — not his country, not his century.

• Hieria of Mesopotamia

  Hieria was a wealthy young widow of noble family in Mesopotamia who, in the last persecution, fell into conversation with the nun Febronia at the convent of the abbess Bryaine near Nisibis, and was so shaken by it that she wept the night through, brought her parents and her whole household to the faith, and was baptised. When the prefect Selenus came against the convent and Febronia was tortured to death before the people, Hieria came out of the crowd and rebuked him to his face for his cruelty, and was threatened with arrest; but she was not put to death. She gave her whole fortune to the convent, asked the abbess to receive her in Febronia's place, was clothed as a nun, and reposed in peace beside the relics of the martyr whose death had made her. She is therefore hosia, venerable, and not a martyr, and her memory is kept on June 3, three weeks before Febronia's own feast on June 25.

• Pappos

  Pappos is a venerable father of the Greek synaxaria commemorated on June 3, of whom the record preserves exactly one clause: Ὁ Ὅσιος Πάππος ἀπεβίωσεν εἰρηνικά — "the venerable Pappos departed this life peacefully." The synaxarion adds only a distich playing on his name, which means "grandfather": that he died not the grandfather of grandchildren but rather the father of daughters that are the virtues. Neither his country, his century, his monastery nor any act of his life has come down. He is entered here because the calendar keeps him, and at the length the sources allow.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Kevin, abbot of Glendalough (618)
• St. Glunshallaich (7th C)
• St. Cronan (617)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings