Leavetaking of Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Prophet Elisha

  Elisha was a monk of the Solovki monastery on the White Sea, remembered for one thing: the manner of his death. Taken mortally ill while fishing on the river Vyg sixty versts from the monastery, he grieved not at dying but at dying without the great schema; his companions carried him by boat through a storm toward Suma, where a priest-monk could clothe him, and he comforted them in the danger by saying that he saw Saint Zosimas in the boat with them. He was dead when they reached the shore — and at the brethren's prayer to Zosimas he revived, received the schema and Holy Communion, and then reposed in peace. More than a century later his grave was found standing above the ground and healings began at it; a chapel was built over it in 1668, and the fishermen and pilgrims of the Pomor coast have asked his blessing ever since.

• St Methodios, Patriarch of Constantinople (847)

• St John Mavropos, Metropolitan of Euchaïta(1100)

• Cyril of Gortyna

  Cyril was bishop of Gortyna, the metropolis of Roman Crete and the see founded by the Apostle Titus, and he was martyred there as a very old man in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian. The synaxarion gives his story with unusual and memorable particularity: he had lived austerely as an ascetic, was consecrated bishop in his sixty-eighth year, governed his flock twenty-five years, and was then brought before the governor Agrianus; condemned to the fire, he stood unhurt while his bonds burned away and the pyre fell to ashes, and was let go. When he went on converting the pagans he was sentenced again — a bridle put in his mouth, and, being ninety-three and unable to walk, set on an ox-cart to be carried to execution. At a place called Raxos the oxen halted of their own accord, and there he was beheaded. The Greek Menaion keeps him on June 14; the Russian and American calendars on July 9.

• Elisha the Prophet

  Elisha son of Shaphat, called in Greek Elissaios and in the Slavonic books Elisei, was the disciple, servant and successor of the Prophet Elijah, and the only prophet of Israel who asked for and received a double portion of his master's spirit. Called from the plough at Abel-meholah, he served through the reigns of six kings of Israel for more than half a century, and the record of his acts in the Books of Kings is the densest concentration of miracle in the whole Old Testament: the parting of the Jordan with Elijah's fallen mantle, the healing of the bitter spring at Jericho, the widow's inexhaustible oil, the raising of the Shunammite woman's dead son, the cleansing of Naaman the Syrian in the Jordan, the axe-head that floated, the blinding of the Aramean army at Dothan, and — after his own burial at Samaria — the dead man who came to life on touching his bones. The Church reads nearly every one of these as a figure of the Gospel, and keeps his memory on June 14.

• Julitta the Venerable

  Julitta is one of the many names in the synaxarion of Constantinople of which nothing further has come down: she is styled hosia — venerable, that is, an ascetic and not a martyr — and the whole of her notice under June 14 is that she reposed in peace. Her memory survives with a couplet of verse and nothing else, and this entry records exactly that, without supplying a life she has not left.

• Methodius of Constantinople

  Methodius the Confessor, a Sicilian by birth and a monk of Chios, was the hierarch under whom the iconoclast controversy ended. Legate of the deposed Patriarch Nikephoros at Rome, he came home in 821 with a papal letter demanding the restoration of the holy images, and paid for it with scourging, seven years in a tomb-like cell on the island of Antigoni, and a jaw broken under the emperor Theophilus, which he carried bound in a cloth to the end of his life. Raised to the patriarchal throne in 843 by the regent Theodora, he convoked the synod that restored the icons, led the procession of the images to the Great Church on the first Sunday of Great Lent — the Sunday of Orthodoxy, kept ever since — and composed the Synodikon of Orthodoxy that is still proclaimed on that day. He brought back the relics of Nikephoros and of Theodore the Studite, wrote lives of the confessors he had known, and reposed on June 14, 847, having ruled four years.

• Methodius of Peshnosha

  Methodius was a disciple of Sergius of Radonezh and the founder of the Nicholas-Peshnosha monastery on the river Yakhroma, north of Moscow near Dmitrov. Having spent some years under Sergius' direction, he withdrew with his blessing to a marshy solitude beyond the river and built himself a cell there; disciples gathered, and Sergius himself came to visit and counselled him to build a church and gather them into a coenobium. Methodius carried the timber for it on foot through the shallows, and it is from that — peshnosha, "carrying on foot" — that the monastery took its name. He became its abbot in 1391 and reposed in 1392, and was buried in the house he had founded. The spot two versts off where he and Sergius used to talk together is called to this day Beseda, the "conversation-place." His local veneration begins in the late seventeenth century; he is commemorated on June 4 and again on June 14.

• Mstislav-George of Novgorod

  Mstislav Rostislavich, called the Brave and the Fearless, baptised George, was a prince of Smolensk and from 1179 prince of Novgorod, a grandson of Mstislav the Great and son of Rostislav-Michael of Kiev. He is remembered in the chronicles for two things above all: the defence of Vyshgorod in 1173, where with a small garrison he held out against the enormous coalition army of Andrei Bogolyubsky and broke it, having first sent the prince's envoy home shaved and shorn; and a personal charity so marked that the chronicler could write that he never kept property for himself but gave all of it to churches, monasteries, the ransoming of captives and the poor. He reposed suddenly at Novgorod on June 14, 1180, aged about thirty, and was buried in the cathedral of Holy Wisdom, where his relics rest incorrupt.

• Niphon of Athos

  Niphon, a priest's son from the Epirot village of Loukovo, was a monk of the Holy Mountain in the fourteenth century and one of the small company of Athonite hesychasts gathered about Maximus the Hut-burner, to whom he attached himself as a disciple. He was tonsured and ordained at the monastery of Mesopotamos in his own country, went up to Athos while still young, moved from cell to cell in the territory of the Great Lavra seeking stillness, and, when disciples began to gather to him at the Transfiguration, fled even that and finished his life in a cave near Kavsokalyvia in the strictest asceticism. He lived ninety-six years and was granted, the tradition says, the gifts of clairvoyance and of wonders. He is also one of the earliest witnesses to the life of Saint Maximus. His memory is kept on June 14.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Dogmael (5th C)
• St. Nennus, abbot of Arran (7th C)
• St. Ciaran, abbot of Bellach-Duin (870)
• St. Psalmodius (c.690)

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