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Thursday 10 July 2025

Ven. Anthony of the Kiev Caves

Thursday of the 5th week after Pentecost

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No Fast Tone 3

Ven. Anthony of the Kiev Caves

Saints commemorated

  • Saint of the day

    Icon of Antony of the Kiev Caves

    Antony of the Kiev Caves

    Antony of the Kiev Caves (983–1073) is the father of monasticism in the land of Rus'. Born at Liubech near Chernigov and baptised Antipas, he went as a young man to Mount Athos, was tonsured there, and was sent back by his abbot with the word that he should carry the Holy Mountain's way of life to his own people. Settling in a cave dug in the wooded hill above the Dnieper at Berestovo, he lived on bread and water and drew disciples he had not sought; from that hole in the earth grew the Monastery of the Caves, the mother-house of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism, whose second founder and organiser was his disciple Theodosius. Antony himself never governed it: he appointed abbots and withdrew again into seclusion, and to the end preferred the cave to the church he had caused to be built. He reposed in 1073, and by a providence the tradition has never tried to explain away, his relics have never been uncovered.

  • Holy 45 Martyrs of Nikopolis in Armenia (319)

  • The Placing of the Precious Robe of the Lord in Moscow (1625)

  • Apollonius of Sardis

    Apollonius was a Christian of Sardis in Lydia, the ancient capital of the Lydian kings and one of the seven churches of the Apocalypse, who was arrested for confessing Christ in the third century and put to death by crucifixion at Iconium. The one detail the synaxarion preserves of his trial is the point on which he broke with the court: he refused to take the oath by the genius of the emperor, saying that it was not lawful for a Christian to swear by a mortal man. He was tortured at length for the refusal and then crucified — a manner of death rare enough among the martyrs to have kept his name in the calendar when almost everything else about him was lost.

  • Bianor and Silvanus of Pisidia

    Bianor and Silvanus are martyrs of Pisidia, the rough highland province of southern Asia Minor, who suffered in the persecution of Diocletian about the year 300. Bianor was arrested and tortured for confessing Christ; Silvanus was not a defendant but a spectator — a bystander at the tribunal who, watching what Bianor endured, cried out that he too was a Christian, and was thereupon condemned with him. For that outcry his tongue was cut out before he was beheaded; Bianor was beheaded after long torment. Theirs is one of the many notices of the calendar in which a martyrdom makes a martyr on the spot.

  • Forty-five Martyrs of Nicopolis in Armenia

    The Forty-five Martyrs of Nicopolis are a company of Christians of Nicopolis in Lesser Armenia who suffered about the year 319, in the persecution which the emperor Licinius raised in the eastern half of the empire after his breach with Constantine. They were not hunted out: the sources are emphatic that they came forward of their own accord and presented themselves to the governor, so that the Church remembers them as volunteers rather than as victims. Their leaders are named — Leontius, Maurice, Daniel, Antony, Alexander, Anicetus, Sisinius, Menaeus and Virilad — and the rest, to the number of forty-five in all, are anonymous. After long imprisonment their hands and feet were struck off and they were thrown into a fire; their bones were cast into a river, recovered by the faithful, and laid in a church raised over the place when the peace of the Church returned.

  • Joseph of Damascus

    Joseph of Damascus (1793–1860) is the great new martyr of the Church of Antioch in modern times: a parish priest and schoolmaster of Damascus who was killed, with a great company of his people, in the sack of the Christian quarter of Bab Touma in July 1860. For twenty-four years he directed the Patriarchal School of Damascus and made it the foremost Orthodox school in the Arab East, teaching the men who would become bishops and archpriests from Syria to Brazil and North America — among them Raphael of Brooklyn. When the quarter was set alight on 10 July 1860, the tradition of the Archdiocese holds that he refused to hide, and went through the burning streets with the Holy Gifts to communicate the dying until he was cut down. The Holy Synod of Antioch glorified him with his companions in 1993, and the Church keeps their memory on July 10.

  • Nectarius of Vryoulla

    Nektarios was a young Greek of Vryoulla (Vourla) in the country of Ephesus who, at seventeen, denied Christ under the pressure of a plague and a lie, was disowned by his own mother for it, and spent the rest of his short life undoing it. Tonsured at the Skete of St Anne on Mount Athos under the elder Hatzi-Stephanos, he returned to the town of his denial, confessed himself a Christian before the Turkish authorities, and was beheaded on Sunday, 11 July 1820 — his twenty-first birthday. His elder recovered the skull and carried it back to St Anne's, where it is kept. He belongs to that Athonite generation of new martyrs who were deliberately trained for martyrdom on the Holy Mountain and sent back to die where they had fallen.

  • Nicodemus the Albanian

    Nicodemus (†11 July 1722) was a Christian of Vithkuq in southern Albania who, wanting a fourth marriage the canons would not give him, apostatised to Islam and drew his children after him. Pursuing to Mount Athos the one son whom Christians had carried off to save him, he was converted instead, became a monk of Vatopedi, and passed three years of hard penance in the skete of Saint Anna. Blessed by the elder Acacius of Kavsokalyvia and sent back, he returned to Berat, confessed Christ publicly in the place where he had denied Him, and was beheaded there on this day. He is one of the best-loved of the Albanian new-martyrs, and is counted with the great company of Athonite new-martyrs of the Ottoman centuries.

  • Ten Thousand Fathers of Nitria

    Under the name of the Myriad — the ten thousand — the Church keeps on July 10 the memory of the monks of the Egyptian desert of Nitria and of the caves of Scete who were driven from their cells, hunted and destroyed about the year 400 by Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria. The synaxarion gives the reason with unusual bluntness: the patriarch charged them with Origenism, but the real offence was that they had sheltered the priest Isidore, whom he had turned against, and had refused to be used in his quarrels. It is the rarest kind of commemoration in the calendar — a company of ascetics honoured as martyrs for what a bishop of the Church did to them — and the Church has never softened it.

  • Victoria, Anatolia and Audax

    Victoria and Anatolia were sisters, Christian maidens of noble family in the Sabine country north-east of Rome, who refused the pagan husbands to whom they had been betrothed, gave away their property, and were put to death in the persecution of Decius about the year 250. Anatolia was held at Thora and Victoria at Trebula Mutuesca. To Anatolia's passion belongs the third name: Audax, the man sent to kill her, who was bitten — or, as the legend has it, seized — by the serpent shut up with her, was delivered by her prayer, confessed Christ, and died with her. The Byzantine calendar keeps the two sisters on December 23; the Roman Martyrology keeps Anatolia and Audax on July 10, which is why they stand in this collection's July 10 file as well.

British Isles and Ireland

  • St. Etto (Hetto) (c.670)

Troparia & kontakia

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)

Thy martyr Apollonius, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)

Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)

Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)

As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Joseph: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a venerable-martyr)

Thou didst fall as a child and rise as a man, O Nektarios; for having wept upon the Mountain of the Mother of God, thou didst go down to the place of thy denial and confess Christ before the ungodly, and on the day of thy birth thou wast born again by the sword. Wherefore intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a venerable-martyr)

Thou didst deny in weakness and confess in strength, O blessed Nicodemus; for having washed away thy denial with the tears of repentance and the labours of the desert, thou didst return to the place of thy fall and there give thy neck to the sword for Christ. Wherefore, O new martyr, entreat Him that our souls may be saved.

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)

Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)

Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.

Kontakion — Tone 8

Having offered thyself to God, whom thou didst love above all from thy youth, O venerable one, thou didst choose to follow Him with thy whole soul before all things else, and counting the beauties of the world as nothing, thou didst make thee a cave in the earth, and struggling well therein against the devices of the unseen enemies, thou didst shine upon all the land of Rus' like the sun in its splendour. Wherefore, standing now with boldness before Christ God, pray for thy flock, O father, and for all who come to thee, that we may cry to thee: Rejoice, O Antony our father.

Kontakion — Tone 2

Ye came of your own will to the tribunal, O forty-five, and were not driven; and having been maimed in hand and foot, ye ran the faster to Christ, and were made whole in the fire. Wherefore Nicopolis, the city of victory, is crowned with your victory, and the Church crieth to you: rejoice, O company of the unconquered.

Kontakion — Tone 4

The city of Damascus offereth thee to the Lord as the firstfruits of her sorrow, O shepherd who wast slain among thy sheep; for thou didst not flee from the fire, but didst bear the Bread of life into it, and wast broken with them that thou didst feed. Wherefore, O Joseph, together with thy companions, entreat Christ God for us who honour your memory.

Troparion — Tone 4

Having gone forth from the tumult of the world, and having followed Christ after the manner of the Gospel by the renunciation of all things, thou didst live a life like the angels' and didst come to the quiet haven of the Holy Mountain of Athos; and thence, with the blessing of the fathers, thou camest to the hill of Kiev, and finishing thy course there in labour, thou didst enlighten thy fatherland, and having shown to a multitude of monastics the path that leads to the Kingdom of heaven, thou didst bring them to Christ. Him do thou entreat, O venerable Antony, that He may save our souls.

Readings

Vespers

Wisdom of Solomon 3.1-9

1But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. 2In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, 3And their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in peace. 4For though they be punished in the sight of men, yet is their hope full of immortality. 5And having been a little chastised, they shall be greatly rewarded: for God proved them, and found them worthy for himself. 6As gold in the furnace hath he tried them, and received them as a burnt offering. 7And in the time of their visitation they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble. 8They shall judge the nations, and have dominion over the people, and their Lord shall reign for ever. 9They that put their trust in him shall understand the truth: and such as be faithful in love shall abide with him: for grace and mercy is to his saints, and he hath care for his elect.

Wisdom of Solomon 5.15-6.3

15But the righteous live for evermore; their reward also is with the Lord, and the care of them is with the most High. 16Therefore shall they receive a glorious kingdom, and a beautiful crown from the Lord’s hand: for with his right hand shall he cover them, and with his arm shall he protect them. 17He shall take to him his jealousy for complete armour, and make the creature his weapon for the revenge of his enemies. 18He shall put on righteousness as a breastplate, and true judgment instead of an helmet. 19He shall take holiness for an invincible shield. 20His severe wrath shall he sharpen for a sword, and the world shall fight with him against the unwise. 21Then shall the right aiming thunderbolts go abroad; and from the clouds, as from a well drawn bow, shall they fly to the mark. 22And hailstones full of wrath shall be cast as out of a stone bow, and the water of the sea shall rage against them, and the floods shall cruelly drown them. 23Yea, a mighty wind shall stand up against them, and like a storm shall blow them away: thus iniquity shall lay waste the whole earth, and ill dealing shall overthrow the thrones of the mighty. 1Hear therefore, O ye kings, and understand; learn, ye that be judges of the ends of the earth. 2Give ear, ye that rule the people, and glory in the multitude of nations. 3For power is given you of the Lord, and sovereignty from the Highest, who shall try your works, and search out your counsels.

Wisdom of Solomon 4.7-15

7But though the righteous be prevented with death, yet shall he be in rest. 8For honourable age is not that which standeth in length of time, nor that is measured by number of years. 9But wisdom is the gray hair unto men, and an unspotted life is old age. 10He pleased God, and was beloved of him: so that living among sinners he was translated. 11Yea speedily was he taken away, lest that wickedness should alter his understanding, or deceit beguile his soul. 12For the bewitching of naughtiness doth obscure things that are honest; and the wandering of concupiscence doth undermine the simple mind. 13He, being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time: 14For his soul pleased the Lord: therefore hasted he to take him away from among the wicked. 15This the people saw, and understood it not, neither laid they up this in their minds, That his grace and mercy is with his saints, and that he hath respect unto his chosen.

Matins Gospel

Matthew 11.27-30

27All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him. 28Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. 30For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Epistle

Romans 15.17-29

17I have therefore whereof I may glory through Jesus Christ in those things which pertain to God. 18For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ hath not wrought by me, to make the Gentiles obedient, by word and deed, 19Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ. 20Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man’s foundation: 21But as it is written, To whom he was not spoken of, they shall see: and they that have not heard shall understand. 22For which cause also I have been much hindered from coming to you. 23But now having no more place in these parts, and having a great desire these many years to come unto you; 24Whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you: for I trust to see you in my journey, and to be brought on my way thitherward by you, if first I be somewhat filled with your company. 25But now I go unto Jerusalem to minister unto the saints. 26For it hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make a certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem. 27It hath pleased them verily; and their debtors they are. For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things. 28When therefore I have performed this, and have sealed to them this fruit, I will come by you into Spain. 29And I am sure that, when I come unto you, I shall come in the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ.

Galatians 5.22-6.2 (St Anthony)

22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. 24And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. 25If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. 26Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another. 1Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. 2Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Gospel

Matthew 12.46-13.3

46While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him. 47Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. 48But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? 49And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! 50For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. 1The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by the sea side. 2And great multitudes were gathered together unto him, so that he went into a ship, and sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. 3And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow;

Matthew 4.25-5.12 (St Anthony)

25And there followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judaea, and from beyond Jordan. 1And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: 2And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, 3Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. 5Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. 6Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. 7Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. 8Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. 9Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. 10Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. 12Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.