Martyrs Proclus and Hilary of Ancyra

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Proclus and Hilary of Ancyra

  Proclus and Hilary were kinsmen — uncle and nephew — of the village of Kallippi near Ancyra in Galatia, put to death for Christ under the emperor Trajan, about the year 115. Proclus was arrested first, confessed boldly before the governor Maximus, and after a celebrated exchange in which he foretold that his persecutor would one day confess Christ himself, was bound to a pillar and shot to death with arrows. His nephew Hilary, meeting him on the road to execution, embraced him and declared himself a Christian; he was imprisoned, dragged wounded through the city, and beheaded three days after his uncle. They were laid in a single grave, and the Church has never separated them.

• St Veronica, the woman with the issue of blood who was healed by the Savior

  Veronica — Berenice in the Greek, and in the Gospels simply "a woman having an issue of blood twelve years" — is the woman who came up behind Christ in the press of the crowd, touched the hem of his garment, and was healed on the instant, hearing from him the words "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole" (Matt. 9:20–22; Mark 5:25–34; Luke 8:43–48). The tradition, following the Acts of Pilate, gives her the name Veronica and makes her a woman of Paneas (Caesarea Philippi, the modern Banias), where Eusebius of Caesarea reports having seen with his own eyes the bronze group she set up in thanksgiving before her house. She is commemorated among the righteous on July 12, and is not the Veronica of the Western legend of the veil.

• Saint Païsios of the Holy Mountain (1994) (June 29 OC)

  Paisios of the Holy Mountain (1924–1994) was a Cappadocian-born Greek monk who became the most widely sought spiritual father of twentieth-century Athos. Baptised in Pharasa by Arsenios of Cappadocia, who gave the infant his own name and foretold his monastic calling, he was a carpenter and an army signaller before entering Athos in 1953. After years at Esphigmenou, Philotheou, Stomio in Epirus, Sinai, Katounakia and Stavronikita, he settled in 1979 at the kelli of the Panagouda near Karyes, where for fifteen years he received thousands of pilgrims a year in a bare yard, giving counsel marked by humility, sober discernment and an unfailing "good thought." He reposed of cancer on 12 July 1994 and is buried at Souroti; the Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified him on 13 January 2015.

• Golinduc of Persia

  Golinduc was a Persian noblewoman, the wife of the chief magus of the Sasanian court, who was converted by a vision, baptised with the name Mary, and for her refusal to return to her husband and to the religion of the fire was shut up for eighteen years in the Persian state prison. Released at last, she preached Christ openly under Khosrau II, was received with honour by the Roman authorities on the frontier, made her pilgrimage to the holy places of Jerusalem, and died on the road home at Nisibis in 591. Her Life was written within a decade of her death, first in Syriac by Stephen of Hierapolis and then in Greek by Eustratius of Constantinople, which makes her one of the best-documented saints of the Persian Church.

• Michael Maleinos

  Michael Maleinos (c. 894 – 12 July 961) was a Byzantine aristocrat of the great Cappadocian house of the Maleinoi who left the court in his youth for Mount Kyminas in Bithynia, where he became the outstanding monastic founder of his generation. He filled the mountain with communities, governed the Lavra of Kyminas for some forty years, and there tonsured and formed Athanasius of Athos, the founder of the Great Lavra. Through his sister's marriage into the Phocas family he was the uncle of the emperor Nicephorus II Phocas, whom he counselled and whose patronage of Athos flowed from that connection. Russia keeps him with special honour as the patron saint of Tsar Michael Romanov.

• Theodore and John the Varangians

  Theodore, a Varangian who had taken service in Byzantium and been baptised there, and his young son John, were killed by a pagan mob at Kiev in 983, when the lot for a human sacrifice in thanksgiving for Prince Vladimir's victory fell on the boy and the father refused to give him up — "these are not gods, but wood." Father and son stood armed in their doorway until the crowd pulled down the gallery beneath them and killed them both. They are honoured as the first martyrs of Rus', five years before the Baptism of Kiev, and the Church of the Tithes was afterwards raised on the site of their house.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Menulphus (Menou) (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings