Royal Passionbearers

Saints commemorated

• Antiochian commemoration

  Greatmartyr Marina

  Marina — known in the West as Margaret — is the shepherd-girl of Antioch in Pisidia, daughter of a pagan priest, who was catechised in secret by her Christian nurse, disowned by her father, and about the year 304 put to death under the prefect Olybrius, whose offer of marriage she refused with the single sentence "I am a Christian." Her passion is one of the most crowded in the whole hagiographic record — rods, iron combs, torches, the cauldron, and above all her night in the prison, where the devil came at her as a dragon and she overcame him and then, in the most famous image in Eastern iconography, beat him about the head with a hammer. The East ranks her among the great-martyrs and has never allowed her cult to weaken; the Latin West, which loved her no less, nevertheless declared her Acts apocryphal. She is the patroness of those tormented by the spirits of malice and, in Serbian usage, is Ognjena Marija, "Fiery Mary."

• Euphrasius of Ionopolis

  Euphrasius is a bishop of Ionopolis commemorated by the Greek synaxaria on 17 July, of whom one sentence and one couplet survive: that he pleased God by his works, and that he reposed in peace — that is, he was not a martyr, and no persecution, council or controversy attaches to his name. His see, Ionopolis, is the Paphlagonian city formerly called Abonoteichos, a suffragan of Gangra on the Black Sea coast; nothing in the notice permits his century to be fixed.

• Irenarchus of Solovki

  Irenarchus was igumen of the Solovki monastery in the White Sea from 1613 to 1626, in the years immediately after the Time of Troubles, and one of the very few Russian saints whose life can be traced almost entirely through account-books rather than through a hagiographer. He came to the islands as a young man in the 1580s, served as a salt-agent and a boat-master before he was cellarer, and was elected abbot on the death of St Antony; he then spent thirteen years rebuilding the monastery's ruined estates, negotiating a truce with the Swedes, digging the ditch and raising the wall of a frontier fortress that he also commanded, and, at the same time, restoring monastic discipline within the walls, for which he wrote out a cell-rule for his brethren with his own hand. He blessed and equipped the Anzer skete of St Eleazar. Having asked to be released, he lived his last two years in silence in his cell and reposed on 17 July 1628. His disciple Hilarion of Suzdal collected the Tale of the Wonders of Igumen Irenarchus; his relics were uncovered about 1675, during the Solovki siege.

• Lazarus of Mount Galesius

  Lazarus the Wonderworker (c. 981–1053) was a Byzantine monk and stylite who became the great ascetic of Mount Galesion, a barren height north of Ephesus. Born in Lydia, he was formed for a decade in the monastery of Saint Sabbas in Palestine and ordained priest by the Patriarch of Jerusalem before returning to Asia Minor, where a vision of a fiery pillar ringed with singing angels drew him to Galesion. There he built a church of the Resurrection, took up the life of the pillar in imitation of the earlier stylites, and gathered a monastery about his column. Renowned for miracles in life and after his repose, he is commemorated on November 7 and July 17.

• Leonid of Ustnedumsk

  Leonid was a peasant farmer who ploughed the land until he was fifty, and then, on the strength of a dream he twice tried to disregard, became a monk, walked the length of the Russian North twice over to fetch an icon he had been told to fetch, and founded a monastery in an uninhabitable marsh on the river Luza. To drain it he dug, with his own hands, three canals running some two kilometres in all — from the Luza to Black Lake, from Black Lake to Holy Lake, and thence to the Black Brook — and while he was digging he was bitten by a venomous snake. Refusing either treatment or anxiety, he committed the matter to God, lay down, and woke up well; and he named the canal the Nedumaya, "the Unthought-of river," and the monastery Ustnedumsk, "at the mouth of the Nedumaya," in memory of it. He is honoured as one of the first enlighteners of the far north-eastern forest lands, and reposed on 17 July 1654 at something over a hundred years old.

• Royal Martyrs of Russia

  In the cellar of a requisitioned merchant's house at Yekaterinburg, on the night of 16–17 July 1918 — the 4th of July by the church reckoning — the last emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, and their haemophiliac son Alexis, aged thirteen, were shot together with four of their household. They had been prisoners for sixteen months. The Church honours them not for their politics, on which she pronounces nothing, but for the manner in which they bore captivity and death: without bitterness, at prayer, forgiving, in the pattern of Boris and Gleb — which is what the title passion-bearer (strastoterpets) means and all it means. They were glorified by the Russian Church Abroad in 1981 and by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Jubilee Council of 2000, and are commemorated on July 4. The family's physician, Eugene Botkin, who refused freedom in order to stay with them, is glorified with them.

• Speratus and Veronica

  Speratus and Veronica are a pair of martyrs whom the Greek synaxaria commemorate on 17 July and of whom, in the Eastern tradition, nothing whatever survives beyond their names, their manner of death, and a two-line epigram. The synaxarion distich says only that Veronica mingled the blood of her throat with the blood of Speratus's neck: both were beheaded. The most probable explanation of the entry — not certain, but strong — is that it is the Byzantine remnant of the Scillitan martyrs of Roman Africa, twelve Christians of Scilli beheaded at Carthage on 17 July 180, whose leader was named Speratus and whose acta are the oldest dated document of the Latin Church.

British Isles and Ireland

• Child-Martyr Prince Kenelm of Mercia (c.821)
• St. Cynllo of Wales (5th C)
• St. Turninus (8th C)
• St. Frédégand (Frégô) (c.740)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings