St Emilian the Confessor

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  St Emilian the Confessor

• Saint of the day

  St Emilian the Confessor, bishop of Cyzicus (820)

  Emilian the Confessor (died c. 820) was bishop of Cyzicus, on the Sea of Marmara, and a bold defender of the holy icons in the second iconoclast persecution under the emperor Leo V the Armenian. Summoned with the other bishops before the emperor when Leo moved to revive iconoclasm, Emilian refused to yield the veneration of the images and answered the emperor to his face, for which he was deposed, ill-treated, and sent into exile, where he died a confessor of the faith. He is numbered among the company of confessor-hierarchs who suffered in those years for the images of Christ and the saints. His principal feast is August 8; he is commemorated again on January 8, within the afterfeast of the Theophany.

• St Myron the Wonderworker, Bishop of Crete (350)

  Myron (c. 250–c. 350) is the great wonderworker of Crete: a farmer of the village of Raucos near Knossos, married and working his own land, who became famous first for a generosity so extravagant that it converted the men who came to rob him, and only afterwards, and by the island's insistence, a priest and then its bishop. The tradition credits him with the gift of miracles from his youth — the vineyard stripped for the poor and refilled from three grapes — and above all with the stilling of the flooded river Triton, which he crossed dry-shod and then sent his staff back to release. He reposed about the year 350, a hundred years old. His birthplace bears his name to this day, Agios Myronas, and he is the patron of the whole island's memory of its fourth-century Church.

• St Gregory of Sinai (Mt Athos) (1346)

  Gregory the Sinaite (c. 1265–1346) is the father of the fourteenth-century hesychast revival: the monk who gathered up the ancient discipline of inner stillness (hēsychia) and the unceasing Prayer of Jesus, learned it on Sinai and in Crete, planted it on Mount Athos at a moment when, by his own complaint, almost no one there knew it, and then carried it over the Byzantine frontier into the Slav lands, where at Paroria in the Strandzha mountains he formed the disciples — Callistus I of Constantinople, Theodosius of Trnovo, Romylos, Nicodemus of Tismana — through whom his teaching passed to Bulgaria, Serbia, Wallachia and at last to Russia. His five treatises stand in the Philokalia; the whole Athonite defence of the uncreated light waged by Gregory Palamas rests upon the practice Gregory the Sinaite had restored. He reposed at Paroria on 27 November 1346, and is commemorated on August 8.

• Eleutherius and Leonidas

  Eleutherius and Leonidas are two young martyrs of the Greek synaxarion, cast into the fire together with a number of infants for refusing to sacrifice to the idols. The record of them is a single line and a couplet in the Menaion for August 8; no passion, no place and no reign is transmitted, and the later notices which locate them at Constantinople do so without ancient warrant. They are kept, as the synaxarion keeps them, among the nameless multitude of those "perfected by fire."

• Gregory the Iconographer of the Caves

  Gregory the Iconographer was a monk of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev and the companion in that craft of Alypius, the first named icon-painter of the Russian land. The Accounts of the Holy Iconographers preserved at the monastery say that he painted many wonderworking icons that were dispersed throughout Rus'; the ninth ode of the canon for the Synaxis of the Fathers of the Near Caves calls him a "Byzantine," which most probably means that he was one of the Greek masters who came from Constantinople to Kiev to decorate the Great Church of the monastery, the cathedral of the Dormition. His relics rest in the Near Caves, and he is commemorated on August 8.

• Herman of Solovki

  Herman was the first of the three founders of Solovki to reach the islands and the last of them to die: an unlettered hermit of the Karelian coast who was living by a chapel on the river Vyg when Sabbatius came north in 1429 looking for a place of solitude, and who told him of the empty island in the White Sea. The two crossed the sea together and settled under the Sekirnaya Hill, and lived there six years. After Sabbatius' repose Herman brought the young Zosimas across in 1436 and stayed with him while the monastery grew up around them; he was on the islands for more than fifty years, and outlived them both. Unable to read or write, he did the one thing that has mattered most to posterity: he called clerics and dictated his memories of Sabbatius and Zosimas, so that the Life of the founders of Solovki rests on the testimony of an eyewitness. He died at Novgorod in 1479 on one of the supply journeys he was still making in old age; when in 1484 his grave was opened to bring him home, the relics were found incorrupt, and that finding is his feast.

• Sabbatius of Solovki

  Sabbatius of Solovki (†1435) was the first hermit of the Solovki islands in the White Sea and, with Herman and Zosimas, is venerated as a founder of the great Solovetsky monastery, the fortress of monasticism in the Russian far north. A monk of the White Lake monastery of Cyril and then of Valaam on Lake Ladoga, he twice fled the esteem of the brethren, and in old age crossed the harsh sea with the hermit Herman to settle the uninhabited island. After six years of struggle there he reposed on September 27, 1435, at a chapel on the river Vyg, having sought out the Holy Mysteries in his last days; his relics were later carried to the monastery his successors built.

• Ten Ascetics of Egypt

  The Greek synaxarion for August 8 commemorates ten unnamed ascetics of Egypt, recording of them only that they were ten, that they were Egyptians, and that they reposed in peace. Not a name, a place, a monastery or a century survives. They stand in the calendar for the great anonymous body of the Egyptian desert — the monks of Scetis, Nitria and the Thebaid whose lives were never written — and the epigram appointed for them in the Menaion turns their number into the day's single memorable figure: ten offshoots of Egypt, matched to the ten plagues that Egypt once suffered.

• Triandaphyllus of Zagora

  Triandaphyllus — "Rose," as the name means in Greek — was a boy of fifteen, a sailor's apprentice from Zagora, who was beheaded at Constantinople in 1680 for refusing to accept Islam. He is one of the earliest of the long roll of neomartyrs of the Ottoman centuries, and one of the youngest; his witness is kept in Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian usage alike, the two nations disputing between them, out of affection rather than rivalry, which Zagora was his home.

• Zosimas of Solovki

  Zosimas (†17 April 1478) is the founder of the great monastery of Solovki in the White Sea and the father of coenobitic monasticism in the Russian far north. Born at Tolvui by Lake Onega, he gave away his inheritance, was tonsured, and went looking for a desert; at the mouth of the Suma he met Herman, who told him of an uninhabited island where he had spent six years with Sabbatius. About 1436 the two crossed the sea to the Solovetsky islands, and Zosimas, seeing in the air a vision of a shining church, built there the wooden Transfiguration church that became the Lavra of the north. He brought Sabbatius's relics from the Vyg in 1465, was made abbot by the brethren when the igumens sent from Novgorod could not endure the climate, foretold at Martha Boretskaya's table the beheading of six Novgorod boyars, and is honoured as the patron of beekeepers. His relics were translated with Sabbatius's on August 8, 1566, which is his second commemoration.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Ultan, abbot of Crayke (7th C)
• St. Ellidius of Hirnant in Powys (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings