Martyrs Florus and Laurus of Illyria

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Florus and Laurus of Illyria

  Florus and Laurus were twin brothers and stone-masons, born at Byzantium and taught their craft — and their faith — by two Christian masters, Proclus and Maximus. Sent into Illyricum to build a pagan temple at Ulpiana in Dardania, they gave their wages to the poor, healed the eye of the son of the idol-priest Mamertinus and converted father and son, and when the building was finished they filled it instead with Christians, threw down the idols and set up a cross in its eastern end. Some three hundred of that company were burnt; the two brothers were thrown into a dry well and buried alive under earth, in the second century. Their relics were afterwards found incorrupt and carried to Constantinople. In the Slavic lands they became, by a devotion of the countryside rather than of the service-books, the patrons of horses, and they are painted in one of the most distinctive icon types of the Russian north.

• Our Holy Father John, Abbot of Rila (946)

  John of Rila (c. 876–946) is the greatest of the Bulgarian saints: the shepherd of Skrino who fled into the Rila wilderness, lived in a hollow oak and a bare cave on herbs and wild chickpeas, refused the visit of Tsar Peter while returning his gold, gathered the disciples who became the Rila Monastery, and left them a Testament of poverty, prayer and freedom from kings. His relics travelled for five centuries — Sredets, Esztergom, Tarnovo, and home to Rila in 1469 — and his monastery became the ark of Bulgarian faith and letters through the Ottoman night. Heavenly protector of the Bulgarian people, he is celebrated above all on October 19, with further feasts on August 18 (his repose) and July 1 (the return of his relics).

• Arsenios of Paros

  Arsenios of Paros (1800–1877) was one of the great spiritual fathers and wonderworkers of nineteenth-century Greece. Born at Ioannina in Epirus and orphaned young, he was tonsured on Mount Athos under the elder Daniel, laboured as a teacher and confessor in the newly independent Greek kingdom, and from 1840 until his death dwelt on the Cycladic island of Paros, where he served as abbot of the monastery of Saint George at Longovarda and spiritual guide of the convent of the Transfiguration. Renowned for his ascetic severity, his gift of discernment, and the miracles and healings worked through his prayers, he became in his lifetime the counsellor of a whole region. He reposed on January 31, 1877, and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1967.

• Barnabas and Sophronius of Mela

  Barnabas and his nephew Sophronius were Athenians who left Greece for the mountains of Pontus and settled on Mount Mela (the Black Mountain, Karadağ) in the gorge above the Altındere valley, some thirty miles south of Trebizond. There, in a cave in a sheer cliff-face a thousand feet above the floor of the ravine, they founded the monastery of the Panagia Soumela — the house of the Mother of God "of Mount Mela," which took its name from the mountain and became the greatest sanctuary of the Pontic Greeks and one of the longest-lived monasteries in the Christian world, inhabited without a break until 1923. The tradition sends them there in obedience to a vision, and makes the occasion of the foundation the arrival in the cave of the icon of the Theotokos painted by the Evangelist Luke. They died in 412, and are kept on August 18 with Christopher of Mela, who restored their house in the seventh century.

• Christodoulos the Philosopher

  Christodoulos was a Georgian scholar-monk from the village of Sakara in Imereti, remembered in his own Church as a philosopher and a controversialist. He was learned in the Scriptures and in languages, and — in order to argue with Muslims on their own ground — committed the Koran to memory. Summoned to a public disputation staged by a Persian king whose name the Georgian sources give as Iamame, he answered the king's own objections, outmatched the court astrologer, and defeated the Muslim scholar set against him, arguing from Scripture and from logic. Church tradition places his monastic labours successively in Georgia, at the Georgian monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, and on the island of Patmos. The Georgian calendar keeps him on August 18.

• Christopher of Mela

  Christopher was born at Gazara, a place near Trebizond in Pontus, and governed the monastery of the Theotokos on Mount Mela — the Soumela of the Pontic Greeks — in the second half of the seventh century, in the reign of Constans II (641–668). He is remembered as the man who raised the house again after the ruin of the intervening centuries, and so as its second founder after Barnabas and Sophronius, with whom the calendar keeps him on August 18. Beyond his birthplace, his abbacy and his period, the record transmits nothing, and nothing is added here.

• Emilian of Trevi

  Emilian was an Armenian who became the first bishop of Trebiae (Trevi) in Umbria and died a martyr under Diocletian, about the year 300. Orphaned young, he came west to Spoleto with his two brothers Dionysius and Hermippus and their tutor Hilarion; ordained bishop, the tradition says, by Pope Marcellinus, he converted a great part of the district by his preaching and by miracles, and healed before the emperor Maximian a paralytic whom the pagan priests could not help. Wheel, molten metal, water and wild beasts left him unhurt — and the sight, the passion says, brought a thousand of the onlookers to Christ and to death. His three companions were beheaded; the first sword raised against Emilian went soft as wax, and the executioners believed; a second man completed the sentence. The East keeps the four on August 18, the West keeps Emilian on January 28, and Trevi has honoured him as its patron ever since.

• George I of Constantinople

  George I was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from November 679 until his death in January 686, and he is the patriarch of the capital under whom the Sixth Ecumenical Council met in the domed hall of the imperial palace in 680–681 and condemned Monothelitism, confessing in Christ two natural wills and two natural operations. He came to the throne from within a Church that had held the one-will formula by imperial policy for two generations; he presided with the emperor Constantine IV over the sessions that repudiated it, subscribed the definition, and saw four of his own predecessors — Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter — struck from the diptychs and anathematised, along with Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, the doctrine's last defender, who was deposed in the council's face. The Church keeps George on August 18 in a joint notice with John V.

• Hermes, Serapion and Polyaenus

  Three Roman Christians of the second century, remembered together in a notice of a very few lines. Hermes, Serapion and Polyaenus were arrested for winning others to the faith and for arguing down the reasoning of the pagans; they were imprisoned, questioned, and ordered to sacrifice, and refused. They were then handed over to the crowd, dragged through the streets and over rough and stony ground until their bodies were torn, and were killed at last with stones. The synaxarion preserves nothing else — no persecutor, no consular year, no burial place — and nothing else is supplied here.

• John V of Constantinople

  John V was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from November 669 to his death in August 675, in the reign of Constantine IV Pogonatus. His six years on the throne fall in the hardest stretch of the seventh century for the capital: the empire had lost Syria, Palestine and Egypt within living memory, the Monothelite settlement imposed by Heraclius and his grandson still stood unrepealed, and in the last year of John's patriarchate the Arab fleet began the first great siege of Constantinople (674–678). Almost nothing of his acts is transmitted. He is remembered as an orthodox hierarch of that interval, and the Church keeps him on August 18 together with his later successor George I.

• Macarius of Pelekete

  Macarius was abbot of the monastery of Pelekete on the Asian shore of the Sea of Marmara, and one of the confessors of the second Iconoclasm. An orphan of Constantinople who gave himself to the reading of Scripture and entered Pelekete as a young man, he was chosen hegumen by the brotherhood on the death of his predecessor Hilarion the New, and became famous in Bithynia as a healer and wonderworker. Under Leo V the Armenian (813–820) and Michael II the Stammerer (820–829) he refused to give up the veneration of the holy icons, was imprisoned, and was finally banished to the island of Aphousia in the Propontis, where he died about 830. The Church keeps him on April 1, the day of his repose, and again on August 18.

• Sophronius of Saint Anne's Skete

  Sophronius was an Athonite of the eighteenth century whose whole recorded biography is two sentences and one extraordinary act: on the night of his wedding he left his house, went to the Holy Mountain, and was tonsured at the Skete of Saint Anne, where he lived fifty years and reposed in peace. Nothing is transmitted of his birthplace, his family, his bride, his name in the world, or the year of his death. The Athonite calendar keeps him on August 18.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Daig Maccairill, bishop of Iniskin (6th C)
• St. Evan, hermit in Ayrshire (9th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings