11th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Eutichius

• Trans. Rel. Peter, Metr. Kiev

  Peter, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia (c. 1260–1326), was the first primate of the Russian Church to make his residence at Moscow, and by that act one of the founders of Moscow's greatness. Born in Volhynia, a monk, icon-painter and abbot of his own foundation on the river Rata, he was consecrated Metropolitan of Russia at Constantinople about 1308, in an age when the see, uprooted from devastated Kiev, had settled at Vladimir. Amid the disorders of the Tatar yoke Peter befriended the rising princes of Moscow, transferred the metropolitan residence there in 1325, and blessed the laying of the foundations of the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin, foretelling that Moscow would be exalted above all the cities of Russia. He reposed on December 21, 1326, was buried in the cathedral he had begun, and was glorified in 1339 as the first wonderworking hierarch of Moscow. He is commemorated on December 21, and among the Hierarchs of Moscow on October 5.

• New Hieromartyr Kosmas of Aitolia, Equal-to-the-Apostles (1779)

• Arsenius of Komel

  Arsenius was a Moscow nobleman of the Sakharusov family who became a monk of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, worked there as a copyist of books — a Gospel written by his hand in 1506 survives — and was made abbot of that greatest of Russian monasteries in 1525. Two years later he laid the office down and walked north into the Komel forest beyond Vologda carrying a large wooden cross, to live as a hermit. He fell in a marsh under the weight of the cross, and where he fell a beam of light showed him his place. Driven out once by hunters and once by Tatar raiders, he was granted land on the river Kokhtysh by Grand Prince Vasily III in 1530, and there built the church of the Placing of the Robe of the Theotokos and the monastery that carried his name for four centuries. He reposed on 24 August 1550.

• Cosmas the Aetolian

  Cosmas the Aetolian (c. 1714–1779) was a monk of Philotheou on Mount Athos who left the Holy Mountain to spend the last twenty years of his life walking the mountain roads of Epirus, Acarnania, Thessaly, Macedonia, Albania and the islands, preaching in the open air to Greek-speaking and Albanian-speaking Christians who had almost no clergy, no books and no schools. He founded something between two hundred and two hundred and fifty village schools, planted wooden crosses where he had preached, and gave away crosses, prayer-ropes and headscarves by the tens of thousands to pay for the teaching of the poor. Denounced to the Ottoman authorities as a Russian agent, he was hanged on 24 August 1779 on the bank of the river Apsos near Berat, and his body thrown into the water. The Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified him on 20 April 1961. He is the great missionary saint of the Greek world under the Turks, honoured at once as new-martyr, as equal-to-the-apostles, and as Didaskalos tou Genous — Teacher of the Nation.

• Dionysius of Zakynthos

  Dionysius (c. 1547–1622) was a nobleman of the Ionian island of Zakynthos who became a monk and then Archbishop of Aegina, but soon resigned his see to return to the monastic quiet of his native islands. He is remembered above all for one act of Gospel forgiveness: when the man who had murdered his own brother fled to him for refuge, not knowing whose house it was, Dionysius sheltered and released him rather than deliver him to justice. His incorrupt relics remain on Zakynthos, of which he is the patron saint and heavenly protector, and he is venerated across the Greek world as "the saint of forgiveness."

• Eutyches, Disciple of John the Theologian

  Eutyches is honoured on August 24 as a hieromartyr of the apostolic age: a hearer first of the Apostle John the Theologian and afterwards a fellow-labourer of the Apostle Paul, ordained bishop by apostolic hands and sent out to preach. The synaxarion remembers him for the sheer extravagance of the torments he outlived — starving, the iron rods, the fire, the arena — and for the wonder in which they culminated, when the lion loosed upon him lay down and glorified God with a human voice. He was at last beheaded in his own city, at the beginning of the second century. Because he preached with the apostles and by their commission, the tradition calls him "an apostle" without numbering him among the Seventy.

• George Limniotes

  George, surnamed Limniotes — "of the Lake" — was a monk of the holy mountain of Olympus in Bithynia, the great monastic massif across the water from Constantinople which was to iconoclast-era Byzantium what Athos became later. When the emperors of the Isaurian house began the war on the holy icons, George, already very old, refused to give them up. For that refusal his persecutors burned his head, destroying his hair and his scalp, and cut off his nose — the standard Byzantine punishment of political disgrace, applied here to a monk for a theological confession. He survived the mutilation and reposed soon after, and the Church numbers him among the confessors of the first iconoclast persecution.

• Martyrius of Novgorod

  Martyrius, called Rushanin from his native Stara Russa, was Archbishop of Novgorod from 1193 to 1199 — six years in which he did more building than most hierarchs do in twenty. Before his election he had founded the Transfiguration monastery at Stara Russa in 1192; chosen for the see by lot after the death of Archbishop Gregory, and consecrated at Kiev on 10 December 1193, he went on to raise the gate-church of the Mother of God at Novgorod, the Resurrection church of the new women's monastery at Lake Myachina, churches of St Cyril of Alexandria and St Euphemia, and at last the stone Transfiguration church at Stara Russa, consecrated on 15 August 1198. He died on 24 August 1199 on the shore of Lake Seliger, travelling to Vladimir on the city's business, and was carried back to lie in the Martyriev porch of the cathedral of Holy Wisdom, which still bears his name.

• Serapion of David Gareji

  Serapion was abbot of the monastery of St John the Baptist in the David Gareji wilderness of Kakheti, in the eighteenth century — the last age of that ancient cave-monastic federation before the Persian and Lezgian raids and the Russian annexation broke it. He is remembered as a wonderworker, and specifically as a protector of his brotherhood against the raiders and brigands who were the ordinary hazard of monastic life in the Gareji desert: once he put an armed band to flight when a flame issued from his staff, and once he knew by revelation of an attack on the monastery's servants and brought them through it by prayer. In old age he resigned the abbacy, received the great schema, and went into seclusion; and having been shown the hour of his death, he asked to be buried beneath the gates of the church, so that everyone who came in should walk over him. He reposed in 1774.

• Syra of Persia

  Syra was the daughter of a Zoroastrian priest of Karkh-Seleucia in Persia, brought up in the fire-religion and trained for its service, who came to Christ through the poor Christians she met at the doors of the temple and through a healing she received by touching a priest's robe. Her Passion is one of the most psychologically detailed martyr-narratives of the Persian Church: it records her long hesitation, the counsel of a stepmother who urged her to worship fire outwardly and believe inwardly, a bishop who refused to baptise her for fear of what she would do under torture, and the vision of her dead mother that ended her doubt. She made her confession aloud in the fire-temple itself, was disowned and denounced by her own father, was baptised at last in prison by bribing a guard, and was strangled under Chosroes the Elder about 559.

• Tation of Claudiopolis

  Tation was a Christian of Bithynia put to death in the persecution of Diocletian, at Claudiopolis — the city of the interior which the Greeks had called Bithynium and which is the modern Bolu. Denounced for his faith, examined and repeatedly urged to deny Christ by the governor Urban, he was imprisoned, beaten, and at last dragged out of the city to be executed. He never reached the place of execution: making the sign of the Cross, he gave up his soul on the road, in the year 305. His memory is kept on August 24, and the synaxarion which preserves it gives no other detail of his life.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Yrchard of Scotland, missionary (5th C)
• St. Bregwine 12th Archbishop of Canterbury (764)
• St. Patrick the Elder (c.450)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings