Martyrs Adrian and Natalia; Vladimir Icon

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Adrian and Natalia

  Adrian and Natalia are the married martyrs of Nicomedia in the last and worst of the imperial persecutions, and theirs is one of the most humanly moving passions in the whole Byzantine calendar. Adrian was a young pagan officer of the imperial praetorium, about twenty-eight years old, whose duty it was to take down the names of Christians brought in for torture; watching twenty-three of them endure what he was recording, he laid down his pen, told the notaries to write his own name among theirs, and went to prison a Christian who had never been baptised and had never heard a catechism. Natalia, his wife of some thirteen months, was already secretly a Christian; she did not weep, but ran to the prison, kissed his chains, and spent the days that were left to him strengthening him against the fear of the anvil on which his hands and legs would be broken. When the hour came she herself laid his limbs on the block so that he should not falter, and afterwards carried away his hand and kept it with her until she died in peace beside the martyrs' relics at Argyropolis. The Church numbers her among the martyrs although no one struck her: she is the classic case of the martyr who suffered everything except the blow.

• Saint of the day

  Vladimir Icon

• Our Holy Father Tithoës of the Thebaid (4th c.)

  Tithoes is one of the anchorites of fourth-century Egypt whose memory survives almost entirely in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, where he is a byword for two things: an irreproachable life, of which Abba Matoes said that no one could find anything to accuse him of, and a prayer so absorbing that when he stood with his hands raised his mind was carried off before he could lower them, so that in company he learned to bring his hands down slowly in order to hide what was happening to him. The tradition attaches him to Pachomius the Great as a disciple, and preserves from him the sharpest of the desert's definitions of pilgrimage: exile is to keep control of your mouth. He reposed in peace, and the Greek synaxarion keeps him on August 26.

• Adrian of Ondrusov

  Adrian of Ondrusov (†1549/1550) was, in the world, Andrei Zavalishin, a landowner of the Olonets country north-east of Lake Ladoga who, hunting a stag through the forest, came upon the hermitage of Alexander of Svir and was converted by the meeting. He supplied the hermit with bread for years, was tonsured at last on Valaam, and about 1520 founded on a peninsula of Lake Ladoga the hermitage of Saint Nicholas at Ondrusov, of which he became igumen; there he is said to have won over the brigands of the lake, one of whose chiefs gave the place its name. Called to Moscow to stand godfather at the baptism of a daughter of Ivan the Terrible, he was seized on the road home by peasants who believed he carried money, and killed, his body hidden in a marsh. Two years later, by his own appearing to his monks, the body was found incorrupt and brought back to the monastery. The finding is kept on May 17 and the burial on August 26.

• Adrian of Uglich

  Adrian was one of the first ten disciples of Paisius of Uglich, his cell-attendant and closest companion, and afterwards a hieromonk and the superior of the monastery of St Nicholas on the Grekhov stream, on the right bank of the Volga below Uglich, which he helped to found in 1489. He shared his elder's vision of the Mother of God in 1472, laboured with him on the stone church of the Protection of the Theotokos in 1482, came back to Uglich to bury him in 1504, and asked to be laid near his grave. He is one of those Russian saints whose whole record is a list of the things he helped another man to build — which is, in the northern monastic tradition, a description of sanctity rather than an absence of one.

• Atticus and Sisinnius

  Atticus and Sisinnius are two martyrs of whom the Greek synaxarion preserves nothing but the names, the day, and the manner of death: they were beheaded. They stand on August 26 immediately after the martyrs of Nicomedia, and the Synaxaristes itself raises — without settling — the possibility that they were taken with St Adrian and belong to the company of the twenty-three. This entry is deliberately short: there is no life to write, and none has been invented.

• Ibistion the Confessor

  Ibistion is an Egyptian ascetic whose entire surviving record is a single line of the Greek synaxarion — that he reposed in peace — together with a metrical couplet built on the image of the hyssop, in which he is described as washed clean with the hyssop of his own tears and departing to a country where there are no tears. The English calendars style him "the Confessor," and the Latin transmission of the name is unstable. He is a good example of the honest limits of the fixed calendar: the Church keeps his day without pretending to know his life.

• Maria of Diveyevo

  Maria Zakharovna Fedina (1870–1931) was the last of the four blazhennye — blessed fools for Christ — of the Seraphim-Diveyevo convent, the great women's house founded under the direction of Seraphim of Sarov. Orphaned in childhood and turned out by her relatives, she wandered for years between Sarov, Diveyevo and Ardatov, sleeping in the forest, and came at last to the convent, where she took up the hard vocation of the holy fool: clairvoyance concealed under abuse and nonsense, healings concealed under rudeness. She survived the closure of the convent in 1927, was carried from village to village by the sisters who had been scattered, and died in exile at Cherevatovo on 26 August 1931 — one of the last living links between the world of St Seraphim and the Church of the persecution.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Pandwyna of Eltisley, virgin (c.904)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings