Ven. Job of Pochaev

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Job of Pochaev

  Job of Pochaev (c. 1551–1651) was for more than half a century the abbot of the monastery on the hill of Pochaev in Volhynia and the foremost defender of Orthodoxy in the south-western Russian lands during the generation of the Union of Brest. Tonsured a monk at twelve, later abbot at Dubno at the patronage of Prince Constantine Ostrozhsky, he withdrew to a cave beside the wonderworking Pochaev Icon of the Mother of God and there governed the lavra with unbroken gentleness and labour, standing against the pressure of Latin and Uniate proselytism by copying and printing Orthodox books, taking part in the 1628 Council of Kiev against the Unia, and pouring out his life in ascetic prayer. He reposed above a hundred years old; his incorrupt relics, uncovered in 1659, made the Pochaev Lavra one of the great pilgrimage centres of Orthodoxy. He is not to be confused with the Old Testament patriarch Job the Long-suffering (May 6), whose name he bore, nor with his fellow Russian ascetic Job of Anzersk (†1720).

• St Moses of Ethiopia (400)

• Righteous Anna the Prophetess (1st c.)

  Anna the Prophetess (Ἄννα ἡ Προφῆτις) is the aged widow of the tribe of Asher who, with the righteous Symeon, witnessed to the infant Christ at his Presentation in the Temple (Luke 2:36–38). "A prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel," she had lived with a husband seven years and remained a widow to a great age, "which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day." Coming forward at the very hour Symeon held the Child, "she gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem." She is one of the few women the Scriptures call a prophetess, and the Church honours her as the last prophetess of the Old Covenant and the first evangelist of the Temple, proclaiming the Redeemer to the waiting remnant. With Symeon the God-receiver she leads the afterfeast of the Meeting, commemorated on February 3. She is not to be confused with Anna the mother of the Theotokos, nor with Hannah the mother of Samuel.

• Righteous Hezekiah, King of Judah (691 BC)

  Hezekiah, thirteenth king of Judah and the son of the idolatrous Ahaz, is commemorated among the righteous of the Old Covenant as the king who cleansed the Temple, broke the high places, and kept a Passover such as had not been kept since Solomon. In the fourteenth year of his reign Sennacherib of Assyria overran Judah and demanded Jerusalem; Hezekiah spread the letter of the Assyrian before the Lord in the Temple and prayed, and the angel of the Lord went out in the night and the siege was broken. Sick to death soon after, he turned his face to the wall and wept, and the prophet Isaiah, who had just told him he would die, was sent back with the word that fifteen years were added to his life and the shadow on the sun-dial went backward as the sign. He is remembered in the Church less for his reign than for those two prayers — the prayer against the invader and the prayer against death — and for the hymn he wrote when he recovered, which the Church still sings as the fifth ode of every canon.

• New Hieromartyr Chrysostom, metropolitan of Smyrna (1922)

• Repose of Elder Joseph the Hesychast of Mt Athos (1959) (August 15 OC)

• Anatolius the Recluse of the Kiev Far Caves

  Anatolius the Recluse (thirteenth century) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra who shut himself into a cell in the Far (Theodosian) Caves and whose relics rest there. Beyond the fact of his enclosure — which is what the epithet затворник records — nothing is transmitted about him: no origin, no teacher, no year, and no miracle. He is commemorated on July 3 and with the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28, and is distinguished in the calendars from his older namesake of the Near Caves, whose memory falls on the same day.

• Arsenius the Lover-of-Labour of the Kiev Caves

  Arsenius the Lover-of-Labour (fourteenth century) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra whose whole memory is contained in his surname: he was known for a love of toil so unremitting that the brethren never saw him idle, and he joined to it a rule of fasting by which he took no food while the sun was up. The tradition holds that for his humility and his labour the Lord gave him the gift of wonderworking. His relics rest in the Far (Theodosius's) Caves, and he is commemorated on May 8 and with the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Damon

  Damon is a hieromartyr known from a single manuscript. He is absent from the Synaxarion of Constantinople and from the printed Menaia; the only witness to his commemoration is Sinai Codex 631, which preserves two stichera appointed to him under August 28. That is the whole of the record: a name, an order — he is styled hieromartyr, and so was a priest or bishop who died for the faith — a day, and two liturgical verses copied in a Palestinian monastery. He is entered here because the Greek calendars keep him, and because the corpus of this collection records what the Church commemorates rather than only what it can narrate.

• Diomedes and Laurence

  Diomedes and Laurence are two martyrs of whom the Church has kept the day, the manner of death, and nothing else. The Synaxarion of Constantinople enters them under August 28 with a single line — that they were bound to a plane tree and shot to death with arrows — and the two-line epigram that stands over the notice, which turns on the sound of the arrows striking wood. No passion, no province, no persecutor and no date has come down. They are commemorated in the Greek books beside Moses the Ethiopian, and are among the many companies whose witness the Church holds without knowing anything of their circumstances.

• Leontius of the Kiev Caves

  Leontius, called the Canonarch, was a boy or very young monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra in the fourteenth century who was given the office of canonarch — the singer who intones the verses and gives out the tone for the choirs — because of the unusual beauty of his voice. He was taught the Scriptures, kept the office faithfully, and died young. His relics rest in the Far (Theodosian) Caves, and he is commemorated on June 18, the day of his heavenly patron Leontius of Tripoli, and with the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Lucian of the Kiev Caves

  Lucian was a priest-monk of the Kiev Caves monastery who suffered martyrdom under Batu Khan about the year 1243, in the devastation of Kiev that followed the Mongol storm of the city. Nothing more of his life is recorded: the whole of his transmitted history is the inscription on an ancient board bearing his icon, which names him a hieromartyr who suffered under Batu. His relics repose in the Far (Theodosius) Caves of the Lavra, and his memory is kept on October 15 — the feast of his patron, the hieromartyr Lucian of Antioch — and with the Far Caves fathers on August 28.

• Moses the Ethiopian

  Moses the Ethiopian — called in Greek ho Aithiops and in Slavonic Murin, "the Black" — is the desert's great sign that no life is beyond mending. Born in Africa about the year 330 and sold as a slave into an Egyptian household, he was thrown out for theft and murder, gathered a band of brigands in the Nile valley and led them by sheer size and ferocity until his name was a terror in the country. Then, hiding among the monks of Scetis, he was overtaken by repentance, received the habit, and gave himself to a penitential struggle of legendary severity under Abba Isidore. He became one of the most quoted of the desert fathers — the author of the saying about the leaking basket of sand, and of the rule that a monk "must die to his neighbour and never judge him at all" — was ordained deacon and then priest, and gathered some seventy-five disciples about him. About the year 400, in his seventy-fifth year, foreseeing a raid on Scetis, he sent his monks away, refused to lift a hand, and was cut down with seven who stayed; a brother hidden in the palm-leaves is said to have seen seven crowns come down upon them. He is honoured throughout the Orthodox and Coptic worlds as the pattern of repentance and of the refusal to judge.

• Moses the Wonderworker of the Kiev Caves

  Moses was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, one of the ascetics of the Far (Theodosian) Caves, remembered for an austerity of body that the Caves tradition records in a single hard image: he wore iron chains and a heavy copper cross on his flesh, and gave the whole of his strength to the psalter and to prostrations without number. For this labour he was granted the gift of wonderworking, and his incorrupt relics lie in the Far Caves to this day. Of his birth, his family, his country and the year of his repose nothing whatever is transmitted.

• Paisius of the Far Caves

  Paisius was a monk of the Kiev Caves monastery, of the fourteenth century by the usual reckoning, whose whole memory rests on a single fact of the sort the Caves Paterikon is best at preserving: he and Mercurius were inseparable. The two shared one cell through their lives, were laid in one grave at their deaths, and were venerated together; their relics were afterwards divided into separate reliquaries, in which they rest today in the Far (Theodosian) Caves. Nothing else of his life is transmitted — no origin, no office, no miracle-story — and the entry does not invent any. He is commemorated on July 19 and among the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Pambo of the Kiev Caves

  Pambo the Recluse was a hieromonk of the Caves monastery at Kiev who was taken captive by the Tatars in the years of the Mongol conquest, held and tortured for refusing to renounce Christ, and — the tradition of the Lavra says — carried back miraculously into his own cell. He ended his life in enclosure and reposed in 1241, the year after the fall of Kiev. His relics rest in the Far Caves, those of St Theodosius, and he is commemorated on July 18, the same day as his namesake Pambo of Nitria, for whom he was named.

• Paphnutius the Recluse of the Kiev Caves

  Paphnutius was a monk of the Kiev Caves who lived as a recluse in the caverns of the great monastery and is remembered above all for the gift of tears: by the unbroken remembrance of death he wept continually for his sins, and when the hour of his own death came he departed in peace, the tradition says, in the sight of angels who came to receive his soul. Nothing of his origin or of the year of his repose is securely transmitted; he is counted among the venerable fathers who rest in the Far (Theodosius) Caves, where his relics lie, and is generally placed in the thirteenth century. He is commemorated on February 15 and with the whole company of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Pimen the Faster of the Kiev Caves

  Pimen the Faster (twelfth century) was a monk — and, by the Russian calendar's styling, an abbot — of the Kiev Caves Lavra, remembered for one thing only, but that a great one: the severity of his fasting, from which he took his surname Postnik. His incorrupt relics rest in the Far (Theodosius's) Caves of the Lavra, and he is commemorated on May 8 and among the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Sabbas of Krypetsk

  Sabbas of Krypetsk (†1495) was an Athonite monk who came north into the Russian lands, spent some years in the crowded monasteries of the Pskov country, and then went out alone into an all but impassable bog fifteen versts from the nearest house to find the solitude he wanted. Disciples found him anyway; a monastery of St John the Theologian grew up on the island of firm ground in the marsh, and he refused to be its abbot, appointing the monk Cassian in his place and keeping for himself the last place in the choir. He was famous in Pskov for two things during his life — the causeway he built with his own hands across the swamp, so that people could reach the church, and his flat refusal to let any woman inside the enclosure, which cost the wife of the city's own governor a healing at the gate rather than at the tomb. He reposed on August 28, 1495; his relics were revealed some fifty years later, his Life was written by the Pskov priest Basil in 1555, and his feast was established at the same time.

• Shushanik of Georgia

  Shushanik — the Slavic books call her Susanna — was an Armenian noblewoman, daughter of the general Vardan Mamikonian who fell at Avarayr, and wife of Varsken, the pitiakhsh or viceroy of the Georgian march of Gugark. When Varsken went to the court of the Persian king Peroz and there apostatised to Zoroastrianism, promising to bring his wife and four children over with him, she left the palace, shut herself in a cell beside the church at Tsurtavi, and would not be moved. Her husband beat her, dragged her by the hair, chained her, and finally shut her in a fortress prison, where she lay six years, ministering by her prayers to the sick who were brought to her window, and died of her treatment on 17 October 475. The account of it was written within a decade by her confessor, the priest Iakob Tsurtaveli, who saw the whole thing: The Martyrdom of Shushanik is the oldest surviving work of Georgian literature and one of the most immediate martyr-acts in any language. Her relics were translated to the Metekhi church at Tbilisi in 578.

• Silvanus of the Kiev Caves

  Silvanus was a schemamonk of the Far Caves of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, who laboured there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His notice preserves a single miracle, and it is a striking one: robbers who broke into the monastery garden were held fast on the spot by his prayer and could not move for three days, until they repented, whereupon he released them. He is commemorated on June 10, again with all the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28, and with the whole company of the Caves on the Second Sunday of Great Lent. He is not the twentieth-century Athonite elder Silouan, with whom his name is often confused.

• Sisoes of the Far Caves

  Sisoes, called the Schemamonk, was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra of the thirteenth century whose incorrupt relics rest in the Far (Theodosian) Caves. Of his life nothing is transmitted beyond what his name and his rank imply: that he bore the great schema, the highest degree of the monastic profession, and that he was remembered among the brethren for fasting — the service of the Caves fathers names him with St Gregory the Faster as one who subdued the passions of the flesh by abstinence. He is commemorated on July 6, the day of his heavenly patron Sisoes the Great, and with the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Sophronius of the Kiev Caves

  Sophronius was a recluse of the Far Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra, one of the monks of that house whose ascetic life is known only from the liturgical commemoration of the Caves fathers and whose relics rest in the Far (Theodosian) Caves. The Canon to the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves remembers his solitary struggle in enclosure and says that he was counted worthy to hear the singing of angels. He is usually placed in the thirteenth century, but nothing of his history survives; his memory is kept on May 11, again on March 11 in Kievan usage, and with the whole company of the Far Caves fathers on August 28.

• Synaxis of the Fathers of the Kiev Far Caves

  On August 28 the Church of the Slavic lands keeps the common commemoration of all the venerable fathers of the Kiev Caves Lavra whose relics rest in the Far Caves — the older name is the Caves of Saint Theodosius, after the co-founder of the monastery who dug and inhabited them. Some fifty and more saints lie there incorrupt: recluses and fasters, canonarchs and gate-keepers, deacons and hieromonks, a hieromartyr, two hierarchs, a prince who died a monk, and archimandrites of the house; between them they span from the eleventh century to the fifteenth. Nearly every one of them has his own day in the year, and this feast neither replaces nor summarises those days: it sets the whole company side by side, as their bodies lie side by side in the corridors under the hill, and confesses that the sanctity of the Lavra is one thing and not fifty. It is the twin of the Synaxis of the Fathers of the Near Caves on September 28, and both are gathered up again in the Synaxis of All the Venerable Fathers of the Kiev Caves kept on the Second Sunday of Great Lent.

• Theodore of Ostrog

  Theodore, Prince of Ostrog in Volhynia, was the founder of the house of Ostrozhsky and one of the great Orthodox magnates of the fifteenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania: a soldier of the wars against the Teutonic Order and in the Hussite campaigns, a builder of churches, and — at a moment when Latin pressure on the Orthodox of Volhynia and Galicia was at its heaviest — a lay defender of his people's faith who had the standing to be heard. About 1441 he laid down his principality, went to the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, and was tonsured with the schema-name Theodosius, living out his years as a monk. He reposed in the second half of the century, by tradition about 1483, and his relics were found incorrupt in the Far (Theodosius's) Caves, where they rest. He was venerated as a saint by the end of the sixteenth century, and is commemorated on August 11.

• Theodore the Silent of the Kiev Caves

  Theodore the Silent (thirteenth century) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra, one of the venerable fathers who rest in the Far Caves (the Caves of Saint Theodosius). His surname records his ascetic labour: he kept a strict silence (molchanie), guarding his lips as a discipline of the heart and a means of unceasing inner prayer, and by this and his other struggles was granted, the tradition holds, a gift of wonderworking. Little else of his life is recorded. He is commemorated on February 17, and among the assembly of the venerable fathers of the Far Caves.

• Theodosius of the Kiev Caves

  Theodosius (Feodosy Pechersky, †3 May 1074) is the father of Russian monasticism: the second founder, with Antony, of the Kiev Caves monastery, and the man who turned a company of hermits in a hillside burrow into a cenobium governed by a written rule. Born at Vasilev near Kiev and raised at Kursk, he baked the prosphora for his village church as a boy against his mother's violent opposition, escaped to Kiev in his twenties, and was received by Antony into the cave above the Dnieper and tonsured by Nicon. As abbot he procured a copy of the typikon of the Studion monastery at Constantinople and imposed it on the brotherhood — common table, common property, unbroken obedience — so that the Caves became the mother and model of every monastery in the land of Rus'. He raised the community from a handful to a hundred, built the wooden and then began the great stone church of the Dormition, gave a tenth of the monastery's income to the poor and maintained a hospice for the sick and the mutilated, sent a cartload of bread each week to the prisoners, and rebuked the Grand Prince Svyatoslav to his face for usurping his brother's throne. His Life, written by Nestor the Chronicler, is one of the founding works of Slavonic literature; his relics were uncovered on 14 August 1091, and in 1108 he became the first monastic saint of Rus' to be formally canonised. Not to be confused with any of the six other saints named Theodosius already in this corpus, and above all not with Theodosius the Cenobiarch (†529), the founder of the coenobia of the Judaean desert. See Disputed questions below.

• Thirty-three Martyrs of Heraclea

  A company of thirty-three martyrs from Heraclea whom the Greek synaxaria enter under August 28 with the bare statement that they were perfected by fire. No names, no persecutor, no date and no passion have survived; even the identity of the Heraclea in question is not stated, though the Thracian city on the Sea of Marmara — ancient Perinthus, the metropolis of the province and a place of frequent martyrdom — is the most likely. They are one of several anonymous companies which the Byzantine calendar preserves by number alone, and are easily and often confused with the like-numbered Thirty-three Martyrs of Palestine kept on August 16.

• Titus the Soldier of the Kiev Caves

  Titus the Soldier (14th century) was a warrior who, grievously wounded in battle, turned from the world to the monastic life and became a monk of the Far (Feodosiev) Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra, where he gave the remainder of his days to prayer and repentance and was healed of the passions as of his wounds. Little is recorded of him beyond this pattern — the brave soldier who exchanged the warfare of the world for the unseen warfare of the ascetic — and his relics rest among the wonderworking fathers of the Far Caves. He is commemorated on February 27, the same day as his namesake, Titus the priest of the Near Caves.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Rumwold (c.650)

Troparia & kontakia

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