Ss Alexander, John, Paul, Pats. Constantinople; Trans. Rel. St Alexander Nevsky

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ss Alexander, John, Paul, Pats. Constantinople

  August 30 gathers into a single office three archbishops of Constantinople who never met, whose lives lie four and a half centuries apart, and who are joined by the one thing they had in common: each held the throne of the imperial city at a moment when a heresy was pressing on it, and each is remembered for what he did about that. Alexander (†337 or 340) stood in for the aged Metrophanes at the First Ecumenical Council and, as patriarch, prayed through a night that Arius might not be forced upon the Church's communion — a prayer answered the next morning by Arius's sudden and appalling death. John the Faster (†595) governed as an ascetic of legendary abstinence and left the Church its penitential Nomokanon. Paul the New (†784), a Cypriot who had made his peace with the iconoclasts out of fear, repented, abdicated the throne for a monastic cell, and from it urged the convening of the council that would restore the holy icons. A confessor, a canonist and a penitent: the day sets them side by side without flattening the differences.

• Saint of the day

  Trans. Rel. St Alexander Nevsky

  Alexander Nevsky (1220–1263) was Prince of Novgorod and Great Prince of Vladimir, the pre-eminent prince-saint of medieval Russia. In an age when the Russian lands were crushed between the Mongol Horde from the east and the Catholic military orders from the west, he won two celebrated victories in defence of Orthodox Rus — over the Swedes on the River Neva in 1240 (whence his surname) and over the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus (Chudskoe) in 1242 — while by patient, self-abasing diplomacy with the khans he shielded his people from annihilation and preserved the freedom of the Church. Refusing union with Rome, he held Russia to Orthodoxy. He died returning from the Horde, having received the monastic schema as Alexis, and was glorified by the Church in 1547. He is commemorated on November 23.

• Synaxis of Serbian Hierarchs

  On August 30 the Serbian Church, and with it the Russian Church and the OCA, keeps a single office for the whole line of archbishops and patriarchs of the Serbian land — from Sava, who obtained the autocephaly in 1219 and became the first archbishop, to Gabriel I Rajić, hanged by the Turks in 1659. Most of them have their own day besides; what the synaxis says is that they are one thing. The service for it stands in the Srbljak, the Serbian book of proper offices, under the heading of the "general service to the Serbian saints"; and its roll — an unbroken succession of hierarchs across four centuries, several of them of the ruling house, several of them the historians and biographers of their own predecessors — is the Serbian Church's account of how a nation was held together by its bishops when it had lost everything else.

• Alexander of Svir

  Alexander of Svir (1448–1533) is the great luminary of monasticism in the forests of the Russian north-east, and the one saint of the Russian Church to whom the tradition ascribes an appearance of the Holy Trinity in three Persons, as to Abraham at the oak of Mamre. Born of peasants on the river Oyat and named Amos at baptism, he fled a marriage arranged for him and made his way at nineteen to Valaam; after some twenty years there he withdrew into the wilderness by the Svir, where he lived seven years alone before disciples found him. Out of that solitude grew the Trinity monastery on the Svir, a mother-house of the whole Olonets and Karelian north, and a company of disciples — Athanasius of Syandem, Gennadius and Nicephorus of Vasheozero, Macarius of Oredezh, Adrian of Ondrusov, Gennadius of Kostroma — who carried his rule outward. His incorrupt relics, uncovered in 1641, were seized by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and held for eighty years in a Petrograd medical academy before being identified and returned in 1998.

• Barlaam of Moldavia

  Barlaam (Varlaam) was Metropolitan of Moldavia from 1632 to 1653, in the reign of Prince Vasile Lupu, and is the father of printed Romanian church literature. A peasant's or small nobleman's son from the Putna country who rose through the monastery of Secu, he set up Moldavia's first printing press at the monastery of the Three Holy Hierarchs in Iași in 1640; from it in 1643 came the Cazania — the Carte românească de învățătură, "Romanian book of teaching" — the collection of homilies and lives that carried the Church's preaching into the Romanian language and became the most widely diffused book of the old Romanian period. He convened the Synod of Iași in 1642, at which the Confession of Peter Mogila was examined and approved for the whole Orthodox East, and he wrote against the Calvinist catechism circulating in Transylvania. He retired to Secu and died there in 1657; the Romanian Orthodox Church canonised him on 12 February 2007, appointing his feast for August 30.

• Christopher of Palestine

  Christopher, called the Roman because he came to the East from Italy, was a sixth-century monk of the great Lavra of Saint Theodosius in the Judaean desert outside Jerusalem, and afterwards of Mount Sinai. He is known entirely from two chapters of the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus, where Abba Theodulus reports his sayings — a first-hand witness of the generation immediately after him — and he survives in the calendar for two things: the ravens he saw holding a brother back from the door of the church, and the lamps of the fathers burning in the cave, among which he asked whether his own was lit and was told to pray.

• Daniel of Moscow

  Daniel of Moscow (1261–1303) was the first prince of Moscow and the progenitor of the line — the house of Daniel — from which came the Grand Princes and Tsars who gathered the Russian lands into a single realm. Youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, he received while still a child the small and obscure appanage of Moscow, the least of the principalities, and by a reign of rare peaceableness made it the seed of a kingdom. In an age of fratricidal wars among the Russian princes he shed as little blood as any ruler of his time, refusing to seize lands by force even in victory, and yet enlarging his inheritance — by the peaceful bequest of Pereslavl-Zalessky from a childless nephew, and by the annexation of Kolomna — so that Moscow rose from nothing to the first rank. He founded on the Moscow River the Danilov Monastery, the first monastery of the city, with its church of his patron Daniel the Stylite; took the great schema before his death; and reposed on March 4, 1303, asking in humility to be buried in the common monastery cemetery. His incorrupt relics were uncovered in 1652, and he is honoured as a heavenly protector of Moscow.

• Eulalius the Hierarch

  Eulalius is a bishop of whom the Greek synaxarion transmits nothing but his name, his order and the manner of his end: he reposed in peace. Nikodemos the Hagiorite prints for him only the elegiac couplet that the synaxaristes gives each saint of the day, playing on his name — eulalos, "sweet-spoken" — and he is tentatively assigned to Cyprus. He is an honest example of the great class of synaxarion entries in which the Church has kept a name without a story, and this reference declines to supply one.

• Fantinus of Calabria

  Fantinus the Wonderworker (c. 927 – c. 1000) is the last and greatest of the Italo-Greek ascetics of Calabria: a Byzantine monk of the Greek-speaking south of Italy, formed in the caves of the Mercurion in the Basilian revival of the tenth century, master of the generation of Nilus of Rossano, and — after Saracen raids destroyed his monastery — a wandering preacher through Corinth, Athens, Larissa and at last Thessalonica, where he died in extreme old age at the tomb of the Great Martyr Demetrius. He belongs equally to Greek and Latin hagiography, and is one of the very few saints of medieval Italy whose Greek Life survives entire.

• Gabriel I of Serbia

  Gabriel Rajić, Patriarch of Peć in the middle of the seventeenth century, is the one member of the Serbian synaxis of August 30 who died a martyr. Sent out from a church that could no longer feed itself to beg alms in Wallachia and then in Moscow — where in 1655 he sat with the Patriarch of Antioch in the council that revised the Russian service books — he came home with the alms to find his throne given to another and himself denounced to the vizier, on a charge got up by Austrian Jesuits, as a traitor. The vizier knew the charge was false; he offered the patriarch his life and an office if he would deny Christ. Gabriel refused in words the tradition has kept, and after torture was hanged in October 1659.

• John the Faster

  John IV the Faster (†595) was Patriarch of Constantinople from 582 to 595: a goldsmith of the capital who rose through the diaconate of Hagia Sophia to the patriarchal throne, and whose fasting, vigil and almsgiving earned him the surname Nesteutes, "the Faster." Under him the title "Ecumenical Patriarch" came into formal synodal use, provoking the celebrated protest of Gregory the Great; yet when John died he was found to own nothing but a wooden bed, a linen shirt and a worn cloak. The penitential canons that shaped later Orthodox confessional practice are transmitted under his name. He is commemorated on September 2.

• Macarius of Serbia

  Macarius Sokolović was the hierarch who, in 1557, brought the Patriarchate of Peć back into existence after nearly a century in which the Serbian Church had been dismembered among Ottoman jurisdictions, and he governed it until 1574. The restoration was made possible by his kinsman Mehmed-paša Sokolović, the Serbian-born Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, and Macarius used the opening to the utmost: he rebuilt and re-endowed monasteries and churches, restored the patriarchal house at Peć, and above all pushed hard at education and the printing of church books, so that the Serbian Church in the second half of the sixteenth century — a subject church in a conquered land — was better supplied with service books than it had been for generations. He is commemorated on August 30 with the Synaxis of the Serbian Hierarchs.

• Milica of Serbia

  Milica (c. 1335 – 11 November 1405) was the wife of the great-martyr Lazar of Serbia, the mother of the despot Stefan Lazarević, and — for the sixteen years between the catastrophe of Kosovo and her death — the woman who governed what was left of the Serbian state and then, as a nun, prayed for it. Of the Nemanjić blood through her father Vratko, she held the regency after 1389, made the terrible peace with the sultan that preserved her people at the cost of her daughter, founded and built the monastery of Ljubostinja, took the veil there as the nun Eugenia and afterwards the great schema as Euphrosyne, and obtained from Bayezid the relics of Parasceva of the Balkans for Belgrade. Her relics at Ljubostinja were reported myrrh-streaming and healing.

• Nicodemus of Serbia

  Nicodemus (†1324) was Archbishop of Peć and of all the Serbian lands from 1317 to his death, an Athonite monk of Hilandar before his elevation and one of the most learned Serbian churchmen of the fourteenth century. He translated the Jerusalem Typikon into Serbian, giving the Serbian Church the liturgical order it has kept ever since; he compiled a synaxarion-calendar recording the death-days of the Serbian kings and archbishops so that their memorials might be kept correctly; he twice acted as peacemaker in the murderous quarrels of the Nemanjić house; he crowned Stephen Uroš III Dečanski at Epiphany 1321; and he built and restored churches at Peć, at Žiča and on Athos. He is honoured with the Serbian hierarchs, and his relics rest in the church of St Demetrius at the Patriarchate of Peć.

• Philonides of Kourion

  The first bishop of Kourion whose name is preserved — the Cypriot city on the cliff above the southern sea whose great sanctuary of Apollo Hylates made it one of the strongholds of the old religion on the island. Philonides was taken in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 306, with a presbyter, a deacon and a reader of his church, who were put to death before his eyes. When his captors threatened, if he would not sacrifice, to hand him over to be sexually violated, the aged bishop got out to the edge of the cliff, prayed, signed himself three times with the cross, and cast himself down, choosing death over defilement. He is commemorated on June 17 and, in Cyprus, again on August 30.

• Sarmatas the Ascetic

  Sarmatas is one of the desert fathers of Egypt, known not from a Life but from the sayings-collections — the Apophthegmata (the "Paradise of the Fathers") and the Evergetinos — where he appears as a master of fasting and vigil whose command over sleep became proverbial, and as a spiritual father with a hard, dry, entirely practical answer for the logismoi that talk a monk out of his cell and his rule. The Greek synaxarion keeps him on August 30, noting only that he was an ascetic of the desert and reposed in peace.

• Sava III of Serbia

  Sava the Third was Archbishop of Serbia from 1309 to 1316, the seventh successor of Sava the First on the throne of the autocephalous Serbian Church. He rose through the classic Serbian cursus — igoumen of Hilandar on the Holy Mountain, then Bishop of Prizren, then archbishop — and his archiepiscopate coincided with the most lavish building programme in medieval Serbian history, that of King Stefan Uroš II Milutin. He was closely involved in it: he had a hand in the rebuilding of the great church of Our Lady of Ljeviš at Prizren while he was its bishop, rebuilt St George at Staro Nagoričane, and was consulted by the king over Banjska, which he did not live to see finished. In the charters he signs himself "Archbishop of all the Serbian and Maritime Lands." He died on 16 July 1316 and was buried at Peć. The Serbian Church numbers him among its holy archbishops and keeps him on July 26.

• The Six Martyrs of Melitene

  Six martyrs, associated in the Greek synaxarion with Melitene in Armenia Minor, who were drowned for Christ. As with several of the minor companies of August 30, no names and no date are transmitted: the synaxaristes gives them a two-line epigram — six stars of the martyrs of Christ, sunk beneath the sea and shining in the heavens — and the bare notice that they were drowned. Melitene was one of the great martyr-cities of the Christian East, and the memory is presumably a fragment of its enormous local calendar.

• The Sixteen Martyrs of Thebes

  A company of sixteen martyrs called Thebans, beheaded for Christ, whose number and manner of death is the whole of what the synaxarion transmits. They are commemorated on August 30 in the Greek books, where Nikodemos the Hagiorite gives them the customary couplet and nothing more; no names, no place beyond the ethnic, no date, and no persecutor. The present entry records the fact of them and refuses to invent the rest.

• Spyridon of Serbia

  Spyridon was Patriarch of Serbia from 1382 to 1389, in the years between the death of Tsar Dušan's empire and the ruin of Kosovo. Consecrated by his predecessor Ephraim II, who had withdrawn from the throne into solitude, he governed a church whose state was disintegrating around it, and gave particular care to the monastic communities on which Serbian life increasingly depended. He is remembered as a hymnographer — he called church singing "a spiritual flute" and is credited with composing offices for the Serbian Church — and he died within weeks of the Battle of Kosovo (15 June 1389), so that Serbian memory sets his repose beside that of the Holy Prince Lazar. He is commemorated on August 30 with the Synaxis of the Serbian Hierarchs.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Loarn, bishop of Downpatrick (5th C)
• St. Fiacre of Brogillum (670)
• St. Rumon of Romansleigh, Devon (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings