Martyr Carpus and Companions at Pergamus

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Carpus and Companions at Pergamus

• Holy Martyr Zlata (Chryse) (1796)

  Zlata of Meglen (†1795), called Chryse in Greek — both names mean "golden" — is one of the best-loved virgin new-martyrs of the Ottoman period: a poor villager's daughter from Slatino in the Meglen district of Macedonia who was abducted by a Turk determined to make her his wife and a Muslim, and who through months of imprisonment, the pleading of her own terrified family, and three months of torture refused to deny Christ, until she was hung upon a tree and cut to pieces on October 13, 1795. Her martyrdom, recorded by her spiritual father, entered the Neon Martyrologion of Nikodemos the Hagiorite within four years of her death. Bulgarians, Macedonian Slavs and Greeks all honour her as their own.

• Benjamin of Persia

  Benjamin of Persia (†c. 424) was a deacon of the Persian church and a tireless evangelist who converted many Zoroastrian Persians to Christ during the great persecution that broke out at the end of the reign of Yazdegerd I. Imprisoned two years for his preaching, he was released at the intercession of a Roman envoy on the pledge that he would keep silence — a pledge he declared himself unable to keep, for he could not hide the light entrusted to him — and when he resumed his preaching he was put to death under Bahram V with tortures of studied cruelty. His story is told by the church historian Theodoret of Cyrrhus, nearly a contemporary. He is commemorated on October 13 and again on March 31.

• Carpus, Papylus, Agathodorus and Agathonica

  Carpus, Papylus, Agathodorus and Agathonica (†c. 251) are the chief martyrs of October 13: in the Byzantine tradition, Carpus the bishop of Thyateira, his deacon Papylus, Papylus's sister Agathonica, and Agathodorus their servant, who suffered together at Pergamon in Asia Minor during the persecution of Decius. Their passion is also transmitted in one of the very earliest surviving martyr-acts — a document some scholars date a century before Decius — so that this small company stands both at the head of the day's synaxarion and near the head of the whole literature of the Acts of the martyrs. The kontakion of their feast celebrates their relics as "a treasure of great price" welling up healings.

• Florentius of Thessalonica

  Florentius of Thessalonica was a Christian of that city who publicly exposed the emptiness of idolatry, taught the faith of Christ to his fellow citizens, and for this was tortured by the pagans and burned to death. The Greek synaxarion of October 13 remembers him with a single admiring distich: "O what courage of the martyr Florentius, running to the flame as if to dew." The calendars transmit no date for his contest; the OCA's listing assigns him broadly to the first or second century.

• Nicetas the Patrician

  Nicetas the Patrician (c. 763–c. 838), called in the Greek synaxarion "Nicetas the Patrician, the Confessor" and by the OCA "Nikita the Confessor of Paphlagonia," was a high courtier of Byzantium who became a monk and a confessor for the holy icons. A Paphlagonian and a kinsman of the empress Irene, he held the rank of patrician at her court, is said to have represented her at the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787, and assisted at the translation of the relics of the great-martyr Euphemia; renouncing rank and honours, he took the monastic habit in the capital, and under the iconoclast revival was driven from his monastery and wandered in exile until his death. The synaxarion's distich says that, having endured afflictions for the sake of the divine icons, "Nicetas rejoices with such joy as the angelic Minds know."

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Comgan, brother of St. Kentigern (8th C)
• Holy Martyrs Fyncana and Fyndoca of Scotland

Troparia & kontakia

Readings