Martyr Nestor of Thessalonica

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Nestor of Thessalonica

  Nestor (†c. 306) was a young Christian of Thessalonica who, blessed and emboldened in his prison cell by the great-martyr Demetrius, went up against the emperor's champion gladiator Lyaeus in the arena and overthrew him, crying "O God of Demetrius, help me!" For this public humiliation of the imperial spectacle he was beheaded, and Demetrius, who had strengthened him, was speared to death — the two deaths bound together in the passion of Thessalonica's patron. Nestor is commemorated on 27 October, the day after Demetrius, whose feast his own scarcely leaves; the Church remembers him as the type of the believer who ventures all in the confidence that "the Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do to me."

• St Procla, the wife of Pontius Pilate.

• Our Venerable Father Demetrius of Basarabov (Romania) (13th c.)

• Capitolina and Eroteis of Cappadocia

  Capitolina and Eroteis (Eroteida) were a Cappadocian mistress and her servant martyred about the year 304, in the persecution of Diocletian. Capitolina, a noblewoman of wealth who despised riches, freed her slaves and gave her substance to the poor before her arrest; brought before the magistrate Zilikinthios and confessing Christ, she was imprisoned and beheaded the next day. Her servant Eroteis, in grief and indignation, hurled stones at the magistrate; beaten and, the tradition says, kept unharmed by grace, she was at last beheaded by the sword — so that mistress and servant died the same death and won the same crown. They are commemorated together on 27 October.

• Nestor the Chronicler

  Nestor the Chronicler (c. 1050 – c. 1114) was a monk and hierodeacon of the Kiev Caves monastery, the first great historian of the Christian East Slavs and, by tradition, the compiler of the Russian Primary Chronicle (the Tale of Bygone Years), which opens "Whence came the Russian land." A disciple of the successors of Theodosius of the Caves, he wrote the earliest lives of the passion-bearers Boris and Gleb and of Theodosius himself, helped uncover Theodosius's relics, and gathered the memory of the young Rus' into a theological history of its baptism and salvation. He reposed in the monastery about 1114 and rests incorrupt in the Near Caves; the Russian Church honours him as the father of its written history and the patron of chroniclers and scholars.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Otteran (Odran) of Iona, bishop of Meath (563)
• St. Abban of Wexford (6th C)
• St. Colman, abbot of Senboth-Fola (632)

Troparia & kontakia

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