Unmercenaries and Wonderworkers Cosmas and Damian

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Unmercenaries and Wonderworkers Cosmas and Damian

  Cosmas and Damian of Mesopotamia (3rd–4th c.) are the first and greatest of the three pairs of holy unmercenary physicians of that name, and the only pair to have reposed in peace rather than by martyrdom. Sons of the pious Theodota and natives of Asia Minor, they were physicians who healed men and beasts alike freely, in the name of Christ, taking no payment — the very pattern of the anargyroi, "the silverless." Their memory on November 1 is the principal feast of the unmercenaries in the Byzantine calendar, and their proper apolytikion, "O holy Unmercenaries and wonderworkers," became the common troparion of the whole company. They are not to be confused with the martyred pairs of the same names venerated of Rome (July 1) and of Arabia (October 17).

• Holy New Martyr Helen of Sinope (18th c.)

• Cyrenia and Juliana

  Cyrenia and Juliana (†c. 305) were two Christian women of Cilicia martyred by fire in the persecution of Maximian Galerius. Cyrenia was from Tarsus and Juliana from the city of Rossos; both had given themselves to works of mercy — caring for orphans, comforting poor widows, and tending the sick without fee — and to bringing pagans to Christ by the Gospel and by their own patience. Arrested by Marcian, governor of Cilicia, and refusing to deny Christ, Cyrenia was shorn and paraded naked through the streets of Tarsus, after which both women were taken to Rossos and burnt alive. They are commemorated on November 1.

• Hermenegild

  Hermenegild (†585/586) was a prince of the Visigoths in Spain, elder son of the Arian king Leovigild, who forsook the Arianism of his people for the Orthodox faith and died for it. Imprisoned by his father and pressed to return to the heresy, he refused on Pascha to receive communion from an Arian bishop, was given the Holy Mysteries in secret by an Orthodox priest, and was beheaded at his father's command. The tradition, following St Gregory the Great's Dialogues, relates that angels were heard singing over his relics, that his father repented of the deed, and that through Bishop Leander the king's surviving son Reccared brought the whole Gothic nation to Orthodoxy. A pre-schism saint of the West, he is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on November 1.

• Theodota, Mother of the Unmercenaries

  Theodota was the widowed mother of the holy unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Mesopotamia, commemorated with her sons on November 1. Natives of Asia Minor, the family was left fatherless while the two boys were still small, their pagan father having died; and it was Theodota alone, by her own example and by reading the holy books to them, who raised her sons in Christian piety and purity of life, so that they grew into the righteous physicians whom the Church venerates as the first and greatest of the unmercenaries. She reposed in peace and is honoured among the righteous.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Pabiali, son of King Brychan of Brecknock (6th C)
• St. Ceitho of Cardiganshire (6th C)
• St. Cledwyn of Breconshire (5th C)
• St. Cadfan, founder of monasteries (6th C)
• St. Caillin (7th C)
• St. Dingad (5th C)
• St. Gwythian (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings