St Sava, Archbishop of Serbia

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  St Sava, Archbishop of Serbia

• Holy Martyr Tatiana (ca. 230)

  Tatiana of Rome (died c. 226) was a noble Roman virgin and deaconess martyred under the emperor Alexander Severus. Daughter of a man who had thrice been consul and who raised her secretly in the faith, she consecrated her virginity to Christ and served the Church of Rome as a deaconess, tending the sick and the poor. Arrested in the persecution driven by the prefect Ulpian, she was subjected to a long sequence of tortures out of which the tradition tells its most vivid signs: the temple of Apollo into which she was led fell in ruin, the arena lion loosed upon her lay down and licked her feet, and several of her executioners, seeing her wounds healed and their own blows turned back upon them, confessed Christ and were themselves baptised in their blood. Beheaded with the sword — together, the account says, with her aged father — she became one of the best-loved virgin-martyrs of the Church, and in Russia the patroness of students, her feast kept as "Tatiana's Day" and bound to the founding of the University of Moscow.

• Venerable Benedict Biscop, Abbot of Wearmouth (689-690)

• Eupraxia of Tabenna

  Eupraxia was a child of the senatorial nobility of Constantinople — daughter of Antigonus, a kinsman of the emperor Theodosius the Great — who was taken to Egypt at the age of seven, asked to be left in a women's monastery of the Thebaid near Tabennisi, and never came out again. Betrothed in infancy to a senator's son, she wrote to the emperor at the age of twelve to renounce the match and to ask that her whole inheritance be given to the poor and the churches, saying that she was already the bride of Christ. In the monastery she chose the lowest work of the house — the kitchen, the water, the sweeping — carried her fast from daily food to one meal a week, bore in silence the malice of an envious sister and a series of disfiguring accidents, and received before her death the gift of healing. She died aged about thirty, about the year 410–413, ten days after the abbess had seen her in a vision standing before the throne of God. Her Life is one of the most widely copied of the early Egyptian women's lives, and she is commemorated on July 25 with Olympias the Deaconess.

• Euthasia

  Euthasia (died c. 305) was a virgin-martyr commemorated on January 12, of whom the synaxaria preserve only the fact of her consecrated virginity and her death by the sword. The Greek books group her among the martyrs of the Diocletianic age, about the year 305.

• Mertius of Mauretania

  Mertius (died c. 305) was a soldier of the Roman army in Mauretania, in Roman Africa, martyred in the persecution of Diocletian. Commanded to sacrifice to the idols and refusing, he was given over to torture, which he bore without a sound; cast into prison, he died there of hunger and of the wounds of his torments. He is commemorated on January 12.

• Peter Absolom

  Peter Absolom (died c. 309–311) was a young Christian of Anea, near Eleutheropolis in Palestine, martyred by fire at Caesarea in the persecution of Diocletian and his successors — one of the Palestinian martyrs whose sufferings Eusebius of Caesarea witnessed and recorded. Renowned, the tradition says, for his bodily strength and his piety, he was seized, refused every inducement to deny Christ or even to make a token compliance, and was burned alive. He is commemorated on January 12.

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