Bright Tuesday

Saints commemorated

• St Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome

• Apostles Aristarchus, Pudens and Trophimus of the Seventy

• Holy Martyr Ardalion the Actor (3rd c.)

• Anthony, John and Eustathius of Vilnius

  Anthony, John and Eustathius — the Three Martyrs of Vilnius — were Lithuanian courtiers, brothers or kinsmen, converted to Christ from paganism, who were hanged on an oak in Vilnius in 1347 under the Grand Duke Olgerd (Algirdas) for refusing to keep the pagan customs of their people. They are the proto-martyrs of the Lithuanian land; their incorrupt relics rest in the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Vilnius, and they are held in especial honour throughout the Russian and the wider Orthodox Church.

• Raphael, Nicholas and Irene of Lesbos

  The strangest entry in the modern Greek calendar, and one of the few saints in this collection whose whole biography reached the Church after their cult did. For five centuries the people of Lesbos walked up on Bright Tuesday to a ruined enclosure at Karyes, above the village of Thermi north-west of Mytilene, without being able to say why: there had been a monastery there, it was remembered, and the monks had been killed by the Turks, and that was all. In 1959 the ground was being cleared to build a chapel when the workmen uncovered a grave, and from that year the dead began — in the accounts of a very large number of islanders — to appear and to say who they were: Raphael, hieromonk and abbot, a native of Ithaca; Nicholas, his deacon, of Thessaloniki; Irene, the twelve-year-old daughter of the village headman; and with them Irene's parents Basil and Maria, the schoolmaster Theodore, and Irene's fifteen-year-old cousin Eleni. They were tortured, the accounts say, from Great Thursday until Bright Tuesday, 9 April 1463, ten years after the fall of Constantinople; Raphael died with a saw through his jaw, tied to a tree; Irene had an arm cut off before her parents' eyes and was suffocated in a burning earthenware jar. They asked for an icon, for a service, and for their graves to be found, and all three were given them: the icon by Photios Kontoglou, the office by the hymnographer Gerasimos Mikragiannanites, and the relics between 1959 and 1961. Their commemoration is movable — it is kept on the anniversary as the Church counts it, the Tuesday of the Renewal, and has no fixed date in the general calendar.

• The Six Thousand Martyrs of David-Gareji

  The largest single martyrdom in the history of the Georgian Church, and the one commemoration of the Georgian calendar that is fixed to Bright Week rather than to a day of the month. In 1616, in the aftermath of the devastation of Kakheti by Shah Abbas I of Persia, the whole brotherhood of the cave-monasteries of the David-Gareji wilderness — reckoned by the Georgian tradition at six thousand monks — was cut down by the shah's troops in the paschal season, at the altar, in their festal vestments, immediately after they had received Holy Communion. The tradition relates that the shah, hunting in the semi-desert, saw from his camp a line of lights moving on the mountain at midnight and was told that these were monks going round their church with candles for the Resurrection of Christ, and that he gave the order for their slaughter on the spot; that an angel warned the abbot Arsenius that night and left each man free to flee or to stay; that all but two novices stayed; and that the two who had hidden returned and were killed when they saw the crowns descending from heaven, two of which floated empty in the air. Their bones were gathered later in the century by King Archil and laid in a great stone vessel beside the altar, where they were reported to stream myrrh. The brotherhoods of the David and the Baptist monasteries asked Catholicos Anthony I to compose their service and to appoint the Tuesday of Bright Week as their day, and it has been kept so ever since.

• Thomais of Alexandria

  Thomais was a young married woman of Alexandria in the fifth century who was killed by her own father-in-law when she refused his incestuous advances, choosing death rather than sin against chastity and against her husband. The Church honours her as a martyr for purity, and, from ancient times, invokes her especially against the passion of lust and the warfare of the flesh; the desert fathers of Egypt kept her memory and taught that she had died for the commandment of God.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Tassach, 1st bishop of Raholp and disciple of St. Patrick (c.497)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings