Virgin Martyr Pelagia of Tarsus

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Virgin Martyr Pelagia of Tarsus

  Pelagia of Tarsus (†c. 290) was a maiden of a wealthy pagan house in Tarsus of Cilicia who came to faith in Christ from Christian companions, vowed her virginity, and refused the hand of the son and heir of the emperor Diocletian. Baptised in the mountains by the fugitive bishop Linus at a spring that sprang up for the purpose, she was denounced by her own mother, and was condemned to be roasted alive in a heated brazen bull. She entered the instrument giving thanks, and her body was consumed like melted myrrh; the bones that remained were guarded, the tradition says, by lions until the bishop could bury them, and a church rose over her relics once the persecutions ended. She is one of three early saints of the name Pelagia and must not be confused with the two of October 8.

• Our Holy Father Nikephoros the Hesychast (14th c.)

  Nikephoros the Hesychast (†before 1300) was an Italian by birth and a Latin by upbringing who came to the Byzantine East, embraced Orthodoxy, and became a solitary on Mount Athos. He opposed the union of the Churches imposed at the Council of Lyons (1274) by Michael VIII Palaiologos, and suffered exile for the refusal. His single surviving work, On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart, gathers the sayings of the fathers on inward attention and then sets out, more explicitly than any earlier text, the method of the prayer of the heart — the disciplined return of the mind from its wandering into the "place of the heart," with the breath as its guide. Gregory Palamas cites him as an authority and calls him a teacher of the hesychasts, and the Philokalia preserves his treatise. He is commemorated on May 4.

• St Monica, mother of Blessed Augustine (388)

  Monica (c. 331–387) was a Christian woman of Tagaste in Roman North Africa, the wife of a pagan husband whom her patience won to the faith, and the mother of Augustine of Hippo, whose conversion she wept and prayed for through nearly twenty years of his heresy and disorder. She followed him from Africa to Rome and to Milan, where she attached herself to the church of Ambrose; she lived to see him baptised at Pascha of 387, and died a few months later at Ostia, on the way home, having told him that nothing further detained her in this life. Nearly everything known of her comes from her son's Confessions, which makes her one of the most vividly recorded women of the fourth century. The Orthodox calendars keep her on May 4.

• Albian of Anaea

  Albian (also Olbian or Alvian), bishop of Anaea in the Roman province of Asia, suffered about the year 304 in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian. Ordered to sacrifice to the idols on pain of death, he refused; he was scourged, seared with red-hot irons, and beaten, and when neither he nor the disciple who stood with him could be moved, both were thrown into a heated furnace and perished there. He is commemorated on May 4 in the Greek and Slavic calendars alike, and is one of the small company of hierarchs of western Asia Minor whose passion the great persecution left in the synaxarion almost without embellishment.

• Aphrodisius and Companions of Scythopolis

  A company of martyrs of Scythopolis in Palestine, headed by Aphrodisius and including Misdas, Macrobius, Valerian, Leontius and Antoninus, who in the early fourth century presented themselves uninvited before the governor of the province, rebuked him to his face for his cruelty to the Christians, and then overturned the altars of the idols. The pagans of the city fell on them with stones and clubs and killed them all. Christians recovered the bodies, buried them with honour, and raised a church over the tomb; at Constantinople their memory was kept in the shrine of James the Less within the great church of the Theotokos in the Chalkoprateia. They are commemorated on May 4.

• Athanasius of Corinth

  Athanasius, Bishop of Corinth, is a hierarch of the middle Byzantine period commemorated on May 4, of whom the synaxarion records only that he governed his church in piety and reposed in peace — no martyrdom, no controversy, no exile. He is styled hosios rather than merely hagios in the Greek notices, which marks him as a bishop of ascetic life. The one chronological datum transmitted is contradictory: he is said to have died "in the reign of Basil and Constantine," which points to the joint reign of Basil II and Constantine VIII (976–1025), while the year attached to the notice is 937. His memory is a good example of the great class of Byzantine hierarch-saints whose sanctity was local, undramatic, and preserved by the calendar alone.

• Erasmus of Formia

  Erasmus (†c. 303), bishop of Formia in Campania, is one of the most widely venerated and least securely documented of the martyrs of the great persecution. The tradition the Orthodox calendars have received makes him a bishop who fled the persecution to Mount Lebanon and lived there seven years in hiding; who was brought at an angel's bidding out of concealment, seized, and tried before Diocletian and afterwards before Maximian; who was scourged, smeared with pitch and set alight, shut in a spiked cask and rolled downhill, and each time preserved; who converted great multitudes — the Slavic and Greek notices say twenty thousand — by his endurance; and who at length was brought to Formia and reposed there. In the West he became Saint Elmo, patron of sailors, and one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers; the Orthodox books keep him on May 4, and the OCA styles him confessor rather than martyr, since the tradition has him die of his sufferings rather than by the sword.

• Hilary the Wonderworker

  Hilary the Wonderworker is a venerable father of the Greek synaxarion commemorated on May 4, of whom the tradition preserves a character rather than a chronology: a man of transparent faith and pure life who was granted, unusually early, the gift of miracles — healing the paralysed and the lame, breaking droughts by his prayer, and casting out demons in the name of Christ — who withdrew for a season into a small cell to prayer and the study of the Scriptures, and who was afterwards drawn back by his people and, at their insistence, ordained priest, serving as their spiritual father and teacher until his repose. The synaxarion couplet remembers him for a joy that was native to him and for wonders that continued from his tomb. Neither his century, his country, nor the place of his labours is transmitted.

• Lazarus of the Four Days

  Lazarus of Bethany, "the Four-Days-Dead" (ὁ τετραήμερος) and "the friend of Christ," is the man whom the Lord raised from the tomb four days after his death (John 11) — the last and greatest sign before the Passion, and the Church's pledge of the general resurrection. Brother of Martha and Mary, he afterwards fled the plots of the high priests, was made first bishop of Kition in Cyprus by the apostles, shepherded that church some thirty years, and reposed in peace about the year 63. His principal feast is the movable Lazarus Saturday, the eve of Palm Sunday; October 17 commemorates the translation of his relics from Kition to Constantinople by the emperor Leo VI the Wise in 898.

• Nicephorus of Medikion

  Nicephorus (†813) was the ascetic who founded the monastery of Medikion on the Bithynian shore of the Sea of Marmara, near the ancient Cius and the modern Mudanya, and was its first abbot. Formed in the mountains in a life of extreme fasting and of prayer for the peace of the Church, he took the government of a community only under compulsion, and raised at Medikion a house whose discipline made it one of the great iconophile strongholds of the ninth century. Grown old and unable to bear the burden, he gave the governance into the hands of his disciple Nicetas the Confessor, who succeeded him as abbot; his repose falls on the eve of the iconoclast persecution of Leo V the Armenian, and some synaxaria make him a sufferer in it. He is commemorated on May 4.

• Silvan of Gaza

  Silvan of Gaza (†311) is one of the last martyrs of the great persecution in Palestine, and one of the few saints of his rank whose death is recorded by an eyewitness historian: Eusebius of Caesarea, who watched the persecution unfold in his own province, describes him as a soldier turned clergyman of Gaza, an old man of exemplary gentleness, who confessed Christ under torture, was condemned to the copper mines of Phaeno, was made bishop of the churches about Gaza, and was beheaded at the mines with thirty-nine companions — about forty in one day — in the persecution's final spasm under Maximinus. The calendars commemorate him on October 14, some styling him presbyter and some bishop; both are true in sequence.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Ethelred (Ailred), King of Mercia and monk (716)
• St. Conleth, Spiritual Father to St. Bridget of Kildare (c.519)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings