Great Martyr Irene of Thessalonica

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Great Martyr Irene of Thessalonica

  Irenaeus, Irene and Peregrinus are three martyrs commemorated on May 5 who, according to the Latin martyrologies and the Greek synaxaristic notices that follow them, suffered at Thessalonica in the persecution of Diocletian, refusing to sacrifice to the idols and being cast into the fire. Nothing further is transmitted about them. Their dossier is unusually vexed: the Latin manuscript tradition varies, the localisation at Thessalonica has been questioned, and the presence of an Irene in the company on the very day of the Great-Martyr Irene — and in the very city associated with the other virgin-martyr Irene of Thessalonica of April 16 — makes this small commemoration one of the most easily confused in the calendar.

• Saint of the day

  Irene the Great Martyr

  Irene is the great-martyr whose long passion — a cycle of tortures survived, deliverances and repeated returns to preaching — made her one of the most widely honoured women saints of the Byzantine world. Born Penelope, the only daughter of a petty pagan king named Licinius, she was shut up from childhood in a tower with thirteen companions, taught the faith in secret by her tutor Apellian, and baptised Irene ("peace") by Timothy, whom the tradition identifies as the disciple of the Apostle Paul. Her father's attempt to kill her ended in his own conversion and that of some three thousand souls; thereafter she passed from city to city under a succession of rulers — Sedekias, Sapor, Numerian, Babdonus — enduring the serpent-pit, the saw, the millwheel and three heated bronze oxen, converting whole populations, and at last reposing near Ephesus, where her sealed tomb was found empty. She is commemorated on May 5.

• Ephraim of Nea Makri

  Ephraim is a fifteenth-century Greek monk of Mount Amomon above the modern Nea Makri in Attica, held to have been tortured to death by Turkish raiders on 5 May 1426. Nothing whatever was known of him until 1950, when the nun Makaria Desipri, excavating the ruins of the abandoned Monastery of the Annunciation on the hill, uncovered a burial she took — on the strength of a series of dreams and visions she reported — to be his, and from which the whole of his transmitted biography derives. A very large popular veneration grew up around the shrine within a generation; the Church of Greece entered him in its calendar in 1998 and the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2011. His commemoration is therefore canonically established and liturgically kept, while the historical foundation of his life rests on private revelation and not on any document, and the Church's own recognition of him was cautious and late.

• Euthymius of Madytos

  Euthymius was a monk of Constantinople who became bishop of Madytos on the European shore of the Hellespont in the last decades of the tenth century, and was famed in his own lifetime as a healer and a seer. He was born at Epivates in Thrace and is remembered chiefly, in the wider Church, as the elder brother of St Parasceva of the Balkans — "Petka" — whose Life records that he went first to the monastic state and drew her after him. He is said to have received the emperor Basil II at Madytos and to have foretold his victory over Bardas Phocas in 989. At his repose, between 989 and 996, myrrh flowed from his tomb, whence he is called the Myrrh-flowing; healings continued there. He is commemorated on May 5.

• Neophytus, Gaius and Gaianus

  Neophytus, Gaius and Gaianus are three martyrs of whom the Greek synaxarion for May 5 preserves a single line: that they were perfected by the sword. Nothing is transmitted of their country, their persecutor, their date, or the relation between them. The one further notice attached to their memory is topographical and belongs to Constantinople: their synaxis was kept in the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian "in the quarter of Dareios", which indicates a real and located cult in the imperial city, however completely their story has been lost.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Hydroc of Cornwall (5th C)
• St. Echa of Crayke, hermit (767)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings