Leavetaking of Mid-Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Virgin Martyr Glyceria

  Glyceria was a young noblewoman of Trajanopolis in Thrace, daughter of a man named Macarius who had held the rank of consul, who came to the public sacrifice with the sign of the Cross traced upon her forehead instead of a garland, and at whose prayer the statue of Zeus fell from its pedestal and shattered. Stoned, hung up and flayed at the head, sealed alive into a prison and fed there by an angel, cast into a furnace and left unhurt, she was carried at last to Heraclea and thrown to the beasts, and died about the year 177 when a lioness laid her down without tearing her. Her jailer Laodicius was converted by the miracle of her healing and beheaded with her. Her tomb at Heraclea streamed healing myrrh, and her memory is kept throughout the Orthodox world on May 13.

• Holy Martyr Alexander of Rome (298)

  Alexander was a young soldier of the regiment of the Tiberiani at Rome, brought up a Christian by his mother Pimenia, who at the age of eighteen refused to take part in the sacrifices commanded by Maximian Herculius (285–305). Denounced by his tribune, he was arrested, and instead of being executed at Rome was carried under guard on a long journey through the provinces to Thrace, tortured at each halt and confessing Christ at each, until at Drizipera he was condemned and beheaded — the executioner, the passion says, holding back his hand at the sight of angels standing by the martyr. His mother followed him the whole way, encouraged him in his torments, and took up his body by the river Ergina for burial; healings were worked at his grave. Whether he was a soldier or a bishop is an old textual question, discussed below.

• Euthymius the Iberian

  Euthymius the Iberian (c. 955 – 1028) was a Georgian nobleman's son given as a hostage to Byzantium, who was recovered by his monk father John the Iberian and brought to Mount Athos, and who there became the second and greatest builder of the Monastery of the Iberians (Iviron) and one of the supreme translators in the history of Christian letters. He governed Iviron some fourteen years, then laid down the abbacy in favour of George the Iberian in order to translate: he rendered the Holy Scriptures and more than fifty other works from Greek into Georgian — and, going the other way, put the Georgian Wisdom of Balahvari into Greek, from which it passed into every language of medieval Europe as Barlaam and Josaphat. Fluent in Greek and Georgian both, he was ordained priest and served as epitropos of the Great Lavra. He died at Constantinople on 13 May 1028 after a fall from a startled mule, and his relics were carried back to Iviron. He is not the ninth-century Euthymius the New of Thessalonica, with whom his English epithet is constantly confused.

• Gabriel the Iberian

  Gabriel was a Georgian ascetic of Mount Athos, a monk of great simplicity who lived in a cave in the high ground above the boundary between Xeropotamou and the monastery of Saint Panteleimon. At the word of a divine voice he came down to the shore and, walking upon the sea, received from the waves the icon of the Mother of God afterwards called Portaitissa, the "Keeper of the Gate" — the Iveron icon, which of its own will took its place over the monastery gate and has remained the great treasure and the guardian of Iviron ever since. The Church honours him with the other Georgian fathers of the Holy Mountain on May 13. Almost nothing else of his life is recorded: he is known by one act, and it is one of the most famous acts in the history of Athos.

• George the Iberian

  George the Iberian was the Georgian monk who was elected abbot of the Monastery of the Iberians (Iviron) on Mount Athos after Euthymius the Iberian resigned the governance in order to devote himself to translation, and who reposed in peace. That single sentence is the whole of the Greek synaxarion notice for him, and this entry is accordingly short. He is commemorated on May 13 with the other Georgian fathers of Iviron. English calendars frequently identify him with George the Hagiorite (†1065), the abbot and translator who wrote the Life of John and Euthymius and whose principal feast is June 27; the question is treated below and is not resolved here.

• Glykeria of Novgorod

  Glykeria was a maiden of Great Novgorod, daughter of Panteleimon, an official of Legoshcha Street, who reposed about the year 1522 and was buried by the stone church of the Holy Martyrs Florus and Laurus. Fifty years later, on 14 July 1572, her body was found incorrupt behind that church, and the Second Novgorod Chronicle records that Archbishop Leonid of Novgorod, informed by an old woman named Nastasia of a healing received fifty years before, had the relics taken up and laid in the church. Healings followed at the burial, among them the recovery of the small son of one Bogdan Suvorov, and these miracles were the ground of her glorification. She is one of the righteous laywomen of the Novgorod calendar, and she is kept on May 13, the day of her patron the ancient martyr Glyceria of Heraclea.

• John the Iberian

  John the Iberian — called in the Greek notices Varasvatse, in Georgian Ioane Mtatsmindeli, "John of the Holy Mountain" — was a Georgian magnate of the tenth century, counsellor of David III Kuropalates of Tao, toparch of Iberian Meskhia and holder of a Byzantine dignity, who abandoned rank, house and family for the monastic life on Mount Olympus of Mysia. Having become a monk he recovered from Constantinople his young son Euthymius, whom his prince had given to the emperor as a hostage, and brought him to Mount Athos, where the two entered the Great Lavra of Saint Athanasius. Around John the Georgians of the Mountain gathered, and out of that gathering came the Monastery of the Iberians (Iviron), of which he is honoured as spiritual father and first abbot. He reposed at Iviron about 1002–1005, and is commemorated on May 13 with his son and the other Georgian fathers of the Holy Mountain.

• Laodicius the Jailer

  Laodicius was the keeper of the prison at Trajanopolis in Thrace during the imprisonment of the virgin-martyr Glyceria, about the year 177. Set to watch a door sealed with the governor's own ring, he found his prisoner alive and her wounds healed, and — believing himself ruined and about to take his own life — was stopped by the saint, catechised by her, and brought to faith in Christ. He put on the chains he had used to bind her, confessed Christ before the tribunal as the true God, and was beheaded with the sword. The Christians took up his body secretly and buried it. His whole story is a single episode of another saint's passion, and the Church keeps him on Glyceria's day.

• Martyrs of Iviron

  The Iberite venerable-martyrs are the Georgian and Greek monks of the Monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos who were put to death for refusing the Union of Lyons — the submission to Rome accepted by the emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos and proclaimed on 6 June 1274 — and the papal and imperial pressure that followed it. Required to accept the Latin doctrine and the pope's obedience, the brotherhood anathematised it instead. Nearly two hundred of the elder monks were driven aboard a ship like cattle and the ship was sunk with them in the deep; the younger and stronger were deported to Italy and sold as slaves. The sources give the date as 1259, or as a persecution running over four years from 1276 to 1280. They are commemorated on May 13 with the Georgian fathers of Iviron, and belong with the Twenty-six Martyrs of Zographou, burned in their tower in the same persecution.

• Nicephorus of Ephapsis

  Nicephorus is one of the genuinely unknown saints of the fixed calendar. The whole of his transmitted memory is a single short notice in a Athonite manuscript of the Great Lavra: that on account of his virtuous and God-pleasing manner of life he was raised up as abbot of the populous monastery of Ephapsis, that he was a presbyter, and that he reposed in peace. Neither his century, nor his birthplace, nor the location of his monastery is recorded. He is commemorated on May 13, and this entry is deliberately as short as the record that produced it.

• Pausikakos of Synnada

  Pausikakos — whose name means "he who makes evil to cease" — was a physician who became a monk, went about the cities of Asia Minor healing the sick without payment while preaching the Gospel, and was ordained Bishop of Synnada in Phrygia by the Patriarch Cyriacus of Constantinople (595–606). The Church remembers him for the double gift of healing "sicknesses of soul and of body": he was a strict shepherd of his flock, is said to have healed the emperor Maurice on a visit to the capital, and to have brought water out of the ground by prayer for his thirsting companions on the road. He reposed in peace in the year 606, and is counted among the unmercenary healers of the Church.

• Sergius the Confessor

  Sergius was a patrician of Constantinople, of one of the great families of the city, and the father of Photius the Great; he was closely akin to the holy Patriarch Tarasius, who had presided at the Seventh Ecumenical Council. In the second iconoclasm, under the emperor Theophilus (829–842), he and his wife Irene refused to give up the veneration of the holy images. He was anathematised by the iconoclast synod, stripped of his whole estate, dragged with a rope about his neck through the streets of the capital as a public spectacle, imprisoned, and then sent with his wife and children into exile in a waterless place, where he died of his hardships before the restoration of the icons in 843. The Slavic calendars keep the same confessor under the name George. The Church honours him on May 13 with Irene and their children.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Mael, the Hermit of Bardsey (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings