Martyr Theodotus of Ancyra

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Theodotus of Ancyra

  Theodotus was an innkeeper of Ancyra in Galatia — a married layman, a wine-seller, whose tavern became in the Great Persecution the hiding-place of the hunted Church, the house where the Liturgy was served when the churches were pulled down, and the office from which the bodies of the martyrs were ransomed and buried. With him are honoured seven aged consecrated virgins — Tecusa his own aunt, Alexandra, Claudia, Phaina, Euphrasia, Matrona and Julitta — who were seized under the governor Theoteknos, refused to serve as priestesses at the washing of the images of Artemis and Athena, were handed over to be violated and preserved their purity, and were at last drowned in the lake outside the city with stones tied to them. Theodotus recovered their bodies by night and buried them, and for that act was betrayed, tortured and beheaded, about the year 303–304. Their passion, told by an eyewitness named Nilus, is one of the most vivid and most disputed documents of the Diocletianic persecution in Asia Minor.

• Holy Martyrs Peter, Dionysius, Christina, Andrew, Paul, Benedimus, Paulinus, and Heraclius (250)

  These eight are the company whose names open the Byzantine notice for May 18: Peter, Dionysius, Christina the virgin, Andrew, Paul, Benedimus, Paulinus and Heraclius, martyred in the persecution of the emperor Decius (249–251). They are in fact two separate companies joined in one commemoration: five who suffered on the Hellespont, at Lampsacus and Troas, under a proconsul the acts name Optimus — Peter broken on a wheel and beheaded for refusing to bow to Aphrodite, the two soldiers Andrew and Paul stoned to death with Dionysius, and the sixteen-year-old Christina beheaded after she had cried out in open court against an apostate; and three who suffered at Athens — Heraclius, Paulinus and Benedimus, preachers against the idols, who were cast into a burning furnace. The Greek Menaion places all eight in a single notice, and this collection follows it.

• David and Tarichan of Georgia

  David and Tarichan were two Georgian boys, the children of the nobleman Vardan and his wife Tagine, kinsfolk of the royal house, murdered in the year 693 by their own uncle Theodosius because they would not leave the faith of their baptism. Theodosius, a pagan, had seized their dead father's estate and tried to secure it by adopting the boys into his own religion — offering them sweets, an inheritance and the affection of a father; they answered that they were content with the faith of their father and would keep it until their souls left their bodies. Their mother fled with them to the province of Tao, where they kept sheep on a mountainside; there Theodosius ambushed them and stabbed them both. The Georgian tradition surrounds their deaths with wonders — David's shepherd's staff struck root and became a tree, the murderer was struck blind on the spot, and Tagine restored his sight with earth soaked in her son's blood, forgiving him — and the story ends not with vengeance but with the uncle's baptism and the building of two churches over the boys' graves.

• Potamon of Heraclea

  Potamon, Bishop of Heraclea in Egypt, is the rare saint who was twice a martyr's victim: maimed by the pagans and killed by fellow Christians. In the persecution of Maximinus Daia, about the year 310, he confessed Christ, was mutilated — he lost an eye and was crippled — and was sent to the mines; he came to the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 with his wounds on him, one of the scarred confessors whose presence gave that council its moral authority, and there stood against Arius. Ten years later, at the Synod of Tyre, it was Potamon who rose and challenged Eusebius of Caesarea to his face to explain how he had come out of the same prison whole. He remained to the end a defender of Athanasius; and when the Arian intruder Gregory and the prefect Philagrius were breaking the Egyptian Church by force, the old confessor was beaten with clubs and left for dead, and died of it about the year 341 — a hieromartyr, as Athanasius himself records, at the hands of Christians.

• Simeon, Isaac and Bachtisius of Persia

  Simeon, Isaac and Bachtisius were Christians of the Persian empire who died for refusing to renounce Christ and to conform to the state religion of the Sasanians. Brought before their judges and required to worship the fire and the sun, they answered that they would not turn from the Creator of all things to reverence His creatures; they were tortured, shut up in prison and left seven days without food, and at the last beheaded. Their names are Syriac and Persian rather than Greek — Bachtisius represents the Syriac Bokhtishoʿ, "Jesus has delivered" — and they belong to the vast company of the martyrs of the Church of the East under Shapur II, whose forty-year persecution (from about 339) produced more martyrs than any single Roman persecution and of whom the Byzantine calendar preserves only a fraction, often reduced, as here, to a name and a manner of death.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Elgiva, mother of St. Edgar and abbess of Shaftesbury (944)
• St. Feredarius, abbot of Iona (c.863)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings