Leavetaking of Pascha / Forefeast of Ascension

Saints commemorated

• Unc. Rel. St Aleksy, Metropolitan of Kiev

• Martyr Thalelaeus at Aegae in Cilicia and those with him (327)

  Thalelaeus (†284) was a young physician of Cilicia who treated the sick without payment and was martyred at the age of about eighteen in the persecution under the emperor Numerian. Born in Lebanon to a Christian officer's household, he was still a student of medicine when the prefect's search for Christians took him. Ordered to be hung head downward by ropes drawn through his bored knees, he was spared when his two executioners — Alexander and Asterius — found themselves piercing a block of wood instead, and confessed Christ on the spot and were beheaded; water and wild beasts likewise refused him, and he was at last put to the sword. Because he had healed freely, the Church numbers him among the Unmercenaries (Anargyroi), and it is under that title that he is commemorated on May 20.

• Alexander and Asterius of Aegae

  Alexander and Asterius were the two men of the prefect's service in Cilicia who were ordered to bore through the knees of the young physician Thalelaeus the Unmercenary and hang him head downward, and who found when the work was done that they had pierced a block of wood and left the martyr untouched. Understanding what had been shown them, they threw down their tools, confessed Christ before the prefect Theodore, and were beheaded in the year 284 — the first fruits of the martyrdom they had been sent to inflict. The Greek synaxaria give them a notice of their own on May 20, immediately after Thalelaeus, with whom they are always commemorated.

• Alexis of Moscow

  Alexis (c. 1292/1305 – 1378) was Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia and one of the great architects of Muscovite Russia — a saint remembered equally as a wonderworking hierarch and as a statesman who held the Russian land together in a perilous age. Born Eleutherius, of a boyar family of Chernigov settled at Moscow, he was a monk of the Theophany monastery for over twenty years before his elevation, and Metropolitan from 1354. Twice he journeyed to the Golden Horde; there, at the Khan's summons, he healed Taidula, the mother of the Khan, of blindness, and won by it protection and privileges for the Church. As guardian and regent for the boy-prince Demetrius Donskoy, he steadied the throne of Moscow and reconciled its warring princes. He founded the Chudov (Miracle) Monastery in the Kremlin and other houses, and reposed on February 12, 1378. His relics, uncovered incorrupt in 1431, made him one of the beloved wonderworkers of Russia and one of the Hierarchs of Moscow.

• Asclas of Egypt

  Asclas (†c. 287) was a Christian of Great Hermopolis in Middle Egypt who suffered in the persecution of Diocletian under the governor Arrian of Antinoe. Hung up and torn with iron rakes until his flesh fell from him, he answered that he was still glorifying his God; and when the governor set out by boat across the Nile to continue the torments at Antinoe, the martyr prayed and the vessel stood still in mid-stream, unmoved by the oars, until Arrian had written with his own hand an acknowledgement of the one true God. Even that sign did not convert him: he had Asclas burned with torches and then drowned in the river with a stone about his neck. The martyr had told the Christians to look for his body after three days; they found it as he had said, and buried him.

• Dovmont-Timothy of Pskov

  Dovmont (Lithuanian Daumantas, †1299) was a pagan Lithuanian prince of Nalšia who fled the dynastic bloodletting of his homeland in 1265, came to Pskov with some three hundred households, was baptised there with the name Timothy, and within a year was elected the city's prince. He held that office for thirty-three years — no other prince of Pskov ruled so long, or so wholly without quarrel with its assembly — and made himself the defender of the north-western frontier of Rus', beating the Lithuanians on the Dvina, standing in the front line at Rakovor in 1268, breaking the Livonian siege of Pskov in 1269, and winning his last battle on the Velikaya in the spring of 1299, a few weeks before his death. He built the fortified quarter still called Dovmont's town, laid his sword on the altar before each campaign, and was venerated at his tomb in the Trinity cathedral almost from the day of his burial; his intervention was credited with lifting the German siege of 1480.

• Lydia of Philippi

  Lydia was a merchant of purple from Thyatira in Asia Minor, settled in the Roman colony of Philippi in Macedonia, and a God-fearer among the Jewish women who gathered for prayer by the river outside its gate. When the Apostle Paul came there about the year 49 or 50 — his first preaching on European soil, undertaken at the summons of the Macedonian seen in a vision at Troas — "the Lord opened her heart," and she and her whole household were baptised in the river: the first Christians of Europe. She then compelled the apostles to lodge with her, and her house became the first house-church on the continent, the place to which Paul and Silas returned after their scourging and imprisonment. The Greek Church honours her as Equal-to-the-Apostles and keeps her memory on May 20.

• Nicetas, John and Joseph of Nea Moni

  Nicetas, John and Joseph were three ascetics living on the mountain of Chios in the first half of the eleventh century who found an icon of the Mother of God hanging in a myrtle bush and could not move it from the place. Crossing to Lesbos, where the future emperor Constantine IX Monomachos was living in exile, they told him he would come to the throne; he promised that if it happened he would build a church on the spot where the icon was found. He was proclaimed emperor in 1042 and kept his word: with the resources of the crown, and under the patronage of Constantine and the empresses Zoe and Theodora, the three hermits' myrtle grove became the Nea Moni — the "New Monastery" — whose mosaics are among the greatest surviving monuments of eleventh-century Byzantine art. The three are venerated at Nea Moni as its ktitores, its founders, and are commemorated together on May 20.

• Zabulon and Sosanna

  Zabulon and Sosanna were the parents of Nina, the Equal-to-the-Apostles and Enlightener of Georgia, and are venerated for what they gave up as much as for what they were. Zabulon was a Cappadocian nobleman and an officer of the Roman army who, having captured a king of the Franks in battle, obtained the baptism of the prisoners and stood godfather to them, and then their release — so that a whole people came to Christ by his intercession. Renouncing his rank, he went to Jerusalem, served the patriarch, and married Sosanna, the patriarch's sister; their only child Nina was born to them in Cappadocia. When the girl was about twelve they sold all they had and returned to the Holy City, where Zabulon withdrew to the wilderness as a solitary and Sosanna was set to the service of the poor and the sick, and they never saw each other or their daughter again in this life. The Church of Georgia glorified them in 1996; their feast is May 20.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Ethelbert, King of East Anglia and Martyr (c.793)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings