Martyr Basiliscus, Bishop of Comana

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Martyr Basiliscus, Bishop of Comana

  Basiliscus (†c. 308) was a young Christian of the Pontic country, nephew of the great-martyr Theodore the Recruit, who confessed Christ at Amasea together with Eutropius and Cleonicus and was left alive in prison when they were crucified. Driven at last in iron sandals studded with nails to Comana in Pontus, he prayed beside a withered plane-tree that put out leaves while a spring broke from its root, saw the idols of the city fall at his word, and was beheaded, his body thrown into the river and recovered by the faithful. Over his grave outside Comana a martyrium arose — and it was there, ninety-nine years later, that John Chrysostom, dying on the forced march into his last exile, was met in a night vision by Basiliscus with the words, "Take courage, brother John; tomorrow we shall be together." Chrysostom died the next day and was buried beside him.

• Righteous Melchizedek, king of Salem.

• Commemoration of the Second Ecumenical Council (381).

• John Vladimir of Serbia

  John Vladimir (c. 990 – 22 May 1016) was prince of Dioclea — Duklja, the Serbian principality on the Adriatic that lay where Montenegro and northern Albania meet — and is honoured as the first canonised saint of the Serbian people. Caught between the Empire of Basil II and the Bulgarian tsardom of Samuel, he surrendered his fortress rather than let his people starve, was carried captive to Prespa, and was there married to Samuel's daughter Theodora Kosara and restored to his throne as the tsar's vassal. He ruled a decade in peace, remembered as a mild, just, and prayerful prince, and was beheaded at the church door at Prespa on 22 May 1016 by order of Samuel's nephew John Vladislav, who had sworn him safe conduct. His relics, laid first in his own church on Lake Skadar, rest today in Tirana, and return each year to the monastery near Elbasan that bears his name for his feast. He is venerated as great-martyr and wonderworker by Serbs, Albanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians and Montenegrins alike.

• Marcellus and Codratus

  Marcellus and Codratus are two martyrs of the Byzantine synaxaria commemorated on May 22, of whom nothing is transmitted but their names and the manner of their deaths: Marcellus was made to swallow molten lead, and Codratus — the Greek notices name him Kodros — was torn to pieces by horses, dragged over the ground until he died. The synaxarion gives each a single line of verse and no more: that Marcellus drank the boiling lead as easily as a man drinks water, and that Codratus, having run his course as a horseman runs it, lifted his hands and received the crown. Their place, their century, and the persecution under which they suffered are not recorded.

• Sophia the Physician

  Sophia, called the Physician (ἡ ἰατρός), is a martyr of the Byzantine synaxaria commemorated on May 22, known only from her bare synaxarion notice: a woman who practised the healing art and was put to death by the sword for Christ. Nothing of her country, her century, or the circumstances of her passion has been transmitted. The synaxarion preserves the single line of verse that is her whole biography — that she who had once been a healer of bodies was, by the sword, shown to be a healer of souls — and she stands in the calendar as one of the small number of women whom the Church remembers in a learned profession.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Conall, abbot of Inniscoel (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings