Apostles Carpus and Alphaeus of the Seventy; Greatmartyr George the New at Sofia

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Apostles Carpus and Alphaeus of the Seventy

  On May 26 the Church keeps the joint memory of two of the Seventy Apostles: Carpus, the host at whose house in Troas the Apostle Paul left the cloak and the books he asks Timothy to bring to him (2 Tim. 4:13), afterwards a preacher in Crete and first bishop of Beroea; and Alphaeus, of Capernaum in Galilee, whom the tradition names as the father of the Apostles James and Matthew, and whose own children Abercius and Helen are commemorated with him on this day as martyrs. Both belong to that second and wider apostolic company whom the Lord "appointed and sent two and two before his face" (Luke 10:1), and both are counted in the ancient rolls of the Seventy; of the events of their lives the record is slender, and the honour paid them rests on the New Testament's brief notices and on the memory of the churches they founded.

• Saint of the day

  Greatmartyr George the New at Sofia

  George the New (c. 1497 – 1515), called also George of Kratovo, was a young Christian goldsmith burned alive at Sofia (the Byzantine Sredets) in the early years of Ottoman rule, one of the most celebrated new-martyrs of the Balkan Slavs. Born at Kratovo, a mining town of the central Balkans, to a devout Christian family, and skilled in the working of gold and silver, he came as a youth of about eighteen to Sofia, where his beauty and gifts drew the notice of the Turks. Pressed to renounce Christ and embrace Islam, he refused with constancy; brought before the judge and offered wealth and honour to apostatise, he confessed his faith the more boldly, and was condemned to the fire and burned alive on 11 February 1515. His Life, written soon afterward by the priest Peyo of Sofia, is a landmark of South Slavic literature, and his memory is kept with honour by the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian Churches, both of the first two peoples claiming him as their own.

• Saint Augustine of Canterbury, evangelizer of England (ca. 605)

  Augustine (†26 May 604 or 605) was the Roman monk whom Gregory the Dialogist sent from the monastery of St Andrew on the Caelian Hill to preach Christ to the pagan English, and who became the first archbishop of Canterbury. Landing in Kent in 597 with some forty companions, he was received by King Æthelberht, whose Frankish queen Bertha was already a Christian, was given the old Roman church of St Martin outside Canterbury for his prayers, baptised the king and, within a year, great numbers of his people, and set the shape of the English Church: the cathedral of Christ Church at Canterbury, the abbey of Saints Peter and Paul outside the walls, and the sees of Rochester and London. His attempt at unity with the ancient British bishops failed over the Paschal reckoning and over his own bearing, and he did not live to see it mended. Wonders were worked through him in his lifetime — Gregory wrote to warn him not to be lifted up by them — and the English Church, which has never called him anything but its apostle, keeps his memory on the day of his repose.

• Holy New Martyr Alexander of Thessalonica (1794)

• Abercius and Helen

  Abercius and Helen were a brother and sister of the apostolic generation, named in the synaxarion of May 26 as the children of the Apostle Alphaeus of Capernaum — and so, by the same tradition, brother and sister of the Apostles James and Matthew. Both confessed Christ and both were put to death: Abercius stripped naked and bound so that he was stung to death by bees, Helen stoned. Nothing further of them is transmitted. They are commemorated with their father on his day, and belong to that large class of saints whose whole surviving record is a single line of the synaxarion.

• John Psychaites

  John, called Psychaites from the monastery in which he lived, was a monk of the Lavra of Psicha near Constantinople in the last years of the eighth century and the first of the ninth, and one of the confessors of the holy icons. He had entered the monastery young, and the fame of his ascetic life and of the healings and exorcisms worked through his prayers had spread beyond it when the imperial power required of him a signature renouncing the veneration of images. He refused it, and called the emperor by his name — a heretic — to his face. For that he was arrested, ill-used and sent into banishment, and by the transmitted account he died in exile. His memory is kept on May 26 in the Slavic calendars and on May 7 in Greek usage.

• Macarius of Kalyazin

  Macarius of Kalyazin (c. 1400–1483) was one of the great monastic founders of fifteenth-century Russia — a wonderworker of the Tver land whose monastery on the Volga became a centre of the Russian North. Born Matthew Kozhin to a pious boyar family, he was married at his parents' wish but widowed within a few years and left an orphan; freed of every earthly tie, he took the monastic habit at Kashin and then withdrew into the forest between the lakes above the Volga, where he built a cell and, drawing disciples, founded the Holy Trinity monastery later called after Kalyazin. Famed for a humility so deep that he named his own monastery after the very landowner who had first opposed it, and for the gift of healing, he governed his brotherhood into great old age and reposed in 1483. His relics were found incorrupt in 1521 and he was numbered among the saints of the Russian Church; his monastery stood until it was drowned by the waters of the Volga in 1940.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Oduvald, abbot of Melrose (698)
• St. Dyfan of Merthyr Dyfan (2nd C.)
• SS Damian and Fugatius, missionaries to Britain (2nd C)
• St. Becan, hermit near Cork (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings