Ven. Onuphrius the Great

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Onuphrius the Great

  Onuphrius the Great is the most famous of the naked anchorites of the deep Egyptian desert: a monk of the coenobium of Eratus near Hermopolis in the Thebaid who fled by night into the wilderness and lived there sixty years without seeing a human face, until his hair and beard had grown down over him for clothing and a girdle of leaves was all his garment. A date-palm whose twelve boughs bore in turn month by month, and a spring beside his cave, were his food and drink; an angel brought him the Holy Mysteries each Saturday and Sunday. At the very end of that hidden life God sent the monk Paphnutius to him, that the Church might not lose him: the two spoke for a day and a night, Onuphrius reposed the next morning, and Paphnutius buried him, saw the cave fall in and the palm wither, and carried the story back to Egypt. His feast is June 12, and few saints are so instantly recognisable in an icon.

• Anna of Kashin

  Anna of Kashin (c. 1280–1368) was Grand Princess of Tver in the worst years that principality ever knew, and the only saint in the history of the Russian Church to have been formally de-canonised. Daughter of the prince of Rostov and wife of the martyred Grand Prince Michael of Tver, she outlived husband, sons and grandson, all destroyed in the long ruin of Tver by the Horde and by Moscow; and at the end she was tonsured a nun — as Sophia at Tver, and in the great schema as Anna at Kashin, in the monastery her youngest son had built — and reposed there on October 2, 1368. Her relics were uncovered in 1649 and translated with great solemnity on June 12, 1650; in 1677 a council under Patriarch Joachim annulled the whole veneration, because the Old Believers were appealing to the two-fingered blessing of her incorrupt hand; and her people went on venerating her regardless until, on June 12, 1909, she was glorified a second time. She is invoked as the patron of widows.

• Arsenius of Konevits

  Arsenius of Konevits was a coppersmith of Novgorod who became a monk, spent three years on Mount Athos making copper vessels for the brethren, and came home in 1393 with an icon of the Mother of God — the Konevskaya, in which the Christ Child holds a fledgling dove. He settled alone on the island of Konevets in Lake Ladoga, a place still used by the Karelian fishermen for sacrifice at a great boulder called the Horse-Stone, and by his prayer the island was cleansed of that worship; and in 1398, with the blessing of the archbishop of Novgorod, he founded there the coenobitic monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos, one of the northern outposts of Russian monasticism. Flood destroyed the first buildings in 1421 and he rebuilt higher on the island. He reposed on June 12, 1447, and is honoured as a wonderworker of the Novgorod land; his monastery's heritage passed in the twentieth century into the Orthodox Church of Finland, so that he is venerated on both sides of that border.

• John, Heraclemon, Andrew and Theophilus of Egypt

  John, Heraclemon, Andrew and Theophilus were four young hermits of the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, known from the Life of Onuphrius the Great. Boys who had studied together in the city of Oxyrhynchus in the Upper Thebaid, they left the world together in their youth for the love of God, were led by an angel to a desert elder, and after his death remained in a hidden oasis, living on the fruit of the trees and the water of a spring. There the monk Paphnutius, having just buried Onuphrius, found them; and on the Sabbath and the Lord's Day, as was their custom, an angel came and communed them — and Paphnutius with them — from the Holy Mysteries. Their brief, luminous story is one of the treasures of the literature of the desert.

• John Tornike

  John-Tornike was the Georgian general Tornike Eristavi, a commander and counsellor of David III Kuropalates of Tao, who laid down his rank to become a monk on Mount Athos beside his kinsman John the Iberian. About the year 979 the Byzantine court, in extremity before the rebellion of Bardas Skleros, begged David to send help; and Tornike was called out of the cloister to lead the Georgian army, which broke the rebel's force. He returned to Athos with the reward of that campaign, and with it the Georgians built the Monastery of the Iberians (Iviron) — so that he is honoured, with John the Iberian and Euthymius, as one of its three founders: the benefactor whose victory paid for the house. He returned to his obedience and to silence, and reposed about 985. His memory is kept on June 12.

• Peter of Athos

  Peter the Athonite is honoured as the first hermit of the Holy Mountain and, with the Theotokos herself, as the founder of its vocation. A Byzantine officer taken prisoner by the Arabs and shut up in the fortress of Samara on the Euphrates, he was delivered — the Life says — by Nicholas of Myra and Symeon the Righteous, the God-receiver, who melted his chains; tonsured at Rome over the tomb of the Apostle Peter at the bidding of a vision given to the Pope himself, he was then directed by the Mother of God to Athos, which she claimed as her own inheritance and portion. There he lived some fifty-three years in the caves without seeing a man, clothed at last only in his own hair and a girdle of leaves, fed after forty-day fasts by an angel with heavenly bread, and assailed by the demons in every shape. A hunter chasing a stag found him, and a year later found him dead. From him the Holy Mountain dates its life as the Garden of the Theotokos, and the hesychast fathers — Gregory Palamas above all — took him as the pattern of the solitary life.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Ternan, missionary abbot & bishop of Culross (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings