Virgin Martyr Febronia; Peter and Fevronia of Murom

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Virgin Martyr Febronia

  Febronia was a young nun of the convent of the abbess Bryene at Nisibis on the Roman–Persian frontier, tortured to death about the year 304 in the persecution of Diocletian. Offered marriage to the prefect's nephew Lysimachus and the wealth that went with it, she answered that she had a Bridegroom who does not die; she was then scourged, burned, her teeth broken and her tongue cut out, her hands and feet struck off before the people of the city, and at last beheaded. The crowd turned against the persecutor as it watched. Her Life and Passion — written in Syriac, and presented as the work of her fellow-nun Thomais, who says she saw it — is the longest and most consciously literary of the Syriac women's martyr-acts, and it carried her cult from the Mesopotamian frontier to Constantinople, to southern Italy and Sicily, and into every Byzantine calendar. She is commemorated on June 25, the same day as the Russian Peter and Fevronia of Murom, with whom she is constantly confused.

• Saint of the day

  

  Peter and Fevronia of Murom

  Peter, prince of Murom on the Oka, and his wife Fevronia, the daughter of a tree-honey gatherer from the village of Laskovo, are the Russian Church's patrons of marriage. The story as Russia has it — that Peter was scaled with sores from the blood of a serpent he had killed, that the peasant girl who healed him made him promise to marry her, that the boyars drove them out and then begged them back, and that they took the monastic habit as David and Euphrosyne and died in the same hour on 25 June 1228, and were found twice in one tomb after being buried apart — comes from the Tale of Peter and Fevronia, written by the priest Yermolai-Erasmus about 1547. Behind it stands a real prince of Murom who died in 1228. They were glorified at the Moscow council of 1547, their relics rest in the Holy Trinity convent at Murom, and modern Russia keeps their day, Old Calendar civil July 8, as the Day of Family, Love and Fidelity. Their Fevronia is the Slavonic form of the name of the Mesopotamian martyr Febronia of Nisibis, with whom they share this feast and with whom they are constantly confused.

• Our Holy Father Dionysios, founder of the Monastery of St John the Forerunner on Mt Athos (1380)

• Dionysius of Korisos

  Dionysius was a peasant's son from Korisos near Kastoria in western Macedonia who went young to the Holy Mountain, was formed there by his elder brother Theodosius — later abbot of Philotheou and Metropolitan of Trebizond — and in old age founded, on a sheer cliff of the south-western shore of Athos, the monastery of the Honourable Forerunner and Baptist John, which the Mountain has called Dionysiou ever since. Its building was paid for by Alexios III Grand Komnenos, emperor of Trebizond, whose gold-sealed charter of September 1374 survives in the monastery archive and is one of the great documents of late Byzantine monastic patronage. Dionysius died at Trebizond about 1388, having gone there to beg further money for the painting of the church. He is commemorated on June 25, together with his fellow-ascetic Dometius.

• Dometius of Dionysiou

  Dometius was a hieromonk of the Holy Mountain, the confidant and fellow-ascetic of Dionysius of Korisos, founder of the monastery of the Honourable Forerunner — Dionysiou — on the south-western cliffs of Athos. The Greek notices describe him as "a most discerning and Spirit-bearing man," and as counsellor, friend and fellow-struggler of the founder; the two kept their hesychia together in the caves above the monastery known as the Vouleftiria, the "places of counsel," which are said to take their name from the taking of counsel between them. He outlived Dionysius by some seventeen years and reposed in peace about 1405. Almost nothing else is transmitted, and his memory is kept on June 25, the founder's day, with which it has always been joined.

• Moluag of Lismore

  Moluag was an Irish monk of the Dál nAraidi of Ulster, trained at Bangor under Comgall, who crossed to Alba about 562 and planted his monastery on the long limestone island of Lismore in Loch Linnhe, in the sea-lanes of Argyll — the same waters, and the same year, as Columba on Iona. From Lismore he worked north and east among the Picts, and the three churches the tradition gives him — Lismore, Rosemarkie in Ross and Mortlach in Banffshire — all became episcopal seats in the medieval Scottish Church, which is the clearest surviving measure of how large his mission was. He died at Rosemarkie on 25 June 592 and was carried back to Lismore for burial. His pastoral staff, the Bachuil Mòr, is still in the hands of the hereditary keepers on the island, one of the very few insular relics in Britain never to have left the family that has kept it. He is patron of Argyll and is commemorated on June 25.

• Nikon of Optina

  Nikon (Belyaev) was the last of the elders of Optina. A Moscow merchant's son who entered the hermitage at eighteen and became the cell-attendant and secretary of the elder Barsanuphius, he was tonsured in 1915 and ordained priest in 1917 — that is, he received the whole tradition of Optina in the four years before it was destroyed. When the monastery was closed and made a museum in 1923 he stayed at his post until the authorities removed him, then carried on hearing confessions in the town of Kozelsk, gathering to himself what was left of the Optina flock. Arrested in 1927, he was sent to the transit camp at Kem and thence into exile on the Pinega in the Arkhangelsk north, where he died of tuberculosis on 25 June 1931, aged forty-two. The Russian Church restored his veneration at Optina in 1996 and glorified him with the New Martyrs and Confessors in 2000, as a venerable confessor.

• Orentius and his Six Brothers

  Seven brothers — Orentius, Pharnacius, Eros, Firmus, Firminus, Cyriacus and Longinus — served as soldiers in Thrace under Diocletian, and were famous in the ranks for their courage. When Orentius, having killed the champion of an invading Scythian host in single combat, refused to join the sacrifice offered in thanksgiving for the victory — declaring that he had conquered by the power of Jesus Christ — the seven were arrested, questioned, and with one voice confessed Christ. They were not executed but sentenced to exile in the Caucasus, and the sentence was the martyrdom: one after another they died on the road and along the eastern shore of the Black Sea, over five weeks and six hundred miles, in six different places, without complaint. The synaxaria preserve the place and the day of each death — a roll of stages that reads like an itinerary and is, in fact, the record of a company killed slowly by transportation. They are kept on June 24 in the Slavonic books and on June 25 in Greek usage.

• Theoleptos of Philadelphia

  Theoleptos, Metropolitan of Philadelphia in Lydia for nearly forty years, is the hinge between the hesychasm of the thirteenth-century Athonite fathers and the theology of Gregory Palamas, whom he taught the prayer of the heart while Palamas was still a boy in Constantinople. Born at Nicaea about 1250 and married, he left the world about 1275; he refused the union of Lyons and was imprisoned for it under Michael VIII; and after that emperor's death he was given the see of Philadelphia, which he held from 1283/4 until his death in 1322, governing it as a frontier bishop of an empire in dissolution and leading its people in the successful defence of the city against the Turks in 1310. He was the spiritual father of the princess-nun Irene-Eulogia Choumnaina, and the author of the Monastic Discourses and of two treatises that entered the Philokalia. He is commemorated on June 25.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Seleva (Selyf), Hermit (6th C)
• St. Moluag, Missionary (592)
• St. Adalbert of Egmond, archdeacon and missionary (c.750)
• Holy Martyr Cyneburgh of Gloucester

Troparia & kontakia

Readings