Martyr Hyacinth; Trans. Rel. Philip, Metr. Moscow

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Martyr Hyacinth

  Hyacinth (Greek Ὑάκινθος, "the jacinth-stone") was a young Christian of Caesarea in Cappadocia who served in the household of the emperor Trajan as cubicularius — chamberlain of the imperial bedchamber, one of the most intimate offices of the palace. Denounced as a secret Christian while the court was sacrificing to the idols, he refused to deny Christ, was scourged, and was shut in a cell where the only food set before him was meat that had been offered to the idols. He would not touch it, and after some six weeks he died of hunger, about the year 108. He is one of the few martyrs of the calendar whose death was neither by sword nor by fire but by deliberate, patient starvation; the synaxarion couplet says simply that "on the third, Hyacinth died of the destroying famine."

• Saint of the day

  

  Trans. Rel. Philip, Metr. Moscow

  Philip (1507–1569), born Theodore Kolychev of a great Moscow boyar family, was the hierarch-martyr who rebuked Ivan the Terrible to his face and paid for it with his life. Forsaking the court in his thirtieth year, he became a monk and then the renowned builder-abbot of the Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea before Ivan drew him, against his will, to be Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia (1566). From the cathedral pulpit he denounced the murders of the Oprichnina and refused to bless the Tsar in his blood-guilt; for this he was deposed in the midst of the Liturgy, stripped of his vestments, and exiled to a monastery in Tver, where in December 1569 the oprichnik Malyuta Skuratov strangled him in his cell. His relics were carried to Solovki in 1591 and, in 1652, translated in triumph to the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin, the Tsar sending a letter of repentance for his forebear's crime. He is venerated as a hieromartyr and wonderworker, the very type of the pastor who lays down his life against tyranny, and is kept on January 9.

• Our Holy Father Isaiah the Solitary (491)

• Our Holy Father Alexander, founder of the Monastery of the Unsleeping Ones (430)

  Alexander the Sleepless (c. 350 – c. 430) was the founder of the Acoemetae (Greek Ἀκοίμητοι, "the Unsleeping" or "Sleepless Ones"), the monks who kept the praise of God unceasing day and night, dividing themselves into relays of choirs so that the Divine Office was never once silent in their churches — a literal enactment of the Apostle's command to "pray without ceasing." Born in Asia and educated at Constantinople, he abandoned a promising secular career for the Syrian desert, gave away all he had, and after years as a solitary conceived the discipline of perpetual psalmody that would make his name. Restless, uncompromising, and often at odds with the settled authorities of Church and city, he led a wandering band of ascetics through Syria and Mesopotamia before founding his monastery near Constantinople; driven out and persecuted, he died at Gomon on the Bosporus about the year 430. His community became one of the most famous of the Byzantine world and supplied the first monks of the great Monastery of Stoudios. He is commemorated on February 23.

• Our Father among the Saints Anatolios, Archbishop of Constantinople (458)

  Anatolius (died July 458) was Archbishop of Constantinople from 449 to 458 and the patriarch under whom the Fourth Ecumenical Council met at Chalcedon in 451. An Alexandrian by birth, ordained deacon by Cyril of Alexandria and present at Ephesus in 431, he was raised to the throne of the capital by Dioscorus of Alexandria in the wake of the Robber Council, in the expectation that he would be a compliant instrument of the Eutychian party. He was not. Within a year he had condemned Eutyches and Dioscorus at a council in his own city, received the Tome of Leo, and restored the name of the murdered Flavian to the diptychs; two years later he presided with the imperial commissioners over Chalcedon, where the definition of the two natures "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" was promulgated and the celebrated 28th canon on the rank of the see of Constantinople was passed. He is remembered also as a hymnographer, and the Anatolian stichera of the Octoechos are traditionally ascribed to him.

• Anatolius of the Kiev Near Caves

  Anatolius (twelfth century) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra whose relics rest in the Near (Antoniev) Caves and of whom the Paterikon records nothing whatever. He is one of the considerable number of Caves fathers known only by name, by the place of burial, and by the century assigned to him in the seventeenth-century catalogues of the Lavra. He is commemorated on July 3 and with the fathers of the Near Caves on September 28. He is not to be confused with his namesake of the Far Caves, whose memory falls on the same July day.

• Anatolius the Recluse of the Kiev Far Caves

  Anatolius the Recluse (thirteenth century) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra who shut himself into a cell in the Far (Theodosian) Caves and whose relics rest there. Beyond the fact of his enclosure — which is what the epithet затворник records — nothing is transmitted about him: no origin, no teacher, no year, and no miracle. He is commemorated on July 3 and with the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28, and is distinguished in the calendars from his older namesake of the Near Caves, whose memory falls on the same day.

• Basil and Constantine of Yaroslavl

  Two brothers, Basil (died 1249) and Constantine (died 1257), successively princes of Yaroslavl on the Volga, orphaned as boys when their father Vsevolod fell fighting the Mongols and left to rule a burnt and depopulated principality in the first generation of the Tatar yoke. Basil bore the whole weight of it — the journeys of submission to the Horde, the rebuilding of a ruined town, the death of his only son — without complaint, and died young. Constantine succeeded him and fell in battle against a Tatar raid on the hill above Yaroslavl afterwards called Tugova Gora, "the hill of grief." Their relics were found incorrupt in 1501 after a fire in the Dormition cathedral, and they have been honoured since as the wonderworkers and heavenly patrons of Yaroslavl.

• Basil of Ryazan

  Basil was bishop of Murom and then of Ryazan in the second half of the thirteenth century, in the generation after the Mongol conquest, and is the chief hierarch-saint of the Ryazan land. His life is remembered for one thing above all: slandered by his own people at Murom and driven out, he spread his episcopal mantiya upon the water of the Oka, stood upon it holding the Murom icon of the Mother of God, and was carried against the current to Ryazan, where he was received as bishop. He reposed on 3 July 1295. On 10 June 1609, in the Time of Troubles, his relics were uncovered by Archbishop Theodoret of Ryazan and translated into the Dormition cathedral of the Ryazan kremlin, and that day became his second feast. He is invoked in Ryazan against the perils of travel and of drowning.

• George the Recluse of the Black Mountain

  George the God-bearer (died 1068) was a Georgian ascetic of the Black Mountain above Antioch, the great cosmopolitan monastic massif of the eleventh century, who withdrew from the quarrels of its many nations into a cleft of an inaccessible cliff — whence his other name, George the Recluse. He is remembered chiefly for what he made of another man: it was he who received the young George the Hagiorite, clothed him in the great schema, and sent him to Iviron on Athos with the charge to take up the unfinished translating work of Euthymius the Iberian — and who, when his disciple spent seven years on other obediences instead, sent a monk across the Mediterranean to rebuke him and remind him what he had been sent for. He was himself a copyist and a man of letters, and the Georgian books of Athos owe their existence to his insistence.

• Gerasimus of Karpenisi

  Gerasimus the New (c. 1787 – 3 July 1812) was a new venerable-martyr of the last Ottoman generation, born George at Megalo Chorio in the mountains of Karpenisi (Eurytania) in central Greece. Sent to Constantinople at eleven to work for a relative who kept a grocer's shop, he was taken in by a Muslim household after an accident in the street and, in gratitude and childish ignorance, allowed himself to be circumcised with the sons of the house. Years later, having returned to his village and repented, he went to Mount Athos, was tonsured Gerasimus, and after nine years of ascetic preparation under an elder who twice made him wait, went back to Constantinople, confronted the man who had adopted him, publicly repudiated Islam and confessed Christ. He was tortured and beheaded at Baba Humai, aged twenty-five. His relics are divided between the Monastery of Prousos in Eurytania and the church built in his name at Megalo Chorio.

• John and Longinus of Yarenga

  Two men of the White Sea coast — John and Longinus — of whom nothing whatever is transmitted except how they died and what happened afterwards. Both were drowned at sea, at different times, near the village of Yarenga on the Summer Coast of the White Sea, in the middle of the sixteenth century; both bodies were washed ashore and buried by the local people where they were found; and both, from their graves, began to appear to the living, to name themselves, and to heal — above all the possessed, and sailors caught in the storms of that sea. Their relics were gathered at the church of St Nicholas at Yarenga and, on 3 July 1638, translated in procession to a new church of Zosimas and Sabbatius built for them, in a ceremony described in detail by an eyewitness. They are among the very few saints of the Russian calendar whose entire hagiography is posthumous.

• John of Moscow

  Blessed John (died 1589), called Bolshoi Kolpak, "Big-Cap," was a fool-for-Christ of the reign of Theodore Ioannovich and the regency of Boris Godunov. Born near Vologda and a water-carrier in a saltworks in his youth, he took up the folly for Christ's sake first at Rostov and then at Moscow, going barefoot and half-naked through the hardest frosts, hung about with heavy iron chains and crosses and wearing on his head the great iron cap that gave him his name. He spoke without fear to anyone, the tsar and the regent included, and he foretold the Time of Troubles and the coming of the Poles. He asked to be buried at the Protection church on the moat — the cathedral of St Basil the Blessed — and was; his relics were found there in 1672.

• Mark and Mokianus

  Two martyrs of the fourth century, arrested as Christians and pressed by the eparch Maximus to sacrifice to the idols. They refused, confessed Christ, and were beheaded together. What the synaxarion remembers about them is not their trial but their families: as Mokianus walked to the place of execution his wife and children followed him weeping, and he turned and told them not to weep but to rejoice at the martyrdom God had counted him worthy of; and when Mark's head fell, his wife took it up in her hands with joy, as a precious treasure. The metrical couplet makes Mark the first to suffer — "Mark offered his neck to the blade, cutting the road of the passion for Mokianus."

• Nikodemos of Kozheozero

  Nikodemos (in the world Nikitas, c. 1550s – 3 July 1640) was a peasant's son from near Rostov who was called by name out of a field as a boy, learned the trade of blacksmith, was recognised in a Moscow street by a fool-for-Christ as "the ascetic of the Khuzyuga" before he had ever heard of the place, and became a monk of the Chudov monastery. Refusing preferment when his abbot was made a metropolitan, he went north to the Kozheozero monastery in the forests of the Onega, and thence to a cell on the little river Khuzyuga, five versts off, where he lived thirty-five years without coming out. He was granted tears, unceasing prayer, clairvoyance and healing; wild deer walked past his hut unafraid; and forty days before his death two saints in shining garments told him the day he would depart, which was July 3, 1640.

• Theodotus, Theodote and Companions

  A company of six martyrs — Theodotus, the woman Theodote, Golindouch, Diomedes, Eulampius and Asclepiades — arrested in the persecution of Trajan and shut up in the same prison as Hyacinth the Cubicularius, whose steadfastness under his slow death by starvation confirmed them in the faith. After Hyacinth died they were brought out to the temple and ordered to eat of the sacrifices; they refused, denounced the worship of idols aloud, were hung upon wooden frames and had their flesh torn away, and were then beheaded. The Christians buried them with honour on the spot where they suffered. They are commemorated with Hyacinth on July 3.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Germanus, bishop of the Isle of Man and Enlightener of Peel, nephew of St. Patrick of Ireland (5th C)
• St. Byblig of Caernarvon (5th C)
• St. Gunthiern the Hermit (c.500)
• St. Bladus, bishop of the Isle of Man
• St. Cillene, abbot of Iona (c.752)
• St. Guthagon of Ireland, hermit in Belgium (8th C)

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