St Andrew of Crete

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  St Andrew of Crete

  Andrew of Crete (c. 650 – c. 740), called the Jerusalemite, is the archbishop of Gortyna in Crete who stands at the head of Byzantine hymnography as the maker — or at least the first great master — of the kanon, and who composed the Great Canon, the two hundred and fifty stanzas of penitential dialogue with his own soul that the Church still sings through the first week of Great Lent and entire on the Thursday of the fifth week. Born at Damascus under Arab rule and mute until his seventh year, healed at the chalice, tonsured in Jerusalem and formed in the brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, he was sent to Constantinople with the acceptance of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, served as deacon of the Great Church and warden of its orphanage, and was made metropolitan of Crete under Justinian II. His episcopate spans the last convulsion of Monothelitism — in which he briefly and disastrously subscribed the synod of Philippikos in 712, and afterwards repented — and the eve of the iconoclast crisis, against which his homilies on the holy images were read as patristic proof at the Seventh Ecumenical Council. He is not the monk-martyr Andrew of Crete of October 17.

• Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia: Tsar Nicholas II, Tsaritsa Alexandra, Crown Prince Alexei, and Grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and those martyred with them (1918).

  In the cellar of a requisitioned merchant's house at Yekaterinburg, on the night of 16–17 July 1918 — the 4th of July by the church reckoning — the last emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, and their haemophiliac son Alexis, aged thirteen, were shot together with four of their household. They had been prisoners for sixteen months. The Church honours them not for their politics, on which she pronounces nothing, but for the manner in which they bore captivity and death: without bitterness, at prayer, forgiving, in the pattern of Boris and Gleb — which is what the title passion-bearer (strastoterpets) means and all it means. They were glorified by the Russian Church Abroad in 1981 and by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Jubilee Council of 2000, and are commemorated on July 4. The family's physician, Eugene Botkin, who refused freedom in order to stay with them, is glorified with them.

• St Martha, mother of St Symeon of the Wonderful Mountain (551)

  Martha of Antioch (†551) is the mother of Symeon the Stylite of the Wonderful Mountain, and one of the very few women in the calendar honoured neither as martyr nor as nun but as a mother — a married Antiochene laywoman whose whole sanctity lay in prayer, mercy and the giving of her child to God. Denied the virginity she had wanted, she was assured at the shrine of the Forerunner that her obedience would be blessed, vowed the child before his birth, and after her husband's death gave her nights to prayer with tears and her days to the poor, the sick, the dying and the newly baptised, for whom she sewed the white garments with her own hands. She was forewarned of her death a year before it, reposed in 551, and was buried at the foot of her son's mountain, where he built a chapel over her tomb and offered the Liturgy for her; her cult grew up beside his at the great Antiochene shrine. She is not the Martha who was mother of Symeon the Stylite the Elder.

• St Andrew (Rublev), iconographer (1430)

  Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 – 1428/1430) is the greatest of Russian iconographers and the only one the Church has glorified as a saint for the painting itself. A monk of the Spaso-Andronikov monastery in Moscow, formed in the spiritual world of Sergius of Radonezh and working for forty years beside his elder-companion Daniel the Black, he painted in the Annunciation cathedral of the Kremlin with Theophanes the Greek (1405), the Dormition cathedral at Vladimir (1408), and the Trinity cathedral of the Trinity–Sergius Lavra, for which he made, "in praise of Saint Sergius," the icon of the Holy Trinity — the most famous icon in the world and the standard against which the Stoglav council of 1551 ordered all later Trinities to be measured. He died at the Andronikov monastery and was buried there. Venerated from the fifteenth century and named a saint by the Life of Joseph of Volokolamsk's tradition, he was formally glorified in 1988, at the millennium of the Baptism of Rus, with his feast on July 4, the day of his patron Andrew of Crete.

• Andrew Bogoliubsky

  Andrew Bogoliubsky (c. 1111–1174), son of Yuri Dolgoruky and grandson of Vladimir Monomakh, is the great prince who moved the centre of gravity of the Russian lands from Kiev to Vladimir, and who is venerated as a passion-bearer for the manner of his death. He carried the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God north from Vyshgorod in 1155; at the place where the horses would go no further he founded Bogolyubovo, from which he takes his name, and there had the vision that produced the Bogolyubskaya icon. He built about thirty churches — the Dormition cathedral at Vladimir, the Golden Gate, the Intercession on the Nerl — sought a metropolitan see of his own from Constantinople, and established two feasts still kept by the Russian Church: the Protection of the Mother of God (October 1) and the All-Merciful Saviour (August 1). On the night of 29–30 June 1174 he was cut down in his own palace at Bogolyubovo by a conspiracy of his household; the Church keeps July 4, the day of his burial in the Dormition cathedral. His incorrupt relics were uncovered there in 1702.

• Donagus of Libya

  Donagus — the name appears in the English calendars as Donatus — is a hieromartyr, a priest or bishop put to death for Christ, commemorated on June 28 and located by the tradition in Libya, the Greek name for the African provinces west of Egypt. No account of his passion survives; the synaxarion preserves his name, his rank, and his country.

• Theodore of Cyrene

  Theodore, bishop of Cyrene in the Libyan Pentapolis, was a calligrapher — a copyist who wrote out the books of the Church with his own hand and gave them to the faithful — and it was for his books that he died. In the persecution of Diocletian he was denounced to the governor Dignianus by his own son Leo, and commanded to surrender the Scriptures and sacrifice; he refused, was beaten with rods and had his tongue cut out, and died of his wounds in prison about the year 310. Three women whom he had brought to Christ — Cyprilla, Aroa and Lucia — suffered with him or shortly after him. He is a hieromartyr of the same African province as the little-known Donagus (Donatus) of Libya, and is not to be confused with Theodotus, bishop of Cyrenia in Cyprus.

• Theodotus and Theodota of Caesarea

  Theodotus and Theodota are two martyrs of Caesarea in Cappadocia who suffered under the emperor Trajan — the calendars give the year as 108 — for refusing to offer sacrifice to the idols. Nothing beyond this is transmitted: no passion survives, no relationship between the two is stated, and no manner of death is recorded. They stand in the synaxarion for July 4, immediately after the Cappadocian chamberlain-martyr Hyacinth, whose commemoration falls on July 3 and with whom the Greek lists associate them.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Finbar, abbot of Innis Doimlile (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings