Ven. Sisoes the Great

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Sisoes the Great

  Sisoes, called the Schemamonk, was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra of the thirteenth century whose incorrupt relics rest in the Far (Theodosian) Caves. Of his life nothing is transmitted beyond what his name and his rank imply: that he bore the great schema, the highest degree of the monastic profession, and that he was remembered among the brethren for fasting — the service of the Caves fathers names him with St Gregory the Faster as one who subdued the passions of the flesh by abstinence. He is commemorated on July 6, the day of his heavenly patron Sisoes the Great, and with the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Saint of the day

  Sisoes the Great

  Sisoes the Great (†429) is among the most beloved of the Egyptian desert fathers, a monk of Scetis who after the repose of Anthony the Great withdrew to Anthony's own mountain by the Red Sea and dwelt there some seventy years. The Apophthegmata Patrum preserves a long chapter of his sayings, whose whole burden is humility: to a brother who boasted of the unceasing remembrance of God he answered that it is a far greater thing to reckon oneself beneath every creature. He raised a dead child by his prayer and hid the miracle; and at his repose, as the prophets, the apostles and Anthony himself came to receive him and his face shone like the sun, he begged the angels for a little more time to repent, saying he did not think he had yet begun. From that word grew the icon-type in which he stands appalled before the opened tomb of Alexander the Great.

• Holy Martyrs Marinus and Martha, and those with them (269)

  Marinus was a nobleman of Persia who, with his wife Martha and their two sons Audifax and Abbacum, distributed his goods to the poor and came on pilgrimage to Rome to pray at the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul. They arrived under Claudius II (268–270), in the thick of a persecution, and spent themselves in serving the confessors: they carried food and comfort into the prisons, and gathered and buried the bodies of the slain — by one account two hundred and sixty Christians killed together on the Salarian Way. For this the family was taken. Marinus and the two sons were beheaded, and Martha was drowned. With them are commemorated Cyrinus, Valentine the presbyter and Asterius.

• Isaurus the Deacon and Companions

  Isaurus was a deacon of Athens who, with five companions — Basil, Innocent, Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus — left the city and came to Apollonia in Macedonia, on the Via Egnatia, to preach Christ. They lodged in a cave outside the town and went in to the assemblies of the Christians; being discovered, they were brought before the magistrate and refused to sacrifice. Two men of the city itself, the brothers Rufus and Rufinus, confessed Christ at their trial and were condemned with them. All were beheaded, under the emperor Numerian (283–284).

• Juliana of Olshansk

  Juliana was the daughter of Prince Yuri Dubrovitsky-Olshansky, a Lithuanian-Rus' magnate of the early sixteenth century and a benefactor of the Kiev Caves Lavra. She died a virgin at the age of sixteen, and was buried near the Great Church of the Dormition. Long afterwards, monks digging a grave beside the church struck an unrecorded coffin and found her body incorrupt, lying as if asleep in a white dress sewn with gold and adorned with her ornaments, with an inscribed plate naming her. Healings followed at her shrine; a thief who stripped a jewel from the relics fell dead at the gate; and Metropolitan Peter Mogila, after a vision in which the saint reproached him for the little honour paid her, enshrined her with a solemn inscription. What survived the Lavra fire of 1718 was laid in the Near Caves, where it remains. Her feast is kept as the uncovering of her relics, on July 6.

• Lucia the Virgin and Rixius Varus

  Lucia was a virgin of Campania in southern Italy, consecrated to Christ from her youth, who was carried off as a captive by a Roman officer named Rixius Varus and taken far from her own country. He first pressed her to sacrifice to the idols and, failing, gave her and her companions a house of their own, where they lived some twenty years in prayer; and in the end the persecutor himself was won to Christ by what he had watched. When the persecution of Diocletian broke out, Lucia asked to return to Italy, and the two came to Rome, where the prefect condemned them, with a company of some twenty-two others, to be beheaded. She is not the Lucy of Syracuse kept on December 13.

• Monenna of Killeavy

  Monenna — called also Darerca, and locally Blinne — was one of the earliest and greatest of the holy women of Ireland, a contemporary of Patrick and Brigid, who founded and ruled the monastery of Killeavy (Cill Shléibhe, "the church of the mountain") at the foot of Slieve Gullion in what is now County Armagh. Her first community, in the account preserved of it, was eight virgins and a widow with an infant child; their rule was eremitical, taking Elijah and John the Forerunner as its models. Killeavy endured as a house of nuns for some seven hundred years. She reposed about 517, and her grave, her ruined church and her holy well are still visited on her day, the sixth of July.

• Quintus of Phrygia

  Quintus was a Phrygian, brought up a Christian, who settled in the district of Aeolis on the Asian coast and there gave himself to almsgiving and to the healing of the possessed. Under Aurelian (270–275) the governor Rufus attempted to compel him to sacrifice, and was himself seized by a demon; Quintus delivered him in the name of Christ and was released with gifts. Travelling toward Pergamum he was seized by the pagans of Cumae and tortured until an earthquake threw down their temple; a later magistrate, Clearchus, had his legs broken, and they were made whole again. He lived some ten years more, working miracles, and reposed in peace about the year 283 — a confessor, not a martyr.

• Sexburga of Ely

  Sexburga was a daughter of Anna, King of the East Angles, one of the most remarkable saint-bearing families of the English Church, and became Queen of Kent by her marriage to Eorcenberht. Widowed in 664, she founded the monastery of Minster-in-Sheppey on the Thames estuary and took the veil there. She afterwards went to Ely, where her sister Æthelthryth (Etheldreda) was abbess, and on her sister's death succeeded her in the rule. In 695 she carried out the translation of Æthelthryth's body, which was found incorrupt sixteen years after burial — the episode Bede records at length, and one of the foundation narratives of English monastic veneration. She reposed at Ely on 6 July 699.

• Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh

  The Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh is the common commemoration of the whole company of saints connected with the Trinity–Sergius Lavra and its founder, Sergius of Radonezh — his kinsmen, his disciples, the disciples of his disciples, and the hierarchs, princes, iconographers and monks who came out of that lineage across five centuries. More than a hundred names are included, from Sergius's parents Cyril and Maria in the fourteenth century to the Lavra's saints of the nineteenth. The feast was appointed for July 6, the day following the commemoration of the uncovering of the relics of St Sergius (July 5), so that the founder's feast opens directly into the feast of all who came after him.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Monenna the ‘daughter of Elijah’, Virgin, abbess, Foundress of Killeevy (517)
• Virgin-Martyr Noyala (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings