Greatmartyr Procopius of Caesarea

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day Antiochian commemoration

  Greatmartyr Procopius of Caesarea

  Procopius (†303) is the most celebrated of the soldier-martyrs of Palestine and one of the great martyrs of the Eastern Church. The developed passion knows him first as Neanias, a young officer of a Roman senatorial family of Jerusalem, whom Diocletian appointed to Alexandria with a commission to break the Christians there. On the road he was arrested by a vision of the Cross and the voice of the crucified Christ — a deliberate re-telling of the conversion of St Paul on the Damascus road — and returned a Christian. He was tried and tortured at Caesarea in Palestine, and in the course of his passion his pagan mother Theodosia and twelve women of senatorial rank were converted by his constancy and beheaded before him; he himself was beheaded on July 8, 303. Behind the legend stands the sober notice of Eusebius, who names a Procopius as the first to die at Caesarea in the Great Persecution; the Byzantine calendar keeps that man separately, as Procopius the Reader, on November 22.

• Appearance of the "Kazan" icon of the Most Holy Theotokos (1579)

• St Procopius, Fool for Christ (1303)

  Procopius of Ustyug (†1303) is the first fool-for-Christ of the Russian land and the patron of Great Ustyug in the far north. By the tradition of his Life he was a wealthy merchant "of the Varangians" — a Hanseatic German of the Latin confession — who came trading to Novgorod, was overcome by the beauty of Orthodox worship, was received into the Church, gave away everything he had, and, to escape the honour his conversion had won him, went east into the wilderness and settled at Ustyug, where for some forty years he lived on the cathedral porch in rags, sleeping on dunghills, taking food only from the honest poor, and carrying three wooden pokers in his hand. In 1290 his prayer before the icon of the Annunciation in the Dormition cathedral was held to have turned aside a rain of burning stones from the city. He foretold the birth of Stephen of Perm, and died in a summer snowfall on the night of July 8, 1303. The Council of Moscow of 1547 glorified him — the first of the Russian holy fools to be canonised.

• Epictetus and Astion

  Epictetus, a priest and monk, and Astion, the young nobleman he converted, are the protomartyrs of the land that is now Romania: two ascetics from Bithynia who crossed the Black Sea to the Roman frontier fortress of Halmyris on the Danube delta in Scythia Minor, lived there some seventeen years in prayer, healing and preaching, and were beheaded together on July 8, 290, under the persecution conducted by the commander Latronianus. Their Latin passion is one of the oldest hagiographic documents of the lower Danube, and their story has an unusual epilogue: Astion's pagan parents, coming from Bithynia to look for their son, were converted by the account of his death and baptised by the bishop of Tomis. In 2001 archaeologists excavating the basilica of Halmyris found beneath its altar a crypt containing the bones of two men, both decapitated — an identification the Romanian Church accepted, and the relics are now enshrined at Murighiol.

• Mirdat of Kartli

  Mirdat, king of Kartli (Iberia, eastern Georgia) about 408–410, is honoured by the Georgian Church as the first of its martyred kings. Reared by his grandfather King Trdat in the Christian faith and in the memory of Georgian independence, he used his short reign to throw off the Persian tribute and to recover Klarjeti from Byzantine control, and then took the field against the Persians. He was defeated near Gardabani and taken alive. The Persian king required him to renounce Christ; he refused, was tortured and loaded with chains, and died of his sufferings in prison. His memory is kept on July 8.

• Theophilus the Myrrh-gusher

  Theophilus (†1548) was a learned Macedonian who served the Ecumenical Patriarchate, refused a metropolitan see, and ended his life as a hermit of Mount Athos in a small cell near Karyes. He is remembered for the manner of his death: foreseeing it, he charged his disciple to treat his body with contempt — to drag it out of the cell and throw it into a ravine — so that no honour should come to him after death. The disciple obeyed; but the body was found, and myrrh flowed from it, so that the very self-abasement he had commanded became the occasion of his glory. His relics were taken to the monastery of the Pantokrator on Athos, and the Church styles him Myroblytes, the myrrh-gusher.

British Isles and Ireland

• Blessed King Edgar the Peaceable (975)
• St. Urith of Chittlehampton (6th C)
• St. Morwenna, Patron of Morwenstow (6th C)
• Hieromartyr Killian, Irish missionary bishop to the Franks, who suffered at Wurzburg (689)
• St. Withburga, anchoress at East Dereham (c.743)
• St. Grimbald, abbot of Winchester (901)
• St. Sunniva of Bergen and her Companions (10th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings