Greatmartyr Euphemia; Blessed Princess Olga

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Greatmartyr Euphemia

  Euphemia the All-praised (†304) is the great-martyr of Chalcedon, a senator's daughter who suffered under the proconsul Priscus in the last great persecution and died in the arena, wounded by a she-bear after fire, wheel and water had left her unharmed. Her fame rests above all on the miracle of 451: the Fourth Ecumenical Council met in her basilica at Chalcedon, and when the orthodox and the Monophysite definitions of faith were laid in her coffin, she was found holding the orthodox tome — whence she is honoured as the seal and patroness of the Council of Chalcedon. Her relics rest today in the patriarchal church of Saint George at the Phanar in Constantinople. She is commemorated on September 16 (martyrdom) and July 11 (the miracle of 451).

• Saint of the day

  Blessed Princess Olga

• New Martyrs Nikodemos (1722) and Nektarios (1820)

• St Sophrony of Essex (1993) (June 28 OC)

• Arcadius of Novotorzhok

  Arcadius (†13 December 1077) was a young man of Vyazma who left his home to follow the Hungarian nobleman Ephraim, founder of the monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb at Novy Torg (Torzhok) on the upper Tvertsa. Before his tonsure he lived as a fool-for-Christ, begging his bread and sleeping in the forest or on a church porch; after it he was known for an obedience to his elder so complete that the Russian tradition holds it up as the pattern of the thing, and for silence, fasting and unbroken attendance at the services. He outlived Ephraim by nearly a quarter of a century. His relics were found in 1572 and enshrined in 1677, and he is kept with Ephraim as one of the two patrons of Torzhok and among the saints of Tver and Smolensk.

• Barbara

  Barbara the Great-martyr (†c. 306) is one of the most beloved of the virgin-martyrs of the early Church, honoured throughout East and West. The daughter of a wealthy pagan, Dioscorus, who shut her in a tower to guard her beauty and her idolatry, she reasoned her way from the created world to the one God, was secretly baptised, and confessed the Holy Trinity by having a third window cut into the bathhouse her father was building. Denounced by Dioscorus himself, she was tortured under the prefect Martianus at Heliopolis; the martyr Juliana, a bystander moved to confess Christ, suffered with her. At the last her own father struck off her head — and was consumed by lightning as he came down from the mountain. From this Barbara is invoked against sudden and unprovided death, and is the patroness of miners, gunners, and artillerymen. She is commemorated on December 4.

• Kindeas of Pamphylia

  Kindeas (Cindeus) was a presbyter of the village of Talmenia in the territory of Side in Pamphylia, put to death by fire in the persecution about the year 290. The short synaxarion account is remembered less for the manner of his death than for two details of his bearing on the way to it: he paid the woodcutter whose faggots the soldiers had seized to burn him, and when the man fell ill he carried the wood to his own pyre on his own back. The fire, the account says, was quenched by a sudden storm, and he gave up his spirit unburnt; the pagan priest who had watched him was converted with his wife and buried him.

• Leo of Mandra

  Leo "of the Mandra" is one of the many saints of the Byzantine calendar who survive in a single line. The Synaxarion of Constantinople commemorates him on July 11 with a couplet and the formula that he "was perfected in peace" — that is, that he died a monk's death and not a martyr's. Neither his century, nor his country, nor the identity of the mandra in which he lived is transmitted. He is recorded here at the length the record allows, and no more.

• Nectarius of Vryoulla

  Nektarios was a young Greek of Vryoulla (Vourla) in the country of Ephesus who, at seventeen, denied Christ under the pressure of a plague and a lie, was disowned by his own mother for it, and spent the rest of his short life undoing it. Tonsured at the Skete of St Anne on Mount Athos under the elder Hatzi-Stephanos, he returned to the town of his denial, confessed himself a Christian before the Turkish authorities, and was beheaded on Sunday, 11 July 1820 — his twenty-first birthday. His elder recovered the skull and carried it back to St Anne's, where it is kept. He belongs to that Athonite generation of new martyrs who were deliberately trained for martyrdom on the Holy Mountain and sent back to die where they had fallen.

• Nicodemus of Vatopedi

  Nicodemus of Vatopedi (†c. 1319–1322) was an ascetic of the Holy Mountain, remembered chiefly because it was he who received the young Gregory Palamas on Athos, tonsured him, and formed him for three years in fasting, vigil and unceasing prayer. Born Nikephoros and first a monk on Mount Auxentius near Chalcedon, he was driven from Bithynia by the Turkish raids and settled in a cell near the monastery of Vatopedi. Philotheos Kokkinos, who wrote the life of his disciple, calls him a man wonderful alike in practice and in contemplation. He died a few years after Gregory came to him, and is commemorated on July 11.

• Nicodemus the Albanian

  Nicodemus (†11 July 1722) was a Christian of Vithkuq in southern Albania who, wanting a fourth marriage the canons would not give him, apostatised to Islam and drew his children after him. Pursuing to Mount Athos the one son whom Christians had carried off to save him, he was converted instead, became a monk of Vatopedi, and passed three years of hard penance in the skete of Saint Anna. Blessed by the elder Acacius of Kavsokalyvia and sent back, he returned to Berat, confessed Christ publicly in the place where he had denied Him, and was beheaded there on this day. He is one of the best-loved of the Albanian new-martyrs, and is counted with the great company of Athonite new-martyrs of the Ottoman centuries.

• Olga of Kiev

  Olga (†11 July 969), Grand Princess of Kiev and in holy baptism Helen, is the first ruler of the Rus to be baptised and the first saint of the Russian land. Widow of Prince Igor, murdered by the Drevlians in 945, she avenged him with a ferocity the chronicle records without apology, then governed the realm for her infant son Svyatoslav with a statecraft that gave the Rus their first fixed administration. About 955–957 she went to Constantinople and was baptised there, the emperor Constantine VII standing as her godfather. She could not bring her son or her people with her to the faith, and died still, in the chronicler's phrase, "the forerunner of the Christian land, as the dawn before the sun." Her grandson Vladimir baptised the Rus twenty years later. She is styled Equal-to-the-Apostles, and is commemorated on July 11.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Drostan, abbot of Old Deer (610)
• St. Thurketyl, abbot of Crowland (975)
• St. Amabilis (c.634)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings