Martyr Emilian of Silistria

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Emilian of Silistria

  Emilian was a young man of servile condition in Dorostolum (Durostorum) on the lower Danube — the Roman legionary city that is now Silistra in Bulgaria — who was burned to death there on 18 July 362, in the brief pagan restoration of the emperor Julian the Apostate. Learning that the imperial commissioner had come to enforce sacrifice, he went by night into the city's temple, shattered the idols and overturned the altars; and when an innocent countryman was seized for the deed, he came forward and claimed it as his own rather than let another suffer. Scourged before the vicar Capitolinus and condemned to the flames, he was, the passion relates, untouched by the fire that killed the pagans standing near it, and lay down of his own will upon the embers to die. The wife of his master, a secret Christian, buried him. He is one of the very last martyrs of the Roman persecutions and one of the chief saints of the Danubian church.

• St Pambo, hermit of Egypt (374? 386?)

  Pambo (c. 303 – c. 375) was one of the founding fathers of the desert of Nitria, the great monastic settlement south-west of the Delta, and one of the most quoted elders of the Apophthegmata Patrum. He came to the desert unlettered, asked a brother to teach him a psalm, heard the verse "I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue" — and refused to be taught the next verse until he had learned to do that one, which by his own account he was still learning nineteen years later. Out of that beginning came the two things for which the desert remembered him: an absolute economy of speech, so that he would sometimes take months to answer a question, and a face that shone, which the fathers set beside the face of Moses. Antony the Great said of him that by the fear of God he had made the Holy Spirit dwell in him. He taught Dioscorus, Ammonius, Eusebius and Euthymius — the "Tall Brothers" of the Origenist controversy — received Melania the Elder when she came out of Rome to the desert, and died weaving a basket, saying that he was going to the Lord as one who had not yet begun to serve God.

• Hyacinth of Amastris

  Hyacinth was a martyr of Amastris in Paphlagonia — the Black Sea port that is now Amasra in northern Turkey — whose short notice in the synaxaria is remembered chiefly for two things: that he was named by an angel, and that as a child of three he prayed a dead infant back to life. Grown up in the ascetic life together with the child he had raised, he came upon his townsmen worshipping a sacred tree and cut it down. For this he was seized and tortured: his teeth were struck out, he was bound with ropes and dragged along the ground, and he was thrown into prison, where he died of his wounds. His memory is kept on July 18.

• John the Long-suffering of the Kiev Caves

  John the Long-suffering (†18 July 1160) was a recluse of the Near Caves of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev whose whole ascetic life was one prolonged war against the passion of the flesh. Denied relief by fasting, thirst and iron chains, he shut himself into a cave beside the relics of Antony of the Kiev Caves, stayed there thirty years, and in one Great Lent had himself buried standing in the earth up to the shoulders for the whole of the fast, his legs burning as though in fire. On the night of Pascha a fiery serpent that had tormented him for days took his head into its jaws; he cried out, and at a flash of lightning it vanished, and a voice told him that the trial had been sent to purify him as gold is purified, and that heavy work is given to strong servants. He is the saint to whom the Orthodox traditionally turn in temptations of impurity, and his relics lie in the cave where he fought.

• Pambo of the Kiev Caves

  Pambo the Recluse was a hieromonk of the Caves monastery at Kiev who was taken captive by the Tatars in the years of the Mongol conquest, held and tortured for refusing to renounce Christ, and — the tradition of the Lavra says — carried back miraculously into his own cell. He ended his life in enclosure and reposed in 1241, the year after the fall of Kiev. His relics rest in the Far Caves, those of St Theodosius, and he is commemorated on July 18, the same day as his namesake Pambo of Nitria, for whom he was named.

• Stephen II of Constantinople

  Stephen II, metropolitan of Amasea in Pontus and afterwards Ecumenical Patriarch, held the throne of Constantinople from 925 until his death on 18 July 928, in the ascendancy of the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos. He succeeded Nicholas Mystikos and inherited a church only just healed of the schism over the fourth marriage of Leo the Wise, which the Tomos of Union of 920 had closed. The Greek synaxaria keep his memory on the day of his repose together with John, Metropolitan of Chalcedon, a confessor of whom almost nothing survives beyond the fact of his confession.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Theneva of Glasgow, mother of St. Kentigern (Mungo) (6th C)
• SS Edburgh of Bicester and Edith, virgins (c.650)
• St. Minnborinus of Cologne (986)

Troparia & kontakia

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