Martys Trophimus, Theophilus and Companions

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martys Trophimus, Theophilus and Companions

  Trophimus, Theophilus and thirteen who suffered with them are a company of martyrs of the Great Persecution under Diocletian, put to death in Lycia on the southern coast of Asia Minor about the year 305. The synaxarion account is short and follows a shape familiar from the Lycian and Pamphylian passions: brought to trial together, they confessed Christ with one voice and refused the sacrifice; their legs were broken and they were thrown into a fire, out of which they came unhurt and praised Christ the louder; and the judge, unable to break them, had them beheaded. They are kept on July 23 by the Slavonic calendars and by the OCA, and are the principal commemoration of that day in Antiochian and Russian usage.

• Hieromartyr Apollinarius, bishop of Ravenna (75)

• Holy Prophet Ezekiel (6th c. BC)

• Righteous Anna (Hannah), mother of the prophet Samuel Righteous Anna (Hannah), mother of the prophet Samuel

• Anna of Leukadion

  Anna, called also Susanna, was a noblewoman of Constantinople born in 840, in the last years of the iconoclast emperor Theophilus. Orphaned young and left a great estate, she spent it on the poor; and when a wealthy Hagarene of the capital sought her in marriage and obtained the emperor's own consent to the match, she refused him, endured his persecution, and prayed to be delivered — a deliverance that came, the account says, when her suitor was struck down and died. She then withdrew to a church of the Mother of God in the quarter called Leukadion (or Leukate), and lived there some fifty years in fasting, vigil and prayer until a light illness took her to God. Her relics were later found whole and fragrant, and healings were worked at them. The Greek Menaion keeps her memory on July 23.

• Apollinaris of Ravenna

  Apollinaris is the first bishop and the protomartyr of Ravenna, the Adriatic city that became the capital of the Western empire and then the seat of Byzantine rule in Italy. The tradition received by the Church makes him an Antiochene, a disciple of the Apostle Peter, whom he followed to Rome and who sent him to preach at Ravenna in the reign of Claudius; there he healed, baptised, built up a church, was five times tried, tortured, banished and recalled, and died of a last beating outside the city walls after twenty-eight years as bishop. Modern historians doubt almost every date in that account and place him a century or more later; what is not doubted is the antiquity and force of his cult, which raised over his grave the basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, whose sixth-century apse still shows him standing with his hands lifted in prayer among the sheep of his flock. The East keeps him on July 23.

• Apollonius of Rome

  Apollonius, called the Apologist, was a Roman of senatorial rank who was denounced as a Christian under Commodus, about the year 185, and who answered the charge not by denial nor by silence but by reading out before the prefect and the Senate a written defence of the faith — one of the earliest Christian apologies known to have been delivered to the Roman state itself. The book is lost; Eusebius had it and quoted from the record of the trial, and Jerome names him among the ecclesiastical writers. He was condemned under the standing law against Christians and put to death. The Byzantine calendars keep him on July 23, where the Greek synaxarion names him with the bishops of Ravenna; the Latin West keeps him on April 21.

• Phocas of Sinope

  Phocas was bishop of Sinope, the great harbour city of the southern Black Sea coast, and died a martyr there in the year 117, in the persecution at the end of Trajan's reign: refusing to renounce Christ, he was tortured and shut into a bath-house heated to fury, where he gave up his spirit. Styled "the Wonderworker" in the synaxaria, he became one of the most beloved saints of the Black Sea world — the patron of seafarers, invoked daily by those in peril on the waters, and a defender against fire and drowning. His relics were translated to Constantinople in 404, and his feast is kept on September 22.

• Theodore Ushakov

  Theodore Ushakov (1745–1817) was the admiral who created the Russian Black Sea fleet and never lost to it a battle, a ship, or a man into captivity — and who, having commanded in forty-three engagements, ended his life in prayer and almsgiving beside the walls of the Sanaksar monastery, where his uncle Theodore of Sanaksar had been abbot. He broke the Ottoman fleets at Fidonisi, Kerch, Tendra and Kaliakra; he took Corfu in 1799 in an assault from the sea that Suvorov envied him; and in the Ionian Islands he set up, with the counsel of the local clergy, a Christian polity that returned the islanders their churches. Refused advancement, he resigned in 1807, withdrew to the country by Sanaksar, gave away what he had to the widows and orphans of the fleet and to prisoners of the Napoleonic wars, and died in 1817. The Russian Church glorified him in 2001 as a righteous warrior, not for his victories but for his mercy; he is honoured as the patron of the Russian navy, and his glorification is kept on July 23.

• Vitalis of Ravenna

  Vitalis is the martyr in whose honour the emperor Justinian's mosaic masterpiece, the Basilica of San Vitale at Ravenna, was raised over the reputed place of his death, and whose figure stands in its apse receiving the martyr's crown from the hand of Christ. The tradition makes him a citizen — by some accounts a soldier — of Milan, husband of Valeria and father of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, who came to Ravenna in the train of the judge Paulinus, encouraged the martyr Ursicinus not to falter, buried him honourably, was denounced for it, racked, and then thrown into a pit and buried alive under stones and earth. The Greek synaxarion of July 23 keeps him with Apollinaris and styles both of them "bishops of Ravenna," a title the Western sources never give him; his own place, date and even his existence as distinct from other martyrs of the name are matters of long scholarly doubt, and the entry sets them out.

Troparia & kontakia

Readings