Apostles Silas and Silvanus of the Seventy

Saints commemorated

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  Apostles Silas and Silvanus of the Seventy

  On July 30 the Church keeps together four apostles of the Seventy whose names stand in the New Testament itself: Silas, the prophet and "chief man among the brethren" whom the Council of Jerusalem sent to Antioch with its decree and who then walked the whole of Paul's second journey with him — beaten at Philippi, singing in the stocks at midnight, and left at last as bishop of Corinth; Silvanus, whom the tradition makes bishop of Thessalonica and a martyr, and whose name Peter writes at the end of his first epistle; Crescens, whom Paul's last letter sends away to Galatia and whom the synaxarion follows into Gaul before his martyrdom under Trajan; and Epaenetus, "the firstfruits unto Christ," greeted in Romans 16 and remembered as first bishop of Carthage. With them on this day the Menaion names Andronicus, bishop of Pannonia, whose own feast is May 17. The four are of the first apostolic generation, and their history is exactly as long as the few verses in which they appear and the short notices the synaxaria have added to them.

• Hieromarytyr Polychronius, Bishop of Babylon, and those with him (251)

  Polychronius, bishop of Babylon, suffered in the persecution of Decius (249–251) with a company of his own clergy — the priests Parmenius, Helimenas and Chrysotelus and the deacons Luke and Mocius — and with a number of laymen of Persia. Brought before the emperor and required to sacrifice, he answered that Christians offer themselves in sacrifice to Christ and never worship the work of men's hands, and thereafter, when questioned again, kept silence altogether, so that the emperor had his mouth beaten in with stones. His priests and deacons were burned and then beheaded at Cordula. Two Persian nobles who were secretly Christians, Abdon and Sennen, gathered up the bodies and buried them by night, and for that were carried to Rome, thrown to the beasts — which would not touch them — and killed with the sword about the year 251. With them the synaxaria name Maximus and Olympius. The Church keeps the whole company on July 30.

• Venerable Angelina, Princess of Albania.

  Angelina was an Albanian nobleman's daughter who married the blinded and dispossessed despot Stephen Branković of Serbia, followed him through exile in Venetian Albania and northern Italy, buried him there, and then — twice widowed of a country, since Serbia itself had fallen to the Turks in 1459 — brought her sons and her husband's body north into Hungarian Syrmia to begin again. Both sons, George and John, are numbered among the saints; George became the monk and metropolitan Maximus, and with him Angelina founded the monastery of Krušedol in the Fruška Gora, the house that became the spiritual centre of the Serbs of the Danube for two centuries. She ended her days there as a nun, about 1520, and is venerated as Prepodobna mati Angelina, "our venerable mother Angelina" — the matriarch of the last Serbian ruling house and of its exile.

• Andronicus and Junia

  Andronicus and Junia are the two Christians of the first generation whom the Apostle Paul greets at Romans 16:7 as "my kinsmen and my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me" — the only persons in the New Testament of whom that last phrase is said. The Byzantine tradition numbers Andronicus among the Seventy and makes him bishop of Pannonia, and honours Junia with him as his synergos, his fellow-labourer in the Gospel; both are remembered as having suffered for Christ. Their relics, hidden in the persecutions and long anonymous, were brought to light outside Constantinople at the Gate of Eugenius, and identified there by revelation. They are kept on May 17, and again on February 22 with the finding of those relics, and Andronicus a third time on July 30 with his fellow-apostles of the Seventy.

• Herman of Solovki

  Herman was the first of the three founders of Solovki to reach the islands and the last of them to die: an unlettered hermit of the Karelian coast who was living by a chapel on the river Vyg when Sabbatius came north in 1429 looking for a place of solitude, and who told him of the empty island in the White Sea. The two crossed the sea together and settled under the Sekirnaya Hill, and lived there six years. After Sabbatius' repose Herman brought the young Zosimas across in 1436 and stayed with him while the monastery grew up around them; he was on the islands for more than fifty years, and outlived them both. Unable to read or write, he did the one thing that has mattered most to posterity: he called clerics and dictated his memories of Sabbatius and Zosimas, so that the Life of the founders of Solovki rests on the testimony of an eyewitness. He died at Novgorod in 1479 on one of the supply journeys he was still making in old age; when in 1484 his grave was opened to bring him home, the relics were found incorrupt, and that finding is his feast.

• John the Soldier

  John was a soldier of the imperial army under Julian the Apostate (361–363), enrolled in a detachment sent to hunt down Christians — and he used the commission to save them. He warned those about to be arrested, opened the way for prisoners to escape, carried help to the imprisoned and buried the dead, all the while passing among his fellow soldiers as a diligent persecutor. When the deception was discovered he was chained and sent to Constantinople to await the emperor's judgment; Julian fell in Persia before the case was heard, and John was released. He spent a long old age in almsgiving, fasting and prayer, and died in extreme age, and was buried among the poor and forgotten. Long afterwards he made himself known by appearing to a devout woman and naming his grave; his relics were taken up and laid in the church of St John the Theologian at Constantinople, where healings followed. In the Slavic world he became the patron of soldiers, the consoler of the sorrowing, and — by a usage as old as it is universal — the saint to whom one prays for the recovery of what has been stolen.

• Proculus, Ephebus, Apollonius and Abundius

  Three students from Athens — Proculus, Ephebus and Apollonius — had come to Rome to read rhetoric under the Greek master Craton, and were in his house on the night that Valentine, bishop of Interamna, straightened Craton's crippled son by prayer. All three were baptised with the household and became Valentine's disciples. After his beheading at Rome they carried his body north to Interamna and buried it on the Flaminian road; they stayed there preaching, and were taken by the consul Leontius and put to death by night, as their master had been. Abundius, son of the prefect of the city of Rome, whom Valentine had also converted and whose conversion had precipitated the bishop's arrest, came looking for them, found them dead, buried them beside Valentine — and was martyred in his turn. The four are kept with Valentine on July 30.

• Tsotne Dadiani

  Tsotne Dadiani was eristavi — duke — of Egrisi, the western Georgian principality of Odishi (Samegrelo, Mingrelia), in the middle of the thirteenth century, when Georgia lay under Mongol occupation. About the year 1246 the Georgian nobility met secretly at Kokhtastavi in Meskheti to plan a rising; the plot was betrayed, and the conspirators were seized and carried to Ani, where they were stripped, bound hand and foot, smeared with honey and laid out under the sun to be eaten by insects until they should confess and name their fellows. Tsotne had not been taken with them: he was absent from the meeting on its business. When he learned what was being done to his companions he rode to Ani, went in among them, took off his own clothes, bound himself, and lay down beside them. The Mongol commander, astonished past anger, questioned him, was told that he had come to share the punishment of men who had done nothing without him, and released the whole company. The Georgian Church glorified him on 26 October 1999, and keeps his memory on July 30.

• Valentine of Interamna

  Valentine was bishop of Interamna Nahars — the modern Terni in Umbria, some sixty miles north of Rome — in the third century, and was renowned for a gift of healing. Called to Rome by a Greek rhetorician named Craton, whose son lay crippled and beyond the physicians' help, he asked and was granted a night alone with the boy, and gave him back straightened and whole; whereupon Craton, his household, and the three Athenian students lodging with him — Proculus, Ephebus and Apollonius — received baptism, and after them Abundius, son of the prefect of the city. Denounced for turning the young men of Rome from the gods, Valentine was seized, scourged and beheaded by night, and his three disciples carried the body home to Interamna and buried it there. The Byzantine calendars keep him on July 30; the Latin West keeps him on February 14, where his memory has become entangled beyond disentangling with that of a Roman presbyter of the same name.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Tatwine, 9th archbishop of Canterbury (734)
• St. Ermengyth of Thanet, virgin (c.680)

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