Martyr Dometius of Persia

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Dometius of Persia

  Dometius was a Persian by birth who came to faith in Christ through a Christian of his own household or acquaintance, and who — driven out by his own people for that faith — crossed the frontier into the Roman world, was baptised and tonsured at Nisibis, and afterwards lived as a monk and deacon at the monastery of Saints Sergius and Bacchus at Theodosiopolis. Fleeing the honour of the priesthood, he withdrew with two disciples to a cave on a bare mountain in the region of Cyrrhus in Syria, where the multitudes came to him for healing and where he turned many pagans to Christ. About the year 363, as the emperor Julian the Apostate passed that way on his Persian campaign, he sent soldiers who found the three at prayer in the cave and killed them — by the older Greek verse-synaxarion, stoned where they stood. He is honoured as a hosiomartyr, a venerable-martyr: a monk who ended as a witness in blood.

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Dometius of Persia (363) and two disciples

• Holy Martyrs Marinus the Soldier and Asterius the Senator (260)

  Asterius — Astyrius in the Greek of Eusebius — was a Roman senator, wealthy, of the highest standing, and a Christian, living under Valerian and Gallienus. Two things are remembered of him, both from Eusebius of Caesarea. At Caesarea Philippi (Paneas), at the pagan festival where a victim thrown into the spring of the Jordan was made to vanish by the demon of the place, Asterius prayed — and the sacrifice floated on the water in sight of all, so that the marvel ceased and the festival with it. And at Caesarea in Palestine, being present at the beheading of the soldier Marinus, he stripped off his senatorial robe, wrapped the martyr's head and body in it, and carried the relics away on his own shoulders to burial. For that act, the Byzantine tradition says, he was himself beheaded, about the year 260.

• Our Holy Father Or (Horus) of the Thebaid (390)

  Horus — Abba Or of the Egyptian sources — was one of the great fathers of the fourth-century desert: a solitary who spent his early years in complete withdrawal with fasting, prayer and the reading of the divine word; who was told by an angel, when he had grown old in that solitude, that God had appointed him for the salvation of many; and who thereafter received all who came, gathered brotherhoods about him, and founded several monasteries which together held as many as a thousand monks. He was unlettered from childhood and yet was given the grace of reading and expounding the Scriptures. He hid his own labours entirely, teaching by stories of temptation which he attributed to other desert-dwellers "personally known to him"; he never entered the refectory, and never ate on the day he received the Mysteries. He reposed in peace at ninety, about the year 390, with his mind unclouded to the last breath.

• Our Holy Father Pimen the Much-Ailing (1110)

  Pimen, surnamed the Much-Ailing (Mnogoboleznenny), is the monk of the Kiev Caves whose whole ascetic life was an illness. Born sick and never healthy, he begged his parents to bring him to the monastery; and when they, having brought him, began instead to pray for his cure, he prayed for the opposite — that his sickness might continue and that he might be tonsured. He was tonsured, the account says, by angels in the likeness of monks, who told him he would receive his health only on the day of his death. So it fell out: after twenty years of grievous suffering borne with joy, and often left days at a time without food or water by attendants worn out with him, he rose up whole, took leave of the brethren, communicated, prophesied over the graves of two monks, lay down on his bed and died. His relics rest in the Near (Antoniev) Caves, and he is commemorated on August 7.

• Alexander Hotovitzky

  Alexander Hotovitzky (1872 – autumn 1937), protopresbyter, was the builder-priest of Orthodox New York and, in his last years, the right hand of Patriarch Tikhon at the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow — a double service, American and Russian, sealed with a martyr's end in the Terror of 1937. For nineteen years he served the New York parish that became Saint Nicholas Cathedral, which he built; he founded parishes across the eastern states, edited the mission's journal, and was wounded by a fanatic's knife for his preaching. Recalled at last to Moscow, he stood by the Patriarch through the confiscations, was imprisoned and exiled repeatedly, and after a final arrest in the autumn of 1937 disappeared — presumed shot, on a date God alone keeps. The Church of Russia glorified him on 4 December 1994.

• Anthony of Optina

  Anthony (in the world Alexander Ivanovich Putilov) was born at Romanov on the Volga in 1795, the younger brother of Moses of Optina, and followed him into the Roslavl forests as a novice in 1816. In 1821 the two brothers came at the bishop's invitation to Optina and cut out of the pine wood the skete of Saint John the Forerunner, the cell-and-garden hermitage that would become the seedbed of the whole Optina eldership. Anthony was its superior for fourteen years (1825–1839), then for fourteen more the abbot of the monastery of Saint Nicholas at Maloyaroslavets; and through all of it he bore an ulcerated affliction of the legs so severe that he stood through services in agony and told almost no one. He was released from the abbacy in 1853, returned to Optina, took the great schema in March 1865, and died on 7 August of that year. He was glorified locally with the Optina elders in 1996 and for general veneration in 2000.

• Dometius of Philotheou

  Dometius, surnamed σημειοφόρος, "the sign-bearer" — the Greek epithet for an ascetic through whom God works signs — was a solitary of the Holy Mountain who lived in the wilderness within the bounds of the monastery of Philotheou and reposed in peace in the sixteenth century. He is remembered chiefly through another man: the New Martyr Damian (†1568), leaving the coenobium in search of a harder life, came and lived with him, and Damian's biographer describes his elder as "a sign-bearing man, Dometius by name," with whom the martyr spent nearly three years of fasting, vigil and hardship before going out to his own contest. Nothing else of Dometius is transmitted.

• Hyperechius of Egypt

  Hyperechius was one of those monks who joined to the faith the treasures of the Christian philosophy — a father of the desert generation whose memory rests not on marvels but on what he said. His Exhortation to Monks (Παραίνεσις ἀσκητῶν), a collection of about a hundred and sixty maxims arranged alphabetically, survives, as do sayings under his name in the Apophthegmata Patrum. The tradition remembers him as calm and gentle, a man whom the flame of anger seldom approached, and preserves as his characteristic word: "He who does not control his tongue in the time of anger will not control his passions either." He reposed in peace, full of the grace of God, in the late fourth or early fifth century, and is commemorated on August 7.

• Marinus of Caesarea

  Marinus was a soldier of the Roman army at Caesarea in Palestine who, in the reign of Valerian and Gallienus and about the year 260, was about to be promoted to the rank of centurion when a rival for the post denounced him: he was a Christian and would not sacrifice to the emperors, and so by the old law was disqualified. Given three hours by the judge to reconsider, he was taken by Theotecnus, bishop of Caesarea, into the church, where the bishop laid before him the sword at his side and the book of the Gospels, and bade him choose. Marinus took the Gospel, went back, confessed, and was beheaded. His body was taken up and buried by Asterius, a Roman senator who was present, and who was himself put to death for the act. Marinus is one of the few martyrs of the third century whose passion survives in the plain narrative of a contemporary historian rather than in a legendary acta.

• Mercurius of the Kiev Near Caves

  Mercurius was a monk of the Kiev Caves who was taken from the cave to the episcopal throne of Smolensk, and who died in his city under the Tatar sword — by the Russian reckoning in 1239, in the aftermath of Batu's invasion of Rus'. The tradition preserves one wholly characteristic detail: dying, he directed that his body be laid in a coffin and set adrift on the Dnieper, to be buried wherever it should come to land; the coffin floated down to the Caves monastery at Kiev, his own house of profession, and he was laid in the Near (Antoniev) Caves, where his relics rest. His memory is kept on August 7, and again on November 24 with the great-martyr whose name he bore.

• Metrophanes of Voronezh

  Metrophanes of Voronezh (1623–1703), in the world Michael and in the schema Macarius, was the first bishop of the newly erected see of Voronezh and one of the most venerated Russian hierarchs of the age of Peter the Great. A parish priest until his widowhood, he became a monk at forty, rose through the abbacies of two monasteries, and in 1682 was consecrated for Voronezh, which he governed for twenty years — building churches, reforming his clergy, caring for the poor, and supporting Peter's shipbuilding at Voronezh for the Azov campaign, while fearlessly rebuking the tsar over the pagan statues at his court. He died in 1703, having taken the schema; Peter himself bore his coffin. His relics were found incorrupt and he was glorified in 1832. He is commemorated on November 23.

• Narcissus of Jerusalem

  Narcissus was bishop of Jerusalem at the turn of the second and third centuries — the thirtieth or thirty-first from James the Brother of the Lord — and one of the few bishops of that period of whom a contemporary record survives. Eusebius, who had access to letters in his own hand, reports that he was already about eighty when he was made bishop; that he presided with Theophilus of Caesarea over the Palestinian synod on the keeping of Pascha; that at a Paschal vigil, the oil for the lamps having failed, he had water drawn from the wells and blessed it, and it served as oil and burned; that three men swore false accusations against him, each invoking a curse upon himself, and that he chose to withdraw into the desert rather than defend himself; that the three perished exactly as they had sworn; and that he returned, was received back, and — being past a hundred — was given Alexander as coadjutor. He reposed in peace at about 116 years.

• Nicanor of Mount Callistratus

  Nicanor (baptised Nicholas) was born at Thessalonica in 1491 to wealthy and devout parents, John and Maria, of the parish of Saint Menas; having given away his inheritance at their deaths he was tonsured, ordained deacon and priest, and was being groomed for high office in the church of Thessalonica when — about the age of twenty-seven — he heard a call in prayer, phrased in the words spoken to Abraham, to go out from his country and his kindred to the mountain of Callistratus in western Macedonia. There he lived sixteen years as a solitary before founding, on the site where he had uncovered an icon of the Saviour hidden since the iconoclast persecution, the monastery of the Transfiguration at Zavorda, above the Haliacmon in the Grevena country. He taught and healed among the Greek villages under Ottoman rule for the rest of his life, and reposed, having foreknown his death, on 7 August 1549. His relic remains at Zavorda, and the monastery bears his name.

• Potamia the Wonderworker

  Potamia is a saint of the Byzantine calendar known from a single line: she was perfected by the sword. Neither her country, her century, the persecution under which she suffered, nor any circumstance of her passion is transmitted. What the tradition does transmit besides the fact of her martyrdom is the epithet Θαυματουργός, "the Wonderworker," and the couplet appointed for her in the synaxarion, which plays on her name: slain for Christ by the sword, Potamia pours out rivers (ποταμοί) of wonders. She is kept on August 7. This entry is short because the record is short, and nothing has been supplied to lengthen it.

• Theodora of Sihla

  Theodora is the great woman hermit of the Romanian mountains: born at Vânători in the county of Neamț in the first half of the seventeenth century, daughter of Ștefan Joldea, a guard of the fortress of Neamț; married, childless, and — by mutual consent with her husband Eleutherius — separated from him so that both might enter monasteries. She was tonsured at the skete of Vărzărești; driven out by the Turkish raids she became a hesychast in the mountains of Buzău under a schema-nun, Paisia; and when Paisia died she was directed to the mountains of Neamț, where the abbot of Sihăstria sent her to try the wilderness of Sihla for a year. She stayed about thirty, in a cell and afterwards in a cave in the rocks, alone, her food a little rusk and the herbs of the forest, her water the rain gathered in a hollow of the rock. She was discovered, at the end, by birds carrying crumbs up the mountain and by a pillar of light over the place; a priest was sent, she made her confession of faith, communicated, said "Glory to God for all things," and died. She was canonised by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992.

• Theodosius the New of the Peloponnese

  Theodosius, called the New to distinguish him from the great Palestinian cenobiarch, and the Healer (ἰαματικός) from the miracles at his tomb, was born at Athens in 862 of Christian parents. Having given his property to the poor he withdrew to a place outside the city; and when even there the crowds of enquirers denied him quiet, he crossed into the Peloponnese and settled near Argos, where he built a church of the Honourable Forerunner at Panariti. Envious clergy denounced him to Peter, bishop of Argos, as a sorcerer; the matter was settled by a vision and by a sign — Theodosius came to meet the bishop censing him with live coals carried in his monastic cap, which neither burned the cap nor his hand — and Peter, convinced, ordained him deacon and priest. He lived to great old age, foreknew his death by three days, and reposed with the words Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. His tomb in the church of the Forerunner became an inexhaustible fountain of healings.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Donat (Dunwyd) of Llandunwyd, Glamorgan (6th C)

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