Hieromartyr Cyprian, Martyrs Justina and Theoctistus; Bl. Andrew, Fool-for-Christ

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Hieromartyr Cyprian, Martyrs Justina and Theoctistus

  Cyprian and Justina (†c. 304) are the protagonists of one of the most famous of all passiones: Cyprian, the great sorcerer of Antioch, hired to bend the Christian virgin Justina to a suitor's desire, found every demon he sent against her shattered by the sign of the Cross, renounced the devil, burned his books of magic, and rose from penitent to bishop; in Diocletian's persecution the two were tortured and finally beheaded together at Nicomedia, with the bystander Theoctistus who confessed Christ at their death. Honestly told, their story is a fourth-century Christian romance whose historicity the scholars doubt — yet its cultus is ancient and universal, and its tale of the magician who found sorcery powerless against the Cross made Cyprian the Church's patron against enchantment and a distant ancestor of the Faust legend.

• Saint of the day

  

  Bl. Andrew, Fool-for-Christ

  Andrew the Fool-for-Christ (†936, by the traditional reckoning) is the most famous of the Byzantine "fools" — a Scythian (Slav) slave in Constantinople who, obeying a vision of Christ, feigned madness and lived for decades on the capital's streets in rags, mocked and beaten, secretly ascetic and clairvoyant. His Life, written by Nikephoros, a priest of Hagia Sophia, recounts his rapture into paradise and, above all, the vision at the Blachernae church in which he and his disciple Epiphanios saw the Theotokos spreading her shining veil in protection over the praying people — the vision from which the feast of the Protection of the Theotokos (October 1) arose. The Life's date and authorship are among hagiography's celebrated problems, recorded honestly below.

• Saint of the day

  Hieromartyr Cyprian and Virgin-Martyr Justina (304).

• St Cassian the Greek, Wonderworker of Uglich (1504)

  Cassian was a Greek prince of the Crimea who became a Russian hermit. Born into the ruling house of Mangup — the principality of Theodoro in the Crimean highlands, the last fragment of Byzantine Gothia — and baptised Constantine, he came to Moscow in 1472 in the retinue of Sophia Palaiologina, the Byzantine bride of Ivan III, in the very years when his homeland was being extinguished by the Ottomans. He refused the estates and the boyar's rank the grand prince offered him, followed Archbishop Ioasaph of Rostov into the Ferapontov monastery on the White Lake, and was tonsured there with the name Cassian. Afterwards he withdrew to the Volga and founded, on the little river Uchma below Uglich, the hermitage of the Dormition that bore his name for four and a half centuries. He reposed on 2 October 1504, and is invoked in Russia especially for diseases of the eyes and the teeth and in fevers. He is kept a second time on May 21, because that is the feast of the emperor whose name he bore in the world.

• Anna of Kashin

  Anna of Kashin (c. 1280–1368) was Grand Princess of Tver in the worst years that principality ever knew, and the only saint in the history of the Russian Church to have been formally de-canonised. Daughter of the prince of Rostov and wife of the martyred Grand Prince Michael of Tver, she outlived husband, sons and grandson, all destroyed in the long ruin of Tver by the Horde and by Moscow; and at the end she was tonsured a nun — as Sophia at Tver, and in the great schema as Anna at Kashin, in the monastery her youngest son had built — and reposed there on October 2, 1368. Her relics were uncovered in 1649 and translated with great solemnity on June 12, 1650; in 1677 a council under Patriarch Joachim annulled the whole veneration, because the Old Believers were appealing to the two-fingered blessing of her incorrupt hand; and her people went on venerating her regardless until, on June 12, 1909, she was glorified a second time. She is invoked as the patron of widows.

• 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.

• Theophilus the Confessor

  Theophilus the Confessor (†716, as the calendars transmit the date) was a monastic of Mount Selention who suffered for the holy icons at the outbreak of iconoclasm. A monk from the age of sixteen and later founder of a monastery near his home country, he openly resisted the iconoclast policy of the emperor Leo the Isaurian: he was beaten, led bound through the city, and given over to an official named Hypatius to be broken — whom Theophilus instead converted to the veneration of the icons, defending them from the brazen serpent of Moses, the cherubim of the Ark, and the Image of Edessa. Released, he returned to his monastery and reposed in peace soon after. The Greek synaxaria commemorate him on October 2, the Slavic books on October 10, and his transmitted dates contain a chronological knot recorded honestly below.

Troparia & kontakia

Readings