Hieromartyr Eleutherius of Illyria; St Stephen of Surozh

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Hieromartyr Eleutherius of Illyria

• Saint of the day

  St Stephen of Surozh

  Stephen the Confessor (8th century) was archbishop of Surozh — Byzantine Sougdaia, the modern Sudak on the south-eastern coast of the Crimea — and one of the earliest hierarchs of that peninsula honoured by the Church. A Cappadocian by birth and educated at Constantinople, he lived thirty years as a hermit before Patriarch Germanus of Constantinople consecrated him for Surozh, where his preaching is said to have won the whole city and its region to the faith. A resolute defender of the holy icons, he refused the iconoclast demands of the emperor Leo III the Isaurian, and was imprisoned and tortured at Constantinople, being freed only after the emperor's death. He returned to his see and died in old age; his tomb became a place of miracles, and the tradition attaches to it the early conversion of the Rus' prince Bravlin.

• Antiochian commemoration

  Eleutherius of Illyricum

  Eleutherius was a young bishop of Illyricum martyred at Rome under the emperor Hadrian (117–138), traditionally about the year 120. Born of an illustrious Roman family and raised in the faith by his widowed mother Anthia, he was advanced to holy orders while still a boy — deacon at fifteen and, the synaxarion says, bishop of Illyricum at twenty — and won renown for the boldness of his preaching. Arrested for confessing Christ, he was subjected to a succession of torments — a heated iron bed, a gridiron, a fiery furnace — from which the tradition reports he emerged unharmed, converting his own persecutors; he was at last beheaded, and his mother, embracing his body, was slain over it. His name — from the Greek for "free" or "deliverer" — made him a patron especially invoked by women in childbirth.

• Holy Martyr Eleutherius the Cubicularius (4th c.)

  Eleutherius was a cubicularius — a chamberlain of the imperial bedchamber — at the court of Byzantium in the last age of the persecutions, a man of wealth and high place who was baptised and thereafter lived, in the emperor's own household, the life of a Christian ascetic: psalmody, almsgiving, and a church built at his own expense on his country estate. Denounced to the emperor by one of his own servants, he refused every inducement to sacrifice and was beheaded, about the years 305–311. His body, cast out to the dogs and the birds, was left untouched and was recovered and buried by a priest. He is commemorated on August 4, and again in the Slavonic books on December 15 among the company of the hieromartyr Eleutherius of Illyricum, with whom he is easily and often confused.

• Holy Martyr Bacchus the New (787)

• Our Venerable Father Tryphon of Kola, apostle of Laponia (1583), and his disciple the Holy Martyr Jonah (1590)

• John Psychaites

  John, called Psychaites from the monastery in which he lived, was a monk of the Lavra of Psicha near Constantinople in the last years of the eighth century and the first of the ninth, and one of the confessors of the holy icons. He had entered the monastery young, and the fame of his ascetic life and of the healings and exorcisms worked through his prayers had spread beyond it when the imperial power required of him a signature renouncing the veneration of images. He refused it, and called the emperor by his name — a heretic — to his face. For that he was arrested, ill-used and sent into banishment, and by the transmitted account he died in exile. His memory is kept on May 26 in the Slavic calendars and on May 7 in Greek usage.

• Paul of Latros

  Paul the Younger (†955) was a hermit and monastic founder of Mount Latros (the ancient Latmos), the range above Miletus in western Asia Minor that became one of the great monastic centres of the middle Byzantine period. Born near Pergamum and orphaned young, he was schooled in a Phrygian monastery and, after his mother's death, gave himself wholly to the ascetic life at Latros, withdrawing at length into a cave. Renowned for clairvoyance and wonderworking, he was consulted by letter by the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus; he twice retired to the island of Samos, where he founded a monastery and restored three others ruined in the Arab raids. Foretelling his end, he reposed in 955.

British Isles and Ireland

• Offa, King of Essex, monk (c.709)
• St. Florentius (Flann), abbot of Bangor (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings