20,000 Martyrs of Nicomedia

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  20,000 Martyrs of Nicomedia

• Saint of the day Antiochian commemoration

  The Twenty Thousand Martyrs burned to death in their church in Nicomedia (ca. 304).

  The Twenty Thousand Martyrs of Nicomedia were the great company of Christians who perished in the imperial capital of Bithynia at the opening of the Great Persecution, when — on the feast of the Nativity of Christ, about the year 302 — the emperor's soldiers surrounded the city's church while the faithful were gathered for the Liturgy, heaped it with fuel, and set it ablaze, so that the whole assembly was consumed by fire. Their bishop, Anthimus of Nicomedia, had first baptised the catechumens and given all Communion; he escaped the flames to be beheaded later, on September 3. The synaxaria join to the anonymous multitude a company of named sufferers of the same city and persecution — the priest Glycerius, the deacons Theophilus and Migdonius, Zeno, Dorotheus, Mardonius, Peter, Indes, Gorgonius, Euthymius, the abbess Agapia, and the women Domna and Theophila among them. The Church keeps them together on December 28, within the afterfeast of the Nativity.

• Our Holy Father Simon the Outpourer of Myrrh, Founder of Simonopetra Monastery, Mt Athos (1287)

  Simon the Myrrh-gusher (†c. 1287) was a hermit of Mount Athos and the founder of the monastery of Simonopetra — "Simon's Rock" — one of the great houses of the Holy Mountain, built upon a sheer pinnacle of rock above the sea. After years of solitary struggle in a cave, he was granted, on the eve of the Nativity, the vision of a star that came to rest over a neighbouring crag, and the voice of the Mother of God bidding him raise a monastery there; he named it New Bethlehem, and dedicated its church to the Nativity of Christ. His masons faltered before the terrifying site until a miracle — a workman who fell from the cliff yet rose unhurt — confirmed the Mother of God's protection. Renowned as a wonderworker in life, Simon after his repose was glorified by the myrrh that flowed from his tomb, whence his surname. He is commemorated on December 28.

• Ignatius of Lomsk

  Ignatius of Lomsk (†1591) was a Russian ascetic of the Vologda–Yaroslavl wilderness who, after monastic struggle in two of the great northern monasteries, withdrew into the forests to live in silence and founded a hermitage on the Lom river, from which he is named. Of his origins nothing is transmitted; the tradition places him first at the Priluki monastery near Vologda and then at the monastery of Saint Cyril of White Lake, before he sought the deeper solitude of the wilds. He reposed at his hermitage on December 28, 1591, and is numbered among the saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl.

• Nicanor the Deacon

  Nicanor was one of the seven deacons chosen by the Apostles in the first days of the Church at Jerusalem — the "seven men of good repute, full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom" set over the daily ministry to the widows (Acts 6:1–6) — and is numbered by the tradition among the Seventy Apostles. The received account holds that he was among the great company of Christians put to death in the persecution that broke out at the stoning of the Protomartyr Stephen, his fellow deacon, and so won a martyr's crown about the year 34. He is commemorated on December 28, and again on July 28 in the joint feast of the deacons Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, and Parmenas.

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