Leavetaking of Theophany

Saints commemorated

• St Nino of Georgia

  Nina (Nino, c. 280 – c. 335) is the Enlightener of Georgia, the Equal-to-the-Apostles whose preaching converted the kingdom of Iberia (eastern Georgia) to Christ in the first quarter of the fourth century. A Cappadocian by birth, kinswoman of the Great-martyr George and, by the Georgian tradition, niece of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, she came to Iberia a lone captive maiden, bearing a cross of grapevine twigs bound with her own hair. By healing, prayer, and the quiet witness of her ascetic life she won first the poor and the sick, then Queen Nana, whom she cured, and at last King Mirian, struck blind and lost in a sudden darkness while hunting and restored to sight when he called upon "the God of Nina." Iberia was declared a Christian kingdom about the year 326; a bishop and clergy were sought from Constantine the Great, and the first cathedral rose at Mtskheta over the buried Robe of Christ, at the Life-giving Pillar (Svetitskhoveli). Nina withdrew to Bodbe in Kakheti, where she reposed and is buried. Her grapevine cross is the emblem of Georgian Christianity, and she is one of the few women the Church honours as Equal-to-the-Apostles.

• Our Holy Father Sava (Sabbas), Enlightener and first Archbishop of Serbia (1236)

  Sabbas (Sava, c. 1174 – 1236), born Rastko Nemanjić, youngest son of the Serbian Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja, is the father of the Serbian Church and the most beloved of Serbian saints. As a youth he fled the court for Mount Athos and was tonsured a monk; there, joined by his abdicated father — the monk Symeon — he refounded the ruined monastery of Hilandar as the great Serbian house of the Holy Mountain. Returning home with his father's relics, he reconciled his warring brothers, reformed the monastic life of Serbia from Studenica, and in 1219 obtained from the exiled Patriarch of Constantinople at Nicaea the autocephaly of the Serbian Church and his own consecration as its first archbishop. He gave his people their law in the Zakonopravilo, its churches their order and hymnody, and its national memory its shape, writing the Life of his father the founder-saint. He died on pilgrimage at Tarnovo in Bulgaria in 1236; his relics, translated to Mileševa, worked wonders until the Turks, to break the Serbs, burned them at Belgrade in 1594 — the act that made him more than ever the symbol of the nation. He is commemorated on January 14, the leavetaking of the Theophany.

• The Holy Fathers slain at Sinai and Raithu (4th – 5th c.)

  On January 14 the Church commemorates the desert fathers of the Sinai peninsula slain by raiding nomads — two companies of monks, martyred in two separate attacks, honoured together as monk-martyrs of the Sinaite wilderness. In the first massacre (early fourth century) some forty anchorites were cut down around Mount Sinai, and at nearly the same time some thirty-nine were slaughtered at Raithu, the monastic settlement on the Red Sea shore — the eyewitness account left by Ammonius, an Egyptian monk. A second raid, told in the Narrations transmitted under the name of Nilus of Sinai, fell upon the Sinai monks a century later, when Nilus's son Theodulus was carried off captive. With them are numbered Joseph Analytinus of Raithu, who reposed in peace before the slaughter, and the fathers whose names the service preserves — Isaiah, Sabbas, Moses and his disciple Moses, and their brethren. Falling on the leavetaking of the Theophany, their feast joins the memory of the ascetics who died for Christ in the wilderness to the closing of the feast of Lights.

• Stephen of Chenolakkos

  Stephen (eighth century) was the founder and abbot of the monastery of Chenolakkos (Greek Chēnolákkos, "the goose-pond") in Bithynia, near Chalcedon on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople. A Cappadocian by birth, he went in his youth to the monasteries of Palestine to be formed in the ascetic life, and returned to gather a community in Bithynia, governing it as a father of prayer and discernment. He is a saint of the synaxaria, remembered in a brief notice, and is commemorated on January 14, the leavetaking of the Theophany.

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