4th Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• St Michael the Confessor

• Unc. Rel. St Leonty, Bishop of Rostov

  Leontius was the first successful bishop of Rostov and the effective apostle of the north-east of Rus'. A monk of the Kiev Caves, of the generation of Sts Antony and Theodosius, he was sent about the middle of the eleventh century to a see whose two previous bishops had been driven out by its pagan inhabitants; he too was beaten and expelled from the city, settled in a small church of the Archangel Michael outside the walls, and there began again from the bottom, teaching and baptising the children of Rostov and winning their parents afterwards. When at last a pagan mob came against the cathedral he went out to meet it in full episcopal vesture with the cross in his hands, and — the life says — his fearlessness and his words broke the riot and converted many of those who had come to kill him. He was killed, or died, about 1073. In 1164, when the foundations of Andrei Bogoliubsky's new stone cathedral were being dug, his coffin was found and his body and vestments were incorrupt; that uncovering, on the twenty-third of May, is his feast, and it made him the first canonised saint of the Russian north-east.

• St Michael the Confessor, bishop of Synnada (818)

  Michael, bishop of Synnada in Phrygia, was one of the most useful men in the Byzantine empire of his generation and one of the boldest: a monk formed under the patriarch Tarasius, a metropolitan trusted with the hardest embassies of the age — to Charlemagne in the West and to the caliph Harun al-Rashid in the East — and finally a confessor who lost his see and died in exile because he would not take the icons out of his churches at the order of the iconoclast emperor Leo V the Armenian. He had sat among the fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787; nearly thirty years later he answered Leo's tribunal with the plainest of all confessions — that he venerated the holy icons of Christ, of His Mother and of all the saints — and was sent to Eudokias, where he reposed on the twenty-third of May. The Synodikon of Orthodoxy names him among the champions of the images.

• Holy Myrrh-bearer Mary, wife of Cleopas

  Mary "of Cleopas" is the woman whom St John names at the foot of the Cross — "his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas" (John 19:25) — and whom the Church numbers among the myrrh-bearing women who followed Christ from Galilee, stood by at the Crucifixion, watched the burial, and came with spices to the tomb on the first day of the week to hear from the angel that He was risen. The Orthodox tradition makes her a daughter of Joseph the Betrothed by his first marriage, brought up in the same household as the Virgin and her companion from childhood, and afterwards given in marriage to Joseph's younger brother Cleopas; her son is the hieromartyr Simeon, son of Cleopas, second bishop of Jerusalem. She reposed in peace. Her fixed memory is May 23; her great commemoration is the movable Sunday of the Myrrh-bearers.

• Holy Martyr Michael of St Sabbas' Monastery(9th c.)

  Michael — called in Slavonic chernorizets, "the black-robed," the plain old word for a monk, and in Greek ho Sabbaïtēs, the Sabbaite — was a young man of Edessa in Mesopotamia who gave away his inheritance, went to Jerusalem, and became a monk of the great Lavra of St Sabbas under the direction of his kinsman St Theodore of Edessa. He supported himself, as the Sabbaite monks did, by weaving baskets of reeds and selling them in the market of Jerusalem; and it was there, in the ninth century, under the caliph al-Ma'mun, that a great lady of the caliph's household took notice of him, sent for him, and — when he refused her — accused him of blaspheming Islam. Offered adoption as the caliph's son if he would confess Muhammad a prophet, he answered that Muhammad was a deceiver and a forerunner of the antichrist, and asked to be sent back to his monastery, or to see the caliph converted, or to be killed. Poison was given him and did not harm him; he was then beheaded. His brethren carried his body back to the Lavra, and the tradition says a pillar of fire went with the relics.

• Holy Virgin Euphrosyne, Princess of Polotsk (1173)

  Euphrosyne — Predslava in the world — was a princess of the house of Polotsk, granddaughter of the formidable Vseslav Bryachislavich, who refused a dynastic marriage in her early teens, took the veil against her family's will, and became the first great woman-founder and woman-teacher of the Rus' lands. She lived first in a cell beside the cathedral of St Sophia in Polotsk copying books for sale and for gift; about 1128 she founded the convent of the Saviour's Transfiguration at Seltso, where she taught the girls of the city not only the psalter but the copying of manuscripts, singing, and handicraft; in 1161 she raised there the stone church of the Transfiguration that still stands, and commissioned from the goldsmith Lazar Bohsha the great reliquary Cross of St Euphrosyne, the most famous work of art of medieval Belarus. Old, she went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and died there on the twenty-third of May 1173. Her relics were carried to the Kiev Caves in 1187 and brought home to Polotsk in 1910. She is the patroness of Belarus and of women's monasticism in the Slavic Churches.

• Damiane of Georgia

  Damiane was King Demetre I of Georgia (reigned 1125–1156), the son and successor of St David the Builder, who held together the great kingdom his father had made, resettled its emptied border provinces, finished the monastery and academy of Gelati, and then — worn down by a conspiracy of his nobles and by the rebellion of his own son — laid down the crown and became a monk in the wilderness of David-Gareji under the name Damiane. In the cell he wrote hymns, among them the Shen khar venakhi, "Thou art a Vineyard," the most beloved chant of the Georgian Church and one of the great Marian hymns of Christendom. When his son David V died after six months on the throne he was obliged to resume the government, naming his other son George as co-ruler; he reposed in 1156 and was buried at Gelati. Georgia honours him on May 23 as a king, a monk and a hymnographer.

• 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.

• Ignatius of Rostov

  Ignatius (†1288) was bishop of Rostov for twenty-six years, in the second and third generations of the Mongol yoke, and is one of the very few Russian saints whose veneration began at his own funeral. A monk of Rostov who rose through the city's Epiphany monastery to be its archimandrite, he was consecrated bishop in 1262 and spent his episcopate holding together a principality that the Horde and its own princes were pulling apart: he reconciled the feuding brothers Dmitry and Konstantin Borisovich, went himself to the Golden Horde on the Church's business, sat at the reforming council of Vladimir in 1274, and once — notoriously — passed sentence on a dead prince by removing his body from the cathedral. He reposed on 28 May 1288, and at his burial, in the sight of the people, his hand was seen to rise from the bier to take the prayer of absolution; he was never lowered into the ground but laid openly in the Dormition cathedral of Rostov, where his relics have rested ever since. He is one of the three founding hierarchs of Rostov, with Leontius and Isaiah.

• Isaiah of Rostov

  Isaiah was a monk of the Kiev Caves, tonsured by St Theodosius, who was set over the princely monastery of St Demetrius in Kiev and then, about 1077, sent as bishop of Rostov — a see that then covered an enormous and only half-converted territory in the north-east of Rus'. For thirteen years he travelled it with apostolic persistence, preaching against idolatry and sorcery, burning the idols, building churches, and adorning the cathedral of the Dormition at Rostov; the Paterikon remembers him above all as merciful to the poor and a nourisher of orphans. The Kiev Caves tradition relates that an angel bore him to Kiev for the consecration of the Great Church of the Lavra on 14 August 1089, when there had been no time to summon the bishops. He reposed on 15 May 1090, and his relics were found incorrupt in 1164 when the foundations of the new stone cathedral at Rostov were dug. He is one of the three great hierarchs of Rostov — Leontius, Isaiah and Ignatius — and is called the Wonderworker.

• Paisius of Galich

  Paisius was abbot, and afterwards archimandrite, of the Dormition monastery on the hill above Lake Galich, in the Kostroma country of northern Russia, where by all accounts he lived and laboured for more than seventy years — through the whole of the dynastic war between Vasily II and the princes of Galich, which twice devastated the district. His name is inseparable from the wonderworking Ovinovskaya icon of the Mother of God, the monastery's great treasure, which was given (the tradition says) by two strangers to the boyar Ivan Ovin with the command to build a church of the Dormition, and which, when a grand prince of Moscow carried it off to his capital, returned of itself to Galich. Paisius was sent to Moscow with a copy of the icon, was received with honour by the grand prince and the metropolitan, and brought back a charter of protection for his house. He reposed on the twenty-third of May 1460, an old man, and the fragrance that filled his cell and the monastery at his death is the one miracle the notices record of him personally. His monastery has borne his name ever since: the Paisiev monastery at Galich.

• Peter, Tsarevich of the Horde

  Peter of Rostov was a prince of the Golden Horde, nephew of Berke Khan (Bergai), who came to Christ through the preaching of Bishop Cyril of Rostov in the years when the Russian principalities lay under Tatar tribute, left the Horde for Rostov, was baptised there, and lived out a long life on the shore of Lake Nero as a landholder, a husband and father, and at the last a monk. The account of his conversion turns on two events: the healing of Berke's son at Bishop Cyril's prayers, and a vision of the Apostles Peter and Paul, who directed him to buy land beside the lake and build a church in their name — the monastery that bore his name for six centuries afterwards. He reposed in 1290, having received the monastic tonsure shortly before, and is a rare and pointed figure in the Russian calendar: a saint drawn out of the conquering horde itself, and venerated by the conquered.

• Salon the Roman

  Salon — the name appears also as Salonas — is known from one line of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, kept in the Greek Menaion for May 23: Σαλὼν ὁ Ῥωμαῖος, ξίφει τελειοῦται, "Salon the Roman, perfected by the sword." His notice stands beside that of the martyr Seleucus, within the office of St Michael of Synnada, who holds the day. Nothing else about him is transmitted: no date, no persecutor, no passion.

• Seleucus

  Seleucus is one of the martyrs whose whole surviving record is a single line of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, preserved in the Greek Menaion for May 23: that he was sawn asunder (πρισθεὶς τελειοῦται) and so was perfected. No place, no date, no persecutor and no companion is transmitted. He is commemorated with the martyr Salon the Roman, whose notice stands beside his in the same synaxarion, and within the office of St Michael of Synnada, who holds the day.

• Theodore of Rostov and Suzdal

  Theodore, a Greek by birth, was consecrated in 991 or 992 — within a few years of the baptism of Rus' — as the first bishop of Rostov, and so the first hierarch sent into the wholly pagan forest country of the upper Volga and the Kliazma. The Merya and Slav population of Rostov would not receive him and drove him out; he withdrew to Suzdal, where his preaching took root, and there he baptised and taught until his repose in 1023. He is honoured as the founder of the see that Leontius, Isaiah and Ignatius afterwards made famous, as the enlightener of the Suzdal land, and — because his body was found incorrupt — as a wonderworker. His relics rest in the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Suzdal.

• 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.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Goban Gobhnena, abbot (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings