Ascension of the Lord

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Timothy, Bishop of Prussa

• St John Maximovitch, Metropolitan of Tobolsk

  John Maximovich (1651–1715) was Metropolitan of Tobolsk and All Siberia, the last of the great Kievan scholar-bishops of the seventeenth century to be sent east, and the founder of the missionary church of Siberia in its settled form. Born at Nezhin and trained at the Kiev-Mohyla college, where he afterwards taught, he was tonsured at the Kiev Caves monastery, became Archbishop of Chernigov in 1697 — where he founded the school that is reckoned the first seminary in Russia and set up a printing press — and in 1711 was sent as metropolitan to Tobolsk. From there he pressed the Siberian mission to the peoples of the north and east, and in 1714 despatched the mission that was to become the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Peking. He was the author of the Heliotropion (Iliotropion), a treatise on the conforming of the human will to the will of God. He died on 10 June 1715, on his knees at prayer, having that day served the poor at table. He was glorified in 1916.

• Holy Martyrs Alexander and Antonina (313)

  Antonina was a Christian virgin of Krodamon in Asia Minor, celebrated for her beauty and her almsgiving, who was denounced to the governor Festus and, having refused both his threats and his offer to make her a priestess of Artemis, was condemned to be violated in a soldiers' brothel. Alexander, a soldier of the guard and himself secretly a Christian, contrived to enter her cell, gave her his military cloak and helmet, and sent her out disguised as a soldier while he remained in her place. When the substitution was discovered he bore the torments in silence; Antonina returned of her own will to stand beside him. The two had their hands cut off, were smeared with pitch, and were cast into a burning pit, about the year 313. Their relics were afterwards taken to Constantinople.

• Hieromartyr Metrophanes, first Chinese priest, and the Chinese New Martyrs of the Boxer Uprising (1900)

• Alexius of Bithynia

  Alexius is a bishop in Bithynia commemorated in the Greek synaxaria on June 10, of whom the record preserves nothing but the name, the province, and the fact that he reposed in peace. The Greek calendars carry him with a distich and state expressly that no further details of his life survive. His notice is given here at the length the sources permit.

• Apollos the Bishop

  Apollos — the name appears also as Apollo — is a bishop-saint commemorated in the Greek synaxaria on June 10, of whom nothing whatever is transmitted beyond the fact that he was a bishop and that he reposed in peace. The Greek books carry him with a single distich, and the standard Greek calendars state plainly that no further details of his life survive. He is recorded here at the length the record allows, and no more.

• Basil of Ryazan

  Basil was bishop of Murom and then of Ryazan in the second half of the thirteenth century, in the generation after the Mongol conquest, and is the chief hierarch-saint of the Ryazan land. His life is remembered for one thing above all: slandered by his own people at Murom and driven out, he spread his episcopal mantiya upon the water of the Oka, stood upon it holding the Murom icon of the Mother of God, and was carried against the current to Ryazan, where he was received as bishop. He reposed on 3 July 1295. On 10 June 1609, in the Time of Troubles, his relics were uncovered by Archbishop Theodoret of Ryazan and translated into the Dormition cathedral of the Ryazan kremlin, and that day became his second feast. He is invoked in Ryazan against the perils of travel and of drowning.

• Bassian of Lodi

  Bassian was bishop of Lodi (Roman Laus Pompeia) in northern Italy for some thirty-five years at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, and is remembered chiefly as the friend and fellow-labourer of Ambrose of Milan, with whom he stood against Arianism in the Italian sees and at whose deathbed he was present in 397. Son of the pagan governor of Syracuse, he was sent to Rome for his education, was catechised there by a presbyter named Gordian, and was baptised against his father's will; he withdrew to Ravenna to live in seclusion, and was consecrated bishop of Lodi by Ambrose and by Ursus of Ravenna about 374. At Lodi he built and, in 381, consecrated a great church of the Holy Apostles. He reposed about 409. The Orthodox calendars keep him on June 10; Lodi and the Western books keep his repose on January 19.

• Kanides of Cappadocia

  Kanides was a Cappadocian ascetic of the fifth century whose whole recorded life is one extreme: he entered a cave on a mountain at the age of seven and never left the ascetic life again, passing some sixty-six years in it and dying at seventy-three, about the year 460. The notice makes his mother the beginning of the story — she is said to have kept a strict abstinence through her pregnancy and to have watched over the child's food afterwards — and dwells on the severity of his rule: one meal a week, of raw vegetables. The damp of the cave, the synaxarion adds, cost him his hair and beard. He is a saint of the Greek synaxaristes, kept on June 10.

• Neaniskos of Alexandria

  Neaniskos is a martyr of Alexandria in the persecution of Diocletian, remembered in the Greek synaxaria under the epithet ὁ σοφώτατος, "the most wise," and described as an athlete of Christ. He was denounced by a slave-girl of his household, tortured for seven days by the prefect Maximus without renouncing Christ, and at last beheaded. The single detail by which his notice is remembered is what he did before his execution: he gave the girl who had betrayed him his gold ring, on the ground that her act had been the means of bringing him to Christ and to eternal life.

• Roman of Ryazan

  Roman Olegovich, prince of Ryazan (c. 1237 – 19 July 1270), was the grandson of princes who died fighting Batu, and the last of his house to die at Tatar hands. Denounced to the khan Mengu-Timur by the baskaki, the tax-farmers of the Horde, on the charge of speaking against the khan and blaspheming the Tatar religion, he was summoned to the camp and offered the choice between apostasy and death. He answered by preaching Christ to his judges, and was put to death by a dismemberment carried out limb by limb while he was still able to speak, his tongue cut out, his eyes put out, and his head at last set on a spear. The Russian Church honours him as a martyr — not merely a passion-bearer — because the demand made of him was explicitly a demand to change his faith.

• Sabbas of Stagira

  Sabbas was a monk of the Athonite Monastery of Konstamonitou, born at Stagira in Chalkidiki in the later eighteenth century, who was killed in 1821, in the year of the Greek rising, while travelling from his monastery in the direction of Zographou, together with a lay servant of the house. The account preserved by the monk Dositheos says that he had foreseen his death, having been warned in a vision that enemies would kill him, and that it fell out as he had been shown. His memory is a recent one in the calendar: his first service was celebrated in 1988, and his first icon painted for that occasion. He is kept on June 10.

• Silvanus of the Kiev Caves

  Silvanus was a schemamonk of the Far Caves of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, who laboured there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His notice preserves a single miracle, and it is a striking one: robbers who broke into the monastery garden were held fast on the spot by his prayer and could not move for three days, until they repented, whereupon he released them. He is commemorated on June 10, again with all the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28, and with the whole company of the Caves on the Second Sunday of Great Lent. He is not the twentieth-century Athonite elder Silouan, with whom his name is often confused.

• Sophronius of Irkutsk

  Sophronius, Bishop of Irkutsk and Nerchinsk — in the liturgical style "of Irkutsk and all Siberia" — was one of the great missionary hierarchs of the eighteenth-century Russian Church, a Ukrainian monk of the Poltava country who was sent in 1753 to a diocese the size of a continent and governed it for seventeen years, founding its seminary, ordaining and disciplining a scattered and half-trained clergy, and travelling to Nerchinsk, Kirensk and Yakutsk. He reposed on 30 March 1771, in Bright Week; and because the Holy Synod took six months to decide where he should be buried, his body lay unburied through a Siberian summer and was found undecayed — the beginning of a veneration that examinations in 1833, 1854, 1870 and 1909 did nothing to check. A fire in the Theophany Cathedral at Irkutsk on 18 April 1917 consumed the shrine and left only his bones; a year later the Local Council of the Russian Church glorified him, and the glorification was solemnly completed on 30 June 1918, which is the day this collection keeps as the second of his feasts.

• Theophanes and Pansemne

  Theophanes was a young man of Antioch, born of pagan parents, who was widowed three years after his marriage, came to Christ, was baptised, gave away what he had, and shut himself in a cell outside the city. Hearing of Pansemne, a harlot of Antioch who had ruined many, he took the one course he thought might save her: he dressed himself richly, took a quantity of gold, went to her, and offered her marriage — on condition that she be baptised and leave her trade. She agreed; and being instructed and baptised, she was changed altogether, distributed the money she had got by her sin, and built herself a cell beside his. She lived in it twenty-two months. Both reposed in the year 369, on one and the same day, and are commemorated together on June 10.

• Timothy of Prusa

  Timothy was bishop of Prusa in Bithynia (the modern Bursa) in the middle of the fourth century, honoured by the synaxaria as a wonderworker whose gift of miracles was ascribed to the purity of his life. He converted a great part of the still-pagan population of his city, and the tradition remembers him above all for destroying a dragon that had made the road between Prusa and its famous hot springs impassable. When the apostate emperor Julian learned of the miracle and of the bishop's success in preaching Christ, he had him imprisoned; Timothy went on teaching from his cell, and about the year 362 was beheaded by the emperor's order. His relics were afterwards carried to Constantinople, where a church was dedicated to him.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Illadan, bishop of Rathlihen (6th C)
• St. Ithamar, 1st English bishop of Rochester (c.656)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings