Martyrs Manuel, Sabel, Ismael of Persia

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Manuel, Sabel, Ismael of Persia

  Three brothers of a noble Persian house — a pagan father, a Christian mother who had them baptised in secret — who entered the royal service and were sent as ambassadors to negotiate a peace with the emperor Julian the Apostate. Received with honour, they were ruined by a single refusal: they would not join the emperor at his sacrifices. Julian broke off the negotiation, held the envoys as prisoners, and when they answered that they had been sent to treat of peace and not of gods, had them tortured and beheaded at Chalcedon in 362. The outrage against the persons of ambassadors was answered, the tradition says, by the very war Julian had been trying to avert; and the emperor died in it a year later. Their relics were enshrined at Constantinople, and Theodosius the Great built a church over them.

• Our Holy Father Botolph, Abbot of the Monastery of Ikanhoe (680)

• Ananias the Iconographer

  Ananias was a monk of the Monastery of Saint Antony the Roman at Novgorod and a painter of icons, remembered for two things: the beauty of the images he made of the holy wonderworkers, and the fact that for thirty-three years he never once passed outside the monastery walls. He reposed in the sixteenth century — the year is given variously as 1521, 1561 and 1581 — and was buried in the monastery, at a place no longer known. He is commemorated on June 21, and again with the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod on the third Sunday after Pentecost.

• Botolph of Iken

  The Anglo-Saxon abbot of Icanho, whose monastery the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records him beginning to build in 654 — a fixed point in a century that gives historians very few. Botolph was formed as a monk on the Continent, returned to East Anglia, and settled with his brother on a tract of marsh and heath on the tidal Alde in what is now Suffolk, where he governed a community for some quarter of a century until his repose about 680. The near-contemporary Life of Ceolfrith — the best witness to him, written by someone who had no reason to flatter — calls him a man of unequalled life and learning, full of the grace of the Holy Spirit. When the Danes came, his relics were carried inland and eventually divided between Thorney, Ely and Westminster; from the churches at the gates of London that bear his name he became the patron of travellers, and the town of Boston — Botolph's stone — carries his name still.

• Hervé of Plouvien

  Blind from birth, the son of a bard, Hervé became the most loved of all the saints of Brittany after Yves — a singer and teacher who never took priest's orders, never held any rank above exorcist, and governed the monastic school at Plouvien and then the abbey of Lanhouarneau in Léon by the authority of what he was rather than of any office. His century is the sixth, his repose about 575. He is the Breton patron of the blind, of bards and musicians, invoked for diseases of the eyes and for sick horses; and the wolf that ate his plough-beast and was made to take its place in the harness is the best-known animal in Breton hagiography.

• Hypatius of Rufinianae

  A Phrygian who ran away from a beating at eighteen and died forty-odd years later the most consulted abbot on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. Hypatius restored the deserted monastery of the Rufinianae — the suburban foundation of the murdered prefect Rufinus at the Oak, outside Chalcedon — and governed it for nearly half a century, to his repose in 446. He sheltered Alexander the Sleepless when the Akoimetoi were driven out of the capital; he struck the name of Nestorius from the diptychs of his church before any council had condemned him, and against his own bishop's wishes; and he broke by open threat of martyrdom a plan to revive the Olympic games at Chalcedon. His disciple Callinicus wrote his Life — one of the finest and most concrete documents of early Byzantine monasticism.

• Isaurus, Basil, Innocent, Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus

  Six martyrs of the third century who carry the printed service of June 17 in the Greek Menaion — the day's chief commemoration in Greek use, though the Slavonic books put them second. The company is led by Isaurus, a deacon of Athens, who with five companions crossed into Macedonia and came to Apollonia, where they lodged in a cave outside the city and went in to preach. Arrested and refusing to sacrifice, three of them — Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus — were beheaded first, and Isaurus, Basil and Innocent after them, about the year 283, in the persecution under Numerian. The Menaion's own notice of them is a single bare line of names: the narrative comes from the fuller passion preserved in the Greek synaxaristic collections.

• Joseph and Pior

  Two of the disciples of Anthony the Great, commemorated together on June 17. Of Joseph the calendars transmit nothing but the name. Pior is one of the best-drawn of the Egyptian fathers: an anchorite of Scetis who left his father's house under a vow never to look on his family again and kept it for fifty years, drank all his life from a well of bitter water he had dug himself rather than move to a sweeter place, and ate walking about, so that eating should never become an occupation. His sayings are preserved in the Apophthegmata and his life is described by Palladius in the Lausiac History and by the historian Sozomen.

• Moling of Ferns

  An Irish monk of the seventh century — reckoned among the four prophets of Ireland — who founded the monastery of Tech Moling on the river Barrow, the place that still bears his name as St Mullins in County Carlow, and who became the second bishop of Ferns after Máedóc. He is remembered for two things above all: for talking the high king Finnachta out of the Bórama, the ruinous cattle-tribute laid on Leinster by the kings of Tara, by a play on words that the Irish have relished for thirteen centuries; and for the Book of Mulling, the little pocket gospel-book that bears his name and preserves, on its last page, a plan of his own monastery — the earliest such plan to survive from anywhere in the Celtic world. He died in 697.

• Nectan of Hartland

  A Welsh hermit of the sixth century, reckoned the eldest of the many children of Brychan of Brycheiniog, who crossed the Bristol Channel with a company of his kindred and settled alone in a wooded valley above the sea at Stoke, by Hartland in north Devon. Given two cows by a swineherd whose lost pigs he had found, he went after the thieves who took them, preached to them, and was beheaded for it. The Life relates that he took up his own head and carried it back the half mile to the spring beside his cell before he laid it down. His shrine at Hartland was among the great pilgrim churches of the Devon coast; King Athelstan, healed at his intercession on the campaign of 937, endowed it, and the parish keeps him still.

• Philonides of Kourion

  The first bishop of Kourion whose name is preserved — the Cypriot city on the cliff above the southern sea whose great sanctuary of Apollo Hylates made it one of the strongholds of the old religion on the island. Philonides was taken in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 306, with a presbyter, a deacon and a reader of his church, who were put to death before his eyes. When his captors threatened, if he would not sacrifice, to hand him over to be sexually violated, the aged bishop got out to the edge of the cliff, prayed, signed himself three times with the cross, and cast himself down, choosing death over defilement. He is commemorated on June 17 and, in Cyprus, again on August 30.

• Shalva of Akhaltsikhe

  A Georgian commander of the generation that won the great victories of Queen Tamar and lived to see them undone. Shalva of Akhaltsikhe, of the princely house of the Toreli, was one of the victors of Shamkori in 1195, where he took the caliph's own standard and gave it as an offering to the Khakhuli icon of the Mother of God. Thirty years later, in the reign of Rusudan, he and his brother Ivane were sent with six thousand men against the vast army of the Khwarazmian sultan Jalal ad-Din, and were left unsupported by a jealous commander-in-chief; Ivane was killed, and Shalva taken. The sultan offered him cities and treasure to become a Muslim. He refused, was tortured through a day, and was thrown half dead into prison, where he died in 1227.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Botolph, abbot and confessor, of Boston, and his brother St. Adolph (680)
• St. Molling, abbot of Aghacainid (697)
• St. Briavel, hermit (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings