Robe of the Theotokos at Blachernae

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Robe of the Theotokos at Blachernae

• St John (Maximovich), Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco (1966) (June 19 OC)

• St Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem (458)

  Juvenal (†458) governed the Church of Jerusalem for some thirty-eight years, from about 422 until his death, and is the hierarch under whom the see of the Holy City ceased to be a bishopric under the metropolitan of Caesarea and became the fifth patriarchate of the Christian world. He stood with Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius at Ephesus in 431, was among the leaders of the violent assembly of 449, and then at Chalcedon in 451 broke with Dioscorus, subscribed the definition of the two natures, and obtained from the council the three Palestines for his throne — a settlement made by agreement with Maximus of Antioch, at the cost of the Antiochian patriarchate. For his acceptance of Chalcedon the anti-Chalcedonian monks of Palestine drove him from Jerusalem, and he lived some twenty months in exile before imperial troops restored him. He reposed in peace among his flock in 458.

• St Juvenaly, First Martyr of America and Alaska (1796)

• Arsenius of Tver

  Arsenius (†1409) was Bishop of Tver and the founder of the Zheltikov Monastery of the Dormition on the river Tmaka near that city. Born at Tver, he was tonsured young in the Kiev Caves Monastery, and rose to be archdeacon to Metropolitan Cyprian of Kiev and Moscow, whose administration he helped govern. In 1390, over his own reluctance, he was consecrated bishop of Tver, a see torn by the feuds of its princes; there he laboured as a peacemaker, built churches and his monastery, and had copied for its monks the great manuscript collection later known as the Arsenian redaction of the Kiev Caves Paterikon. He reposed in 1409; his incorrupt relics were uncovered in 1483, and he was canonised by the Moscow Council of 1547. He is commemorated on March 2.

• Photius of Kiev

  Photius (c. 1370s–1431) was a Greek monk of the Peloponnese who was sent from Constantinople in 1408 to be Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus' and governed the Russian Church for twenty-two years from Moscow. He came to a metropolitanate half-ruined by the wars of Edigu and the Lithuanian pressure on its southern dioceses, and left it richer, better ordered, and canonically one: he recovered the alienated properties of the see, put down the Strigolnik heresy at Pskov and Novgorod, and after ten years of struggle obtained in 1420 the suppression of the rival Lithuanian metropolitanate set up under Gregory Tsamblak. A learned writer of epistles and instructions, he stood as regent-guardian of the boy grand prince Vasily II in the opening of the great Muscovite civil war. He reposed on July 2, 1431, having foreseen his end, and his incorrupt relics were uncovered in the Dormition cathedral of the Kremlin in 1471. He is not the ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople of the same name.

• Stephen the Great of Moldavia

  Stephen the Great (Ștefan cel Mare, c. 1438–1504) ruled Moldavia for forty-seven years, from 1457 until his death on July 2, 1504, and is the central figure of Romanian Orthodox memory: the prince who held the eastern gate of Christendom against the Ottoman advance, and who is said to have built a church for every battle he fought. Under the direction of his spiritual father, the hesychast elder Daniel, he founded or endowed some four dozen monasteries and churches — Putna above all, where he lies buried — and created in the process the Moldavian architectural style. He was canonised by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992 and is commemorated on the day of his repose.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Eddogwy, bishop at Llandaff (c.615)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings