Ven. Thomas of Mt Maleon

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Thomas of Mt Maleon

  Thomas of Mount Maleon was a Byzantine officer — a commander of troops, strong, brave, and much honoured for his victories — who at the height of his career laid down his arms, was tonsured a monk, and turned the whole force of a soldier's discipline against the passions. After learning obedience under experienced elders he was blessed to withdraw into the wilderness, and was led (the tradition says by the Prophet Elias, who appeared to him on the way) to Mount Maleon, the mountain of the great Laconian promontory at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, whose earlier ascetics he imitated. There he lived in solitude, was granted the gift of healing, and became a father to the crowds who found their way to his cell. He reposed in the tenth century, and his memory is kept on July 7; he is held in particular honour in Laconia, and his relics are treasured in the Metropolis of Monemvasia and Sparta.

• Antiochian commemoration

  Kyriaki of Nicomedia

  Kyriaki — "she of the Lord's Day" — was the only child of a prosperous Christian couple of Nicomedia who had prayed long for a child and named their daughter for the Sunday on which she was born. Vowed to virginity, she refused the suit of a magistrate, who denounced the whole family to Diocletian; her parents were beaten and exiled to Melitene, and Kyriaki was passed from tribunal to tribunal — to Maximian at Nicomedia, to the eparch Hilarion at Chalcedon, and to his successor Apollonius — enduring scourging, suspension by the hair, burning with torches, the fire and the beasts, and being delivered each time. At her prayer the idols of the temple were thrown down in an earthquake; when at last she was sentenced to the sword, she asked for a moment to pray and gave up her soul before the blade fell. She is honoured as a Great Martyr, one of the most loved of the Greek virgin-saints, and is commemorated on July 7.

• Holy Martyr Kyriake of Nicomedia (289)

• Acacius of Sinai

  Acacius of Sinai was a young monk of the sixth century whose perfect obedience, kept for nine years under a harsh and negligent elder, became one of the most celebrated examples of the monastic virtue. He endured constant hardship, hunger, and beatings with unfailing meekness and thanksgiving, and died worn out by them. Five days after his burial, when his elder doubted whether so obedient a disciple could really be dead, the saint answered from the tomb that a doer of obedience does not die. John Climacus records the story in The Ladder of Divine Ascent as a pattern of obedience and its reward. Acacius is commemorated on November 29 and July 7.

• Euphrosyne of Moscow

  Eudokia Dmitrievna (c. 1353 – 1407), daughter of the grand prince of Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod, was the wife of Dmitri Donskoy, the victor of Kulikovo, and after his early death the guide of her sons and of the principality of Moscow through eighteen dangerous years. Beneath the dress of a grand princess she wore iron chains and kept a hidden ascetic discipline, and she spent her wealth on churches: the stone church of the Nativity of the Theotokos in the Kremlin, raised in memory of Kulikovo, and above all the Ascension Convent within the Kremlin walls, which she founded and which became for five centuries the burial place of the women of the Muscovite house. When her children were grown she took the monastic habit there, on 17 May 1407, with the name Euphrosyne — "gladness" — and reposed seven weeks later, on 7 July, at the age of fifty-four. Her commemoration on May 17 is the feast of that tonsure.

• Evangelos of Tomis

  Evangelos — in the Latin and Romanian sources Evangelicus — is the first bishop of Tomis whose name is preserved: the see on the western shore of the Black Sea, at the Greek colony that is now Constanța in Romania, in the Roman province of Scythia Minor at the mouths of the Danube. The tradition makes him an heir of the mission of the Apostle Andrew, who is held to have preached in those lands; he baptised many of the pagan population, planted churches through the province, and — a detail that fixes him in the local record — baptised the parents of the martyrs Epictetus and Astion of Halmyris (July 8), Alexander and Marcellina, after their son's death at Halmyris. He is said to have suffered martyrdom in the persecution of Diocletian, and is commemorated on July 7.

• Peregrinus and Companions of Dyrrachium

  Seven Christians of Italy — Peregrinus, Lucian, Pompeius, Hesychius, Papias, Saturninus and Germanus — fled the persecution in their own country and took refuge at Dyrrachium, the great Adriatic port of Illyricum (modern Durrës in Albania). There they saw the bishop of the city, the hieromartyr Astius, hanging crucified, and could not keep silence: they cried out publicly in praise of his endurance and confessed themselves Christians. They were seized at once, taken out to sea, and drowned. The waves carried their bodies ashore, and Christians buried them where they lay in the sand. Ninety years afterwards, the tradition says, the seven appeared to the bishop of Alexandria, asking that their relics be gathered and a church built over them — and it was done. They are commemorated on July 7, the day after their bishop in the Greek reckoning.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Hedda, bishop of the West Saxons (705)
• St. Illtyd of Wales (505)
• St. Ethelburga (c.664)
• St. Willibald of Hampshire, bishop of Eichstatt (786)
• St. Maelruin of Tallaght (792)
• SS Medran and Odran, disciples of St. Kieran of Saghir (6th C)
• St. Palladius of Rome, missionary in Ireland and Scotland (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings