Hieromartyr Pancratius, Bishop of Taormina

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Hieromartyr Pancratius, Bishop of Taormina

  Pancratius (first century) is venerated as the first bishop of Tauromenium (Taormina) in Sicily and the apostle of the island — a disciple of the Apostle Peter, who is said to have consecrated him and sent him westward to preach. Of Antiochene origin, converted (the tradition holds) with his parents in the days of the Lord's own preaching, he was set by Peter over the young church of Tauromenium, where he laboured with such success that he is remembered as the enlightener of eastern Sicily; he overthrew idols, worked wonders, and built up a Christian people, until he was set upon and stoned to death by pagans (in some accounts by a band of brigands). He is honoured in the Byzantine calendars on February 9, kept with the leavetaking of the Meeting of the Lord, and is one of the three disciples of Peter — with Marcellus of Sicily and Philagrius of Cyprus — whom the day commemorates as apostles of the West.

• Andrew and Probus

  Two martyrs of whom the Byzantine synaxaria preserve nothing but their names, their day, and the manner of their death: Andrew and Probus were perfected by fire. They stand on July 9 in the Greek day-lists, are given a single elegiac distich in the synaxarion, and have no Life, no place, no persecutor and no date. The entry that follows is short because the record is short.

• Cyril of Gortyna

  Cyril was bishop of Gortyna, the metropolis of Roman Crete and the see founded by the Apostle Titus, and he was martyred there as a very old man in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian. The synaxarion gives his story with unusual and memorable particularity: he had lived austerely as an ascetic, was consecrated bishop in his sixty-eighth year, governed his flock twenty-five years, and was then brought before the governor Agrianus; condemned to the fire, he stood unhurt while his bonds burned away and the pyre fell to ashes, and was let go. When he went on converting the pagans he was sentenced again — a bridle put in his mouth, and, being ninety-three and unable to walk, set on an ox-cart to be carried to execution. At a place called Raxos the oxen halted of their own accord, and there he was beheaded. The Greek Menaion keeps him on June 14; the Russian and American calendars on July 9.

• Dionysius the Rhetor and Metrophanes

  Two monks of the Monastery of Stoudios at Constantinople who came to the Holy Mountain at the turn of the sixteenth century in search of stillness, and who, after passing through Karyes and the Skete of Saint Anna, settled in a cave on the steep and stony ground between Saint Anna's and Katounakia: the elder Dionysius, honoured by the Great Church with the office of Rhetor, a learned man, a fine calligrapher and a writer; and his disciple Metrophanes, a spiritual father who left the Mountain for a time to hear confessions in the villages of Chalkidiki under Ottoman rule. Their cave became the nucleus of what is now the Little Skete of Saint Anna (Mikragianna), and they are honoured as its first inhabitants and founders. Dionysius reposed on 9 July 1606, Metrophanes not long after.

• Methodius of Lampe

  Methodius, surnamed Silygardos, was a Cretan of the village of Vyzari in the province of Amari, who became abbot of the monastery of the Asomatoi (the Bodiless Powers) and then bishop of Lampe, one of the ancient sees of the island. He set himself against the violence of the Turkish authorities toward his flock, was arrested for it, and after long torture was put to death on 9 July 1793. His body was buried near the place of his martyrdom, at the little monastery of the Taxiarchs. He is a local Cretan commemoration: no notice of him stands in the received synaxaria, and no service in his honour has ever been found.

• Michael Pakhnanas

  Michael Pakhnanas — the surname is also written Baknanas (Μπακνανάς) — was an illiterate young gardener of Athens, born about 1750 in the quarter of Vlassarou beneath the Acropolis, on ground that is now the excavated Ancient Agora. Returning to the city from a village where he had been working, he was seized by the Turkish guard and falsely accused of smuggling gunpowder to the Greek insurgents. Offered his life if he would apostatise to Islam, he answered with the sentence that fixed him in the memory of Athens — "Δὲν τουρκεύω", "I will not turn Turk." Led out to execution he went rejoicing; the executioner struck him first with the flat and reversed blade to frighten him into recanting, and then nicked his throat, and to each stroke Michael answered, "Strike, for the faith." He was beheaded on 9 July 1771, aged about twenty-one, and is honoured as the new martyr of the Church of Athens.

• Patermuthius, Coprius and Alexander

  Three Egyptians who suffered under Julian the Apostate (361–363): Patermuthius, in his youth the captain of a band of robbers, who repented, was baptised, went into the desert and gave the rest of his life to nursing the sick and burying the dead; Coprius, the priest who was his disciple and the eyewitness who wrote down his deeds — the man who walked unhurt into a fire to confound a Manichaean; and Alexander, a soldier of the guard who, watching Coprius tortured, confessed Christ on the spot and was burnt alive. Coprius, deceived by the emperor's plea that he too had once served Christ, denied the faith and then, brought to himself by his elder's tears, confessed it again and died for it. Patermuthius and Coprius were beheaded. Their memory is kept on July 9 in the Slavonic and American calendars and on December 17 in the received Greek books.

• Theodore of Edessa

  Theodore, called the Sabbaite from the Palestinian lavra in which he spent most of his life, was a native of Edessa in Mesopotamia who was orphaned as a boy, gave away his inheritance, and went to Jerusalem, where he was tonsured at the Great Lavra of Saint Sabbas. After decades of obedience and of enclosure he was drawn out of his solitude and made bishop of Edessa — a Melkite see of the Patriarchate of Antioch, then long under Muslim rule — where he contended with the Manichaeans, the Nestorians and the Monophysites and governed his diminished Chalcedonian flock. His Life makes him travel to Baghdad to lay the grievances of the Christians before the caliph, whom he heals and baptises under the name John, and who is afterwards killed for confessing Christ. Theodore returned to Saint Sabbas and died there in 848. Chapters of ascetic teaching under his name passed into the Philokalia, and his Life, translated early into Slavonic, became one of the favourite reading-books of medieval Rus.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Evereld (Avril), Virgin and abbess of Everingham (c.700)
• St. Golvinus (Golwen) (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings