Ven. Anthony of the Kiev Caves

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Antony of the Kiev Caves

  Antony of the Kiev Caves (983–1073) is the father of monasticism in the land of Rus'. Born at Liubech near Chernigov and baptised Antipas, he went as a young man to Mount Athos, was tonsured there, and was sent back by his abbot with the word that he should carry the Holy Mountain's way of life to his own people. Settling in a cave dug in the wooded hill above the Dnieper at Berestovo, he lived on bread and water and drew disciples he had not sought; from that hole in the earth grew the Monastery of the Caves, the mother-house of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism, whose second founder and organiser was his disciple Theodosius. Antony himself never governed it: he appointed abbots and withdrew again into seclusion, and to the end preferred the cave to the church he had caused to be built. He reposed in 1073, and by a providence the tradition has never tried to explain away, his relics have never been uncovered.

• Holy 45 Martyrs of Nikopolis in Armenia (319)

• The Placing of the Precious Robe of the Lord in Moscow (1625)

• Apollonius of Sardis

  Apollonius was a Christian of Sardis in Lydia, the ancient capital of the Lydian kings and one of the seven churches of the Apocalypse, who was arrested for confessing Christ in the third century and put to death by crucifixion at Iconium. The one detail the synaxarion preserves of his trial is the point on which he broke with the court: he refused to take the oath by the genius of the emperor, saying that it was not lawful for a Christian to swear by a mortal man. He was tortured at length for the refusal and then crucified — a manner of death rare enough among the martyrs to have kept his name in the calendar when almost everything else about him was lost.

• Bianor and Silvanus of Pisidia

  Bianor and Silvanus are martyrs of Pisidia, the rough highland province of southern Asia Minor, who suffered in the persecution of Diocletian about the year 300. Bianor was arrested and tortured for confessing Christ; Silvanus was not a defendant but a spectator — a bystander at the tribunal who, watching what Bianor endured, cried out that he too was a Christian, and was thereupon condemned with him. For that outcry his tongue was cut out before he was beheaded; Bianor was beheaded after long torment. Theirs is one of the many notices of the calendar in which a martyrdom makes a martyr on the spot.

• Forty-five Martyrs of Nicopolis in Armenia

  The Forty-five Martyrs of Nicopolis are a company of Christians of Nicopolis in Lesser Armenia who suffered about the year 319, in the persecution which the emperor Licinius raised in the eastern half of the empire after his breach with Constantine. They were not hunted out: the sources are emphatic that they came forward of their own accord and presented themselves to the governor, so that the Church remembers them as volunteers rather than as victims. Their leaders are named — Leontius, Maurice, Daniel, Antony, Alexander, Anicetus, Sisinius, Menaeus and Virilad — and the rest, to the number of forty-five in all, are anonymous. After long imprisonment their hands and feet were struck off and they were thrown into a fire; their bones were cast into a river, recovered by the faithful, and laid in a church raised over the place when the peace of the Church returned.

• Joseph of Damascus

  Joseph of Damascus (1793–1860) is the great new martyr of the Church of Antioch in modern times: a parish priest and schoolmaster of Damascus who was killed, with a great company of his people, in the sack of the Christian quarter of Bab Touma in July 1860. For twenty-four years he directed the Patriarchal School of Damascus and made it the foremost Orthodox school in the Arab East, teaching the men who would become bishops and archpriests from Syria to Brazil and North America — among them Raphael of Brooklyn. When the quarter was set alight on 10 July 1860, the tradition of the Archdiocese holds that he refused to hide, and went through the burning streets with the Holy Gifts to communicate the dying until he was cut down. The Holy Synod of Antioch glorified him with his companions in 1993, and the Church keeps their memory on July 10.

• Nectarius of Vryoulla

  Nektarios was a young Greek of Vryoulla (Vourla) in the country of Ephesus who, at seventeen, denied Christ under the pressure of a plague and a lie, was disowned by his own mother for it, and spent the rest of his short life undoing it. Tonsured at the Skete of St Anne on Mount Athos under the elder Hatzi-Stephanos, he returned to the town of his denial, confessed himself a Christian before the Turkish authorities, and was beheaded on Sunday, 11 July 1820 — his twenty-first birthday. His elder recovered the skull and carried it back to St Anne's, where it is kept. He belongs to that Athonite generation of new martyrs who were deliberately trained for martyrdom on the Holy Mountain and sent back to die where they had fallen.

• Nicodemus the Albanian

  Nicodemus (†11 July 1722) was a Christian of Vithkuq in southern Albania who, wanting a fourth marriage the canons would not give him, apostatised to Islam and drew his children after him. Pursuing to Mount Athos the one son whom Christians had carried off to save him, he was converted instead, became a monk of Vatopedi, and passed three years of hard penance in the skete of Saint Anna. Blessed by the elder Acacius of Kavsokalyvia and sent back, he returned to Berat, confessed Christ publicly in the place where he had denied Him, and was beheaded there on this day. He is one of the best-loved of the Albanian new-martyrs, and is counted with the great company of Athonite new-martyrs of the Ottoman centuries.

• Ten Thousand Fathers of Nitria

  Under the name of the Myriad — the ten thousand — the Church keeps on July 10 the memory of the monks of the Egyptian desert of Nitria and of the caves of Scete who were driven from their cells, hunted and destroyed about the year 400 by Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria. The synaxarion gives the reason with unusual bluntness: the patriarch charged them with Origenism, but the real offence was that they had sheltered the priest Isidore, whom he had turned against, and had refused to be used in his quarrels. It is the rarest kind of commemoration in the calendar — a company of ascetics honoured as martyrs for what a bishop of the Church did to them — and the Church has never softened it.

• Victoria, Anatolia and Audax

  Victoria and Anatolia were sisters, Christian maidens of noble family in the Sabine country north-east of Rome, who refused the pagan husbands to whom they had been betrothed, gave away their property, and were put to death in the persecution of Decius about the year 250. Anatolia was held at Thora and Victoria at Trebula Mutuesca. To Anatolia's passion belongs the third name: Audax, the man sent to kill her, who was bitten — or, as the legend has it, seized — by the serpent shut up with her, was delivered by her prayer, confessed Christ, and died with her. The Byzantine calendar keeps the two sisters on December 23; the Roman Martyrology keeps Anatolia and Audax on July 10, which is why they stand in this collection's July 10 file as well.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Etto (Hetto) (c.670)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings