Greatmartyr and Healer Panteleimon

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day Antiochian commemoration

  

  Panteleimon the Healer

  Panteleimon of Nicomedia (c. 275 – c. 305) is the physician-martyr of the Great Persecution and, with Cosmas and Damian, the chief of the Unmercenary Healers of the Orthodox Church. Son of the pagan senator Eustorgius and of the Christian Eubula, trained in medicine at Nicomedia under the celebrated Euphrosynus, and marked out to be physician to the emperor Maximian, he was converted and baptised by the hidden priest Hermolaus, gave away his inheritance, healed the sick without fee in the name of Christ, and was denounced by the envy of his fellow-physicians. Preserved through a long cycle of tortures, he was beheaded beside an olive tree which, at the moment of his death, broke into fruit. His name — Panteleēmōn, "all-merciful" — is invoked in the Mystery of Holy Unction, at the Blessing of Waters and in every Orthodox prayer for the sick, and his cult is one of the most universal in the Church: his skull is kept at the Russian monastery on Mount Athos that bears his name.

• St Clement, Archbishop of Ochrid (916)

  Clement of Ohrid (c. 840 – 916) was the chief of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, the first bishop of the Slavs to preach, serve and write in the Slavonic tongue, and the founder of the Ohrid Literary School. Driven out of Great Moravia after Methodius's death in 885, he came down into Bulgaria, was set by prince Boris I over the region of Kutmichevitsa in south-western Macedonia, and there in some seven years is said to have taught three and a half thousand pupils, of whom the ablest were ordained. In 893 Tsar Symeon made him bishop of Drembica (Velitsa) — the first Slav to hold a Bulgarian see. He built the monastery of St Panteleimon at Ohrid, wrote the first original body of Slavonic Christian literature — sermons, panegyrics, lives, and hymns — and reposed there on 27 July 916, in a coffin he had made with his own hands. With Naum, Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar, and with the two brothers themselves, he is one of the Seven Enlighteners of the Slavs, the Sedmochislenitsi.

• Commemoration of the canonization (1970) of St Herman of Alaska (1837)

• Anthusa of Mantinea

  Anthusa the Confessor (†759) was abbess of the convent of Mantineon in Paphlagonia and, with the ninety nuns of her community, one of the women's monastic confessors of the first iconoclast persecution. Born of pious parents, Stratēgios and Phebronia, and heiress to their estate, she refused every offer of marriage, gave the inheritance away, and lived alone in the mountains before being tonsured by the hieromonk Sisinnios and set over a community that grew to ninety. When Constantine V Copronymus demanded that she renounce the veneration of the holy icons she refused; she and her sisters were flogged, burning icons were laid on her head, her feet were burnt with red-hot coals, and she was sent into exile. She is said to have foretold to the empress the birth of twins, a son and a daughter — the daughter, named Anthusa after her, is the confessor kept on April 12 — after which she was allowed to return to Mantineon, where she died at a great age and was buried in her own cell.

• Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar

  Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar are three of the five chief disciples of Cyril and Methodius who carried the Slavonic letters and liturgy out of Great Moravia after their teacher's death in 885. Gorazd, a Moravian by birth and fluent in Slavonic, Greek and Latin, was named by Methodius as his own successor in the archbishopric and was deposed and driven out by the Frankish party before he could hold it. Angelar, a priest, crossed the Danube into Bulgaria with Clement and Naum and died within months of the journey, about 886. Sabbas, also a priest, disappears from the record after the expulsion. With Clement, Naum and the two brothers they make up the Seven Enlighteners of the Slavs, the Sedmochislenitsi, whose common memory is kept on July 27.

• Joasaph of Moscow

  Joasaph (Skripitsyn), Metropolitan of Moscow and All Rus' from 1539 to 1542, was hegumen of the Trinity-Sergius monastery, godfather at the baptism of the future Ivan the Terrible, and one of the few men of the boyar regency who tried to use the primatial office to restrain the factions rather than to profit by them. He obtained the release of Prince Ivan Belsky from prison, and for that was overthrown in a night coup by the Shuiskys on 3 January 1542, hunted through the Kremlin, and exiled to the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery. Allowed back after Ivan's coronation, he returned to Trinity-Sergius and lived out his last years there among his books, reposing on 27 July 1555. He is credited with the Life of Serapion of Novgorod and with obtaining the release of Maximus the Greek from confinement. His relics lie under a bushel in the Serapion chamber of the Trinity cathedral.

• 153 Martyrs of Thrace

  The 153 Martyrs of Thrace are a company of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, entered under July 27 with a number, a province, and a manner of death: they were drowned. No name, no city, no persecutor and no year is transmitted. The number itself is unstable — the Greek lists give 153, and a substantial body of English and Slavonic enumerations give 853 — and the entry is one of the many bare notices by which the synaxarion preserves the memory of martyrdoms whose particulars had already been lost by the tenth century.

• Nicholas Kochanov

  Nicholas Kochanov (†1392) was a fool for Christ's sake at Novgorod the Great, born of a rich and well-known family of the city, who fled the good name his piety was earning him and took up the hardest of the ascetic callings instead — running the streets in rags through the Novgorod winter, beaten and mocked, and hiding a life of prayer under the appearance of madness. He is remembered above all for the feigned quarrel he kept up with his fellow fool Theodore, each holding one bank of the Volkhov and driving the other off it, in a running public parody of the faction-fighting that was tearing the republic apart. The nickname by which the Church knows him — Kochanov, "cabbage-head" — comes from the head of cabbage he is said to have thrown at Theodore across the river, walking on the water as on dry land. He reposed on 27 July 1392, and his relics rest in Novgorod.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Congall of Iabnallivin (c.5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings