Apostles of 70 Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Apostles of 70 Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas

  Nicanor was one of the seven deacons chosen by the Apostles in the first days of the Church at Jerusalem — the "seven men of good repute, full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom" set over the daily ministry to the widows (Acts 6:1–6) — and is numbered by the tradition among the Seventy Apostles. The received account holds that he was among the great company of Christians put to death in the persecution that broke out at the stoning of the Protomartyr Stephen, his fellow deacon, and so won a martyr's crown about the year 34. He is commemorated on December 28, and again on July 28 in the joint feast of the deacons Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, and Parmenas.

• St Irene, Abbess of the Convent of Chrysovalantou (912)

  Irene was a Cappadocian noblewoman of the ninth century who was summoned to Constantinople as a candidate for the hand of the young emperor Michael III, and who — finding on her arrival that the choice had already fallen elsewhere — received the news with joy, freed her slaves, gave away her wealth and entered the small women's monastery of Chrysovalantou in the capital. Chosen abbess while still a young nun, she governed it for many decades in a life of extraordinary prayer and clairvoyance, and reposed at a great age on July 28. She is among the best-loved of the women saints of the Greek world, invoked for childlessness and for the discernment of hidden griefs, and remembered above all for the three apples sent her, in the tradition, from the paradise of God by the hand of the Apostle John.

• Acacius of Apamea

  Acacius was tried for the faith at Apamea by three successive governors — Licinius, Terence and Posidonius — and passed through the whole repertory of the ancient passions without being killed by any of it: the iron instruments, a cauldron of boiling pitch and tallow, the wild beasts, and a furnace whose heat, when the officials came to test it, burned the governor himself and not the martyr. In the end, the notice says with a dry realism unusual in the genre, the torturers were worn out, and Acacius was beheaded. A priest named Leontius carried his body away and buried it at Synnada in Phrygia. He is kept on July 28.

• Eustathius of Ancyra

  Eustathius was a soldier arrested at Ancyra in Galatia for confessing Christ. His passion, as the synaxaria transmit it, is short and consists almost wholly of one scene: after beating and the piercing of his heels he was dragged bound through the streets to the river, shut into a wooden chest and sunk in the water — and an angel brought the chest to the bank again with the martyr alive inside it, singing the psalms. The judge, the account says, was so confounded that he ran on his own sword; and Eustathius, having received communion from the hand of the angel, gave up his soul. Neither the year nor the emperor is transmitted. His relics were laid at Ancyra, and he is kept on July 28.

• Julian of Dalmatia

  Julian was a young Christian of Dalmatia who came into the Italian province of Campania during the persecution conducted there by the governor Flavian under Antoninus Pius (138–161). Challenged by soldiers, he declared himself a Christian without being asked twice; was shut for seven days in a pit called the Cold Prison without food; and was scourged bound to a tree. His words to the crowd who had gathered to watch — a plain warning not to trust gods made with their own hands — are said to have converted more than thirty of them; and in the night the temple of Serapis and its images fell in ruins, which the pagans laid to his sorcery. He was beheaded on the site of the fallen temple, and is kept on July 28.

• Moses the Wonderworker of the Kiev Caves

  Moses was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, one of the ascetics of the Far (Theodosian) Caves, remembered for an austerity of body that the Caves tradition records in a single hard image: he wore iron chains and a heavy copper cross on his flesh, and gave the whole of his strength to the psalter and to prostrations without number. For this labour he was granted the gift of wonderworking, and his incorrupt relics lie in the Far Caves to this day. Of his birth, his family, his country and the year of his repose nothing whatever is transmitted.

• Parmenas the Deacon

  Parmenas was the last-named but one of the seven deacons whom the Apostles ordained at Jerusalem (Acts 6:1–6), and is numbered among the Seventy Apostles. Beyond that verse the tradition transmits very little: that he preached Christ through Macedonia, and that he died there — in the account followed by the Greek synaxaria, worn out by sickness and labour before the eyes of the Apostles themselves; in the account followed by the Latin martyrologies and by much modern Orthodox usage, as a martyr under the emperor Trajan. He is commemorated on July 28 with his fellow deacons Prochorus, Nicanor and Timon.

• Paul of Xeropotamou

  Paul is honoured as the founder of two of the twenty ruling monasteries of Mount Athos — Xeropotamou, which he restored out of ruins, and the house of St George that afterwards took his own name, Agiou Pavlou — and as one of the fathers who prepared the Holy Mountain for the great organised coenobitism of the tenth century. The Athonite tradition makes him Procopius, son of the emperor Michael I Rhangabe, a man of the first rank of Byzantine learning who exchanged the purple for a beggar's rags, hid his erudition under the habit for years together, healed an emperor in Constantinople and asked in return nothing for himself but the rebuilding of his monastery. He reposed on July 28, and the relics of the True Cross that he brought to his two houses are among the Mountain's great treasures.

• Pitirim of Tambov

  Pitirim was the second bishop of Tambov, a frontier diocese on the steppe edge of seventeenth-century Muscovy, where he served thirteen years among a population of half-Christianised Mordvins and Cheremis, Muslim Tatars, Old Believer schismatics and transported criminals. Born Procopius at Vyazma in 1645, an icon-painter and singer by training, he was tonsured at twenty-one, became archimandrite of his own monastery, and was consecrated for Tambov by the Patriarch Joachim in 1685. He built the stone Transfiguration cathedral with his own hands among his workmen, founded a clerical school and a library, dug wells, and laboured above all at the patient reconciliation of the schismatics. He reposed on 28 July 1698; healings at his tomb were formally investigated from 1819, and he was glorified on 28 July 1914, the last Russian canonisation before the revolution.

• Prochorus the Deacon

  Prochorus was one of the seven deacons ordained by the Apostles in the earliest days of the Jerusalem church (Acts 6:1–6) and is numbered among the Seventy Apostles. The tradition makes him a companion first of the Apostle Peter, who set him over the church of Nicomedia in Bithynia, and afterwards of John the Theologian, whose disciple and amanuensis he became: it is Prochorus whom the whole Byzantine iconographic tradition shows seated at John's feet in the cave of Patmos, taking down at his dictation the words of the Apocalypse. Returning at length to his see, he went out preaching and is held to have finished his course as a martyr at Antioch. He is kept on July 28 with his fellow deacons Nicanor, Timon and Parmenas.

• Timon the Deacon

  Timon was one of the seven deacons ordained by the Apostles at Jerusalem in the first days of the Church (Acts 6:1–6) and is numbered among the Seventy Apostles. The tradition sends him out from Jerusalem to Bostra, the caravan city of the province of Arabia, as its first bishop, and remembers him for a deliverance out of a furnace: cast into the fire by Jews and Greeks together, he is said to have walked out of it unharmed. Of his end the sources differ — some say he was crucified, others that he died in peace after his preaching — and the calendars accordingly style him now hieromartyr, now simply apostle. He is kept on July 28 with his fellow deacons Prochorus, Nicanor and Parmenas. As bishop of a see of the Arabian province, historically within the orbit of the patriarchate of Antioch, he belongs to the earliest layer of the Antiochian tradition's own memory.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Samson, disciple of St. Illtyd and bishop of Dol in Brittany (c.565)
• St. Arduinus (Ardwin) the pilgrim, patron saint of Trepino (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings