Martyr Callinicus of Gangra

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Callinicus of Gangra

  Callinicus (†c. 250) was a Christian of Cilicia who left his own country to preach Christ through the cities of Asia Minor, and was seized at Ancyra in Galatia. Refusing to sacrifice, he was torn with iron hooks and ox-hide thongs, then shod in iron sandals studded with nails and driven on foot toward Gangra, the metropolis of Paphlagonia, to be executed there. On the road his own guards, perishing of thirst, were saved when at his prayer a spring broke out of a dry rock; and at Gangra he gave thanks and walked into a burning furnace, where he gave up his soul. His body was found unconsumed and was buried by the faithful. His name — Kallinikos, "gloriously victorious" — has been turned into a proverb by the hymnographers, who say that he was rightly so called, since the fire he entered became his crown.

• Holy Martyr Seraphima (2nd c.)

  Seraphima — Serapia in the Latin books, Seraphima in the Slavonic — was a Christian virgin of Antioch on the Orontes who came to Rome in the reign of Hadrian (117–138) and entered the household of a noblewoman of senatorial rank, Sabina, as her servant. She converted her mistress, and when the persecution reached them it was the servant and not the lady who was denounced. Brought before the governor Berillus (Virilus in the Slavonic transmission), she confessed Christ, was preserved untouched when two men were sent to violate her — an earthquake struck them down, and she healed them by her own prayer — and, when beatings and torches failed, was beheaded. Sabina gathered her body and buried it, and was herself martyred not long after. She is the day's Antiochene commemoration, and one of the small company of saints whose memory travelled from Antioch to Rome in a servant's baggage.

• Bogolep of Chorny Yar

  Bogolep (1660–1667) was a seven-year-old boy of the Ushakov family, baptised Boris, whose father was sent as governor to Chorny Yar — "Black Ravine" — a small fort on the lower Volga some two hundred and fifty versts above Astrakhan. From infancy he kept the fasts of his own accord, refusing the breast on Wednesdays and Fridays; struck by plague at two and left lame, and afterwards disfigured by sores, he saw a wandering monk in the street and would not be quieted until he had been given the monastic habit. He was tonsured into the great schema with the name Bogolep ("comely unto God"), was briefly restored to health, took a fever three days later, and died. He is one of the very few child ascetics in the Orthodox calendar, and the only Russian saint whose relics were carried away by a river: in 1851 the Volga cut the bank at Chorny Yar and took the grave, which the people of the place received as God's will. He is invoked for children, and against fire and lightning.

• Constantine and Cosmas of Kosinsk

  Constantine and Cosmas were monks of the Khutyn monastery near Novgorod, of the generation formed by Barlaam of Khutyn and by Anthony of Dymsk, who about the year 1220 withdrew into the wilderness south of Lake Ilmen and settled on a tongue of land — a kosa, whence the name Kosinsk — three versts from Staraya Russa, between the rivers Polist and Snezhna. There they built a church of Saint Nicholas and gathered a brotherhood. Constantine governed the community as abbot until his repose about 1240; Cosmas, his companion from the beginning, succeeded him and was buried beside him. Their relics rest under the porch of the Saint Nicholas church raised over their tomb in 1820, and they are commemorated together on July 29 among the venerable fathers of the Novgorod land.

• Eustathius of Mtskheta

  Eustathius (†589) was a Persian by birth and a fire-worshipper by upbringing, the son of a mobed, who came as a young craftsman to Mtskheta, the old capital of Kartli, and there was drawn to the Christian faith of the Georgians among whom he worked. He was baptised by the Catholicos Samuel, married a Georgian wife, and became to all appearance a Georgian. Denounced by his own countrymen as an apostate from the religion of the Persian king, he was tried twice: released the first time, under the marzban Arvand Gushnasp, after the intercession of the Georgian nobles; re-arrested under Vezhan Buzmihr, who ordered him beheaded in prison by night and his body thrown over the fortress wall. The Christians recovered it and Catholicos Samuel buried it beneath the altar of Svetitskhoveli, where it remains. His Martyrdom, written by a contemporary, is among the oldest surviving works of Georgian literature.

• John the Soldier

  John was a soldier of the imperial army under Julian the Apostate (361–363), enrolled in a detachment sent to hunt down Christians — and he used the commission to save them. He warned those about to be arrested, opened the way for prisoners to escape, carried help to the imprisoned and buried the dead, all the while passing among his fellow soldiers as a diligent persecutor. When the deception was discovered he was chained and sent to Constantinople to await the emperor's judgment; Julian fell in Persia before the case was heard, and John was released. He spent a long old age in almsgiving, fasting and prayer, and died in extreme age, and was buried among the poor and forgotten. Long afterwards he made himself known by appearing to a devout woman and naming his grave; his relics were taken up and laid in the church of St John the Theologian at Constantinople, where healings followed. In the Slavic world he became the patron of soldiers, the consoler of the sorrowing, and — by a usage as old as it is universal — the saint to whom one prays for the recovery of what has been stolen.

• Michael the Black-Robed

  Michael — called in Slavonic chernorizets, "the black-robed," the plain old word for a monk, and in Greek ho Sabbaïtēs, the Sabbaite — was a young man of Edessa in Mesopotamia who gave away his inheritance, went to Jerusalem, and became a monk of the great Lavra of St Sabbas under the direction of his kinsman St Theodore of Edessa. He supported himself, as the Sabbaite monks did, by weaving baskets of reeds and selling them in the market of Jerusalem; and it was there, in the ninth century, under the caliph al-Ma'mun, that a great lady of the caliph's household took notice of him, sent for him, and — when he refused her — accused him of blaspheming Islam. Offered adoption as the caliph's son if he would confess Muhammad a prophet, he answered that Muhammad was a deceiver and a forerunner of the antichrist, and asked to be sent back to his monastery, or to see the caliph converted, or to be killed. Poison was given him and did not harm him; he was then beheaded. His brethren carried his body back to the Lavra, and the tradition says a pillar of fire went with the relics.

• Roman of Kirzhach

  Roman (†1392) was a disciple of Sergius of Radonezh and the first abbot of the monastery of the Annunciation on the river Kirzhach, in the Vladimir land. When Sergius, rather than contend for authority in his own Trinity monastery, quietly walked away from it, Roman was among the few who followed him into the forest; the two built there a church of the Annunciation and founded a new community (1371). After some three or four years the Metropolitan Alexis and the entreaties of the Trinity brethren brought Sergius back, and he left Roman — ordained hieromonk for the purpose — as abbot in his place. Roman governed the Kirzhach house for twenty years by his teacher's rule, "a zealous ascetic and a good but demanding instructor," and reposed on 29 July 1392, some two months before Sergius himself. He is buried in the Annunciation church and is numbered among the saints of Radonezh.

• Theodosius the Younger

  Theodosius II (401–450), called the Younger to distinguish him from his grandfather Theodosius the Great, reigned over the Eastern Roman Empire for forty-two years — longer than any other emperor of Constantinople — having been proclaimed Augustus in infancy and left sole ruler of the East at seven. Formed in piety by his elder sister Pulcheria, he lived by a monastic rule inside the palace, copied manuscripts with his own hand (whence his by-name ho Kalligraphos, "the Calligrapher"), and gave the Church of the fifth century two of its permanent foundations: the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431, which he summoned and whose condemnation of Nestorius he ratified, and the Theodosian Code. He built the land walls that kept Constantinople for a thousand years, and reposed on 28 July 450 from a fall while riding. The Greek and Slavic calendars commemorate him on July 29.

• Theodota of Bithynia

  Theodota (†c. 304) was a young Christian widow of Nicaea in Bithynia, a friend and helper of the great-martyr Anastasia the Deliverer-from-Bonds, who with her three small sons suffered martyrdom in the persecution of Diocletian. Refusing a pagan official who sought to marry her and preserving her purity, she was sent for judgment to Bithynia; her eldest son Evodus confessed Christ boldly under beating, and mother and children together were cast into a burning furnace. She is commemorated on July 29 and, with Anastasia and her companions, on December 22.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Silin (Sulian), abbot of Luxulyan in Cornwall (6th C)
• St. Cillian, abbot of Inishcaltra (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings