Seven Sleepers of Ephesus

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Seven Sleepers of Ephesus

  The Seven Youths of Ephesus — Maximilian, Iamblichus, Martinian, John, Dionysius, Exacustodianus (also called Constantine), and Antoninus — were young Christians of noble family who, rather than sacrifice to the idols under the emperor Decius (c. 250), hid in a cave on Mount Ochlon, where the emperor ordered them sealed in to die. God laid them instead in a miraculous sleep of nearly two centuries; they awoke under Theodosius II (408–450), at a moment when the resurrection of the dead was being denied, so that their waking became a living proof of it. Having borne this witness they lay down and reposed. Popularly the "Seven Sleepers," they are among the few saints venerated by both Christians and Muslims, the story being retold in the Qur'an.

• Alexius of Bortsurmany

  Alexius Gnevushev (1762–1848) was a village priest of the Volga country who served one parish, the church of the Dormition at Bortsurmany in the Kurmysh district of Simbirsk province, for some sixty years and never held any other. Shaken in 1796 by having let a parishioner die without the Mysteries, he took upon himself a rule of life that belonged to the desert rather than to a parish house — daily Liturgy, the full monastic office, fifteen hundred prostrations a day with the Jesus Prayer, one meal, a hair shirt — and became one of the great clairvoyant elders of the Russian nineteenth century, in the same spiritual country as Seraphim of Sarov, who is remembered to have sent pilgrims on to him. He died on Great Thursday, 21 April 1848, in his eighty-sixth year, blessing the people from the window of his cell, and was glorified by the Russian Church in 2000; the uncovering of his relics is kept on August 4.

• Eleutherius the Cubicularius

  Eleutherius was a cubicularius — a chamberlain of the imperial bedchamber — at the court of Byzantium in the last age of the persecutions, a man of wealth and high place who was baptised and thereafter lived, in the emperor's own household, the life of a Christian ascetic: psalmody, almsgiving, and a church built at his own expense on his country estate. Denounced to the emperor by one of his own servants, he refused every inducement to sacrifice and was beheaded, about the years 305–311. His body, cast out to the dogs and the birds, was left untouched and was recovered and buried by a priest. He is commemorated on August 4, and again in the Slavonic books on December 15 among the company of the hieromartyr Eleutherius of Illyricum, with whom he is easily and often confused.

• Eudocia of Heliopolis

  Eudocia of Heliopolis (†c. 152–170) was a wealthy Samaritan woman of Heliopolis in Phoenicia — the great sun-city the Romans called Baalbek — who lived by her beauty as a famed and dissolute courtesan, and amassed a fortune from her many lovers. Overhearing through a wall the monk Germanus reading aloud of the Last Judgement and the torments and rewards to come, she was pierced to the heart, sought him out, and was converted; baptised by the bishop Theodotus, she gave her whole fortune to the poor, entered a convent, and gave herself to so severe a repentance that she was counted worthy of the gift of wonders, raising the dead and turning her former companions and their persecutors to Christ. After many years as a nun and at length abbess, she was seized in a renewed persecution and beheaded for the faith. The Church honours her as a venerable-martyr — a monastic who sealed her repentance with her blood — and keeps her as one of its great models of conversion, that the deepest sinner may become the purest saint.

• Ia of Persia

  Ia was a Christian woman — the Greek synaxarion remembers her as aged in years — who was seized with nine thousand fellow-Christians in the great fourth-century persecution of Shapur II of Persia and brought to the city of Bisada. Commanded by the chief of the magi to renounce Christ, she refused through repeated tortures and imprisonment, and was at last beheaded, around the year 363. The tradition relates that the sun was darkened at her death and the air filled with a sweet fragrance. She and the nine thousand with her are commemorated on September 11.

• Tathuil and Bebaia

  Tathuil (Thathuil, in some sources Thiphael) and his sister Bebaia were martyrs of the second century, remembered for bold and fruitful preaching of Christ among the pagans. The notices place their deaths in the period of Trajan and Hadrian (98–138): after prolonged torture Tathuil was hanged upon a tree and cut with a saw, and Bebaia was killed by a spear-thrust to the neck. They are commemorated together on September 5.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Sezni of Sithney (c.529)
• St. Lugid, abbot and disciple of St. Comgall (609)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings