Image of Christ Not Made by Hands

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Diomedes the Physician of Tarsus in Cilicia (298)

  Diomedes was a physician of Tarsus in Cilicia who practised his art without fee and used the sickbed as a pulpit, healing bodies and preaching Christ to those he healed, in deliberate imitation of the Lord who "spoke to them of the kingdom of God and healed those who had need of healing." His work carried him to Nicaea in Bithynia, where he was denounced when the persecution of Diocletian began. God took him before the soldiers could take him: they found him already dead, and — having orders they meant to fulfil — beheaded the corpse, whereupon they were struck blind, and received their sight again only when they had carried the head back and set it with the body. They confessed Christ. The Church numbers Diomedes among the unmercenaries, and his name is invoked in the service of Holy Unction.

• Chairemon of Egypt

  Chairemon was an anchorite of Scetis, the great desert south-west of the Nile delta, at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries. What the record preserves of him is a handful of measurements and a death: his cave stood forty stadia from the church and twelve stadia from water, so that every liturgy and every drink was bought with a walk; he lived past a hundred years; and he died sitting at his handiwork, the plaited rope still in his fingers. Palladius set him among the fathers of the Lausiac History, the alphabetical Paterikon keeps his name, and Theodore the Studite numbered him in the roll of holy ascetics sung on the Saturday of Cheesefare, by which the whole Church still remembers him each year on the threshold of Lent.

• Constantine Brâncoveanu and his sons

  Constantine Brâncoveanu (1654–1714), Prince of Wallachia for twenty-six years, was the greatest patron the Romanian Church ever had — builder of Hurezi, founder of the Princely Academy of Bucharest, master of a printing house that issued books in Romanian, Greek, Slavonic, Georgian, Turkish and Arabic, and the man who gave the Church of Antioch its first printed liturgical books and, through them, the first Arabic press in the Arab world. Deposed and carried to Constantinople in 1714, he was tortured for four months in the fortress of the Seven Towers and, on 15 August 1714 — the feast of the Dormition and his own sixtieth birthday — was made to watch the beheading of his four sons and his counsellor Ianache Văcărescu before he was beheaded himself, all of them having refused the life offered them at the price of Islam. The Romanian Orthodox Church glorified the six in 1992; because the day of their death is the Dormition, they are kept on August 16.

• Gerasimus of Cephalonia

  Gerasimus of Cephalonia (c. 1509–1579) is the great saint and heavenly patron of the Ionian island of Cephalonia (Kefalonia). Born to the noble Notaras family of the Peloponnese, he became a monk on Zakynthos and Mount Athos, made long pilgrimage to the Holy Land — where he served twelve years at the Sepulchre of the Lord and was ordained by the Patriarch of Jerusalem — and after years of extreme asceticism, including forty days in the desert of the Jordan, settled at last in a cave on Cephalonia. There he restored a ruined church at Omala and founded a women's monastery, the "New Jerusalem," which he governed for thirty years in ceaseless prayer and manual toil. Famed as a healer of the sick and above all of the demon-possessed, he reposed in 1579; his relics were found incorrupt two years later and remain so, venerated in his monastery to this day. His repose is kept on August 16 and the uncovering of his relics on October 20.

• Joachim of Osogovo

  Joachim of Osogovo (†16 August 1105) is one of the four great hermit-saints of the Bulgarian and Macedonian lands — with John of Rila, Prohor of Pčinja and Gabriel of Lesnovo — whose caves, in the century after the Byzantine conquest of Bulgaria, became the seed-beds of a native monasticism. A boyar of the village of Gradec gave him a cave above the river Sarandapor, in the Osogovo mountains near the modern Kriva Palanka, and there he lived out his life in fasting and prayer, unknown to almost everyone. After his death a widowed priest named Theodore settled at the place, took the monastic name Theophan, and uncovered his wonderworking relics; a church rose over them, and around the church the Osogovo Monastery, which has carried his name for nine centuries.

• Nilus of Erikoussa

  Nilus the Erikousian was a prince of the house of Laskaris who became a monk, a wanderer and at last a founder. Born at Constantinople as Nicholas, son of John Laskaris and nephew of the emperor Theodore I Laskaris, he took the habit in flight from the Latin occupation, made a long pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was exiled to Mount Athos by Michael VIII Palaiologos for his opposition to the union with Rome, and after ten years at Iveron and a long voyage through the Mediterranean settled as a hermit on the deserted islet of Erikoussa north-west of Corfu, from which he takes his name. After ten years there he crossed to the mainland and founded in Thesprotia the Monastery of Giromeri, where he reposed in great age. His principal feast is January 2; the Greek synaxaria repeat his memory on August 16.

• Thirty-three Martyrs of Palestine

  A company of thirty-three martyrs of Palestine, of whom the calendar of the Church has kept the number, the province and the manner of their death — they were beheaded — and nothing else. They stand in the Greek synaxarion for August 16 between the ascetic Chairemon and the notice of the Holy Image, with a single distich of verse for their whole memorial. Neither their names, their persecutor, nor the year of their contest has come down. They are an instance, honest and unadorned, of what the great persecutions left behind: a number, a place, a sword, and a day.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Armagillus (Armel), cousin of St. Samson (c.550)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings