Prophet Samuel

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Prophet Samuel

  Samuel (eleventh century BC) stands at the hinge of the Old Testament: the last of the Judges and the first of the great line of prophets after Moses, the man who closed the age of the tribal deliverers and opened the age of the kings. Asked of God by his barren mother Hannah, vowed to the sanctuary before he was conceived, and given to the priest Eli at Shiloh as a small child, he was called by night while he slept beside the ark and answered with the words the Church has never let the world forget — "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." He judged Israel from Ramah, put away the strange gods at Mizpah, warned the people what a king would cost them, and then, at God's command, anointed Saul and afterwards David. He died mourned by all Israel, and appeared once more, after his death, to pronounce Saul's doom on the eve of Gilboa.

• Hieromartyr Philip, Bishop of Heraklion, and those with him (2nd c.)

• Heliodorus and Dosa of Persia

  Heliodorus and Dosa are two of the numberless martyrs of the Church of Persia under Shapur II, commemorated together on August 20. The synaxaria transmit their names, the country of their passion and the reign under which they suffered, and nothing more; the year given is 380. They belong to the forty-year persecution which is, by a great margin, the largest sustained killing of Christians in the ancient world, and which the Byzantine calendar remembers in a long series of such brief paired and grouped notices scattered through the year.

• Lucius the Senator

  Lucius is a martyr of the councillor class commemorated on August 20, of whom the synaxaria preserve his rank, his manner of death, and — with a disagreement that has never been settled — the island on which he suffered. He was a bouleutēs, a member of a city council, and was beheaded for confessing Christ about the year 310, in the last phase of the Diocletianic persecution. The Greek tradition and the English-language synaxaria that depend on it place him in Cyprus; the Orthodox Church in America places him in Crete. Nothing further is transmitted, and nothing further is supplied here.

• Oswin of Deira

  Oswin, king of Deira — the southern half of Northumbria — from about 644 until 651, is the humblest of the royal saints of the English conversion, and the one whose story Bede tells with the most evident affection. Tall, handsome, generous and courteous to everyone, he was so beloved that nobles came from every province to serve him; and the one anecdote of him that survives entire is of his kneeling on the floor before Aidan of Lindisfarne to beg forgiveness for having questioned the bishop's gift of a royal horse to a beggar. When his kinsman and rival Oswiu of Bernicia marched against him, Oswin disbanded his army rather than spend his people's lives on a battle he could not win, and went into hiding with a man he trusted; that man betrayed him, and he was killed on 20 August 651. Aidan, who had said that so humble a king would not live long, died twelve days after him.

• Philip of Heraclea

  Philip, bishop of Heraclea (the old Perinthus) on the Thracian shore of the Propontis, is the chief name under which the Byzantine calendars gather the martyrs of Thrace commemorated on August 20. His passion belongs to the very first months of Diocletian's persecution: when the edict of 303 ordered the churches closed, the Scriptures surrendered and burned, Philip — already an old man — refused to leave his church, taught his people on the steps when the doors were sealed against them, and answered the governor that God dwells not in buildings but in the hearts of men. With his presbyter Severus and his deacon Hermes he was tried, tortured, dragged through the streets, imprisoned for months, and at last taken to Adrianople, where about the year 304 he was burned alive. In the Slavic and American calendars his name heads the company of Severus, Memnon and the thirty-seven martyrs; in the Greek books the two groups stand apart, and their relation is an old and unresolved question.

• Photini of Blachernae

  A woman martyr commemorated on August 20 in the Greek synaxaria, of whom the one transmitted detail is topographical rather than biographical: her memory was kept at her martyrion beside the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae in Constantinople. Neither her country, her persecutor, her century nor the manner of her death has come down. She is one of a considerable class of saints in the Byzantine calendar known only from the stational notices of the Synaxarion of Constantinople — saints whose names survived because a shrine in the capital was dedicated to them and the city went out to it on a fixed day.

• Severus, Memnon and the Thirty-Seven Martyrs

  A company of thirty-nine martyrs of Thrace, put to death in the persecution of Diocletian about the year 304 and commemorated together on August 20. At their head stand Severus, a presbyter, and Memnon, a centurion whom Severus had converted; with them suffered thirty-seven more, most of them soldiers of Memnon's command. The notices are agreed that the two leaders were tortured with a peculiar and inventive cruelty — Memnon flayed, Severus torn with iron hooks, seared with heated rings on his fingers and a red-hot belt about his body, and finally blinded — and that the thirty-seven had their hands and feet struck off and were cast into a burning furnace. In the Slavic and American calendars the company is placed under the name of Philip of Heraclea; the Greek books keep it by itself.

• Theocharis of Neapolis

  Theocharis was an orphan boy of Cappadocia taken into the household of the Turkish judge of Neapolis — the town the Ottomans called Nevşehir — who was offered his master's daughter in marriage on the single condition that he become a Muslim. He answered that he had been born a Christian and could not deny the faith of his Saviour or of his fathers; and he held to that answer through starvation, imprisonment and torture. On 20 August 1740, at noon, he was tied to a horse, dragged an hour's distance out of the town to a white poplar, and there stoned and hanged. The tree is still called Kanlı Kavak, the Bloody Poplar, and is a place of pilgrimage; his right hand was carried to Thessaloniki with the Cappadocian refugees in 1923 and is venerated in the church of Saint Katherine there.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Oswin, king and martyr (651)
• St. Edbert of York, monk (768)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings