Greatmartyr Eustathius and Martyr Theopistes; Martyrs Michael and Theodore of Chernigov

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Greatmartyr Eustathius and Martyr Theopistes

  Eustathius, named Placidas before his baptism, was by tradition a celebrated Roman general under Titus and Trajan who was converted while hunting by a vision of Christ — a radiant Cross shining between the antlers of the stag he pursued. Baptised with his wife Theopiste and their sons Agapius and Theopistus, he was tried like Job: stripped of wealth, parted from wife and children, and reduced to a hired labourer, until God restored his family and his command. Refusing to sacrifice to the idols after his triumph, he was martyred with his whole family in a bronze bull under Hadrian, around 118. His passio became one of the most beloved legends of the Christian world, East and West, and the Vision of Eustathius a classic subject of iconography.

• Saint of the day

  

  Martyrs Michael and Theodore of Chernigov

  Michael Vsevolodovich, Prince of Chernigov and for a time Grand Prince of Kiev, and Theodore, his boyar and faithful counsellor, were put to death at the camp of Batu Khan in 1245/6, in the first generation of the Mongol yoke over Rus'. Summoned to the Horde to receive the khan's charter for his principality, Michael was willing to bow to the khan as an earthly ruler but refused the pagan rites demanded of arriving princes — passage between the purification fires and veneration of the Mongols' idols and elements — and was beaten and beheaded; Theodore, offered his master's principality if he would conform, followed him in the same confession and death. The protomartyrs of the Horde, glorified as wonderworkers of Chernigov, their relics have rested since the sixteenth century in the Moscow Kremlin.

• Holy Martyrs Hypatius and Andrew, Confessors of the Holy Icons (8th c.)

• Sts Anastasius, Theodore, Euprepius and Anastasius the Younger, confessors and disciples of St Maximos the Confessor (7th c.)

• Hilarion of Saint Anne's

  Hilarion (†1804), in the world John of Heraklion in Crete, is one of the Athonite-prepared new-martyrs: a merchant's clerk in Constantinople who, falsely accused of theft and abandoned in his trouble, denied Christ under pressure of the Sultan's court — and within twelve days was fleeing his denial. Ten months in the Crimea, the counsel of elders, and the long school of Athos followed: at Iviron, then at the Skete of Saint Anne under the elder Bessarion, he was tonsured Hilarion and formed by a rule of strict fasting for the purpose the skete's fathers knew well — the return to the place of denial. On 20 September 1804, at Constantinople, he publicly renounced Islam and confessed Christ; tortured until, the account says, all his bones were broken, he was beheaded, receiving — as the Athonite tradition writes of his company — two crowns, of ascesis and of martyrdom.

• Oleg of Briansk

  Oleg Romanovich (†c. 1285), prince of Briansk — Leontius in baptism, Basil in the schema — was the grandson of the martyred Michael of Chernigov, and chose the opposite crown: after campaigning with his father against Lithuania in 1274, he laid down the principality at the height of his strength, entered the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Briansk which he had himself endowed, and finished his life there as the monk Basil in strict ascesis. He was buried in the monastery church, and the Church keeps him on September 20 with his grandfather — the martyr and the monk of one house, the two renunciations answering each other across a generation.

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