Hieromartyr Hierotheus, Bishop of Athens; Unc. Rel. Gurias of Kazan and Varsanuphy of Tver

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Hieromartyr Hierotheus, Bishop of Athens

  Hierotheus (1st century) is venerated as a member of the Athenian Areopagus converted by the apostle Paul, bishop of Athens, and the teacher of Dionysius the Areopagite, whose feast precedes his on October 3. Everything the tradition tells of him comes through the writings that bear Dionysius's name: that he was an initiate of divine things second only to Paul, author of Elements of Theology and Hymns of Love, and that at the Dormition of the Theotokos he was "wholly transported out of himself," surpassing all the other sacred singers. The Greek books commemorate a peaceful repose; the Slavic tradition styles him a hieromartyr. His feast is October 4.

• Saint of the day

  Unc. Rel. Gurias of Kazan and Varsanuphy of Tver

  Gurias of Kazan (in the world Gregory Rugotin, c. 1500–1563) was the first archbishop of Kazan and the apostle of the newly-conquered Tatar lands of the middle Volga. A courtier's servant who suffered long imprisonment on a false charge, he became a monk and abbot of the Volokolamsk monastery, and in 1555 was chosen by lot to head the new Kazan diocese established after Ivan the Terrible's capture of the city. With his companions Herman and Barsanuphius he built churches, monasteries and schools and won many from Islam and paganism to Christ by gentleness rather than force. He died in 1563; his incorrupt relics, uncovered in 1595, made him one of the most venerated saints of the Russian Volga.

• Our Holy Father Ammon of Egypt (4th c)

  Ammon of Egypt (Amun of Nitria, c. 290–c. 350) was the founder of the great monastic settlement of the Nitrian desert, the first of the ascetic republics south-west of the Nile Delta that made fourth-century Egypt the wonder of the Christian world. Married against his will as a young man, he persuaded his bride to a life of continence, lived with her as brother and sister for eighteen years, and then withdrew to the mountain of Nitria, where thousands of monks eventually gathered in his wake. A friend and correspondent of Anthony the Great — who, thirteen days' journey away, saw Ammon's soul borne up to heaven at the hour of his death — he is commemorated on October 4.

• Anna of Novgorod

  Anna of Novgorod (c. 1001 – 1050) was a Swedish princess who became Grand Princess of Kiev and is venerated as one of the first canonised women saints of the Russian land. Born Ingegerd, daughter of the first Christian king of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung, she was given in marriage in 1019 to Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev, taking in Rus' the name Irene; she bore him the children through whom his dynasty was bound to half the courts of Europe. A woman of deep faith and learning, she raised her children in the Christian way, shared in her husband's building of the great churches of Kiev and Novgorod, and at the end of her life received the monastic tonsure with the name Anna — the name by which the Church remembers her. She died at Novgorod and was buried in its cathedral of Holy Wisdom, and is honoured as the first of the princely women of Rus' to be glorified, kept on February 10 and among the Hierarchs of Novgorod on October 4.

• Domnina and her Daughters

  Domnina of Syria and her daughters Berenice and Prosdoce (†c. 302–306) were women of Antioch who, fleeing the Diocletianic persecution, were seized by soldiers and — while their captors halted to dine on the road — went down together into the river and drowned themselves rather than face the violation they feared. Their act was remembered at Antioch with veneration from the first generation: Eusebius tells their story, and John Chrysostom preached a surviving homily on their feast.

• Onesimus the Recluse of the Kiev Caves

  Onesimus was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra who enclosed himself in the Near (Antonian) Caves and lived out his life there as a zatvornik, a recluse, in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Nothing of his history is transmitted beyond the vocation and the place: his relics were buried where he had struggled and are venerated in the Near Caves still. He is commemorated on July 21, together with Onuphrius the Silent of the Kiev Caves, and again on October 4 with the venerable Elladius of the same caves.

• Paul the Simple

  Paul the Simple (†c. 339) was an Egyptian farmer who at about sixty years of age, on discovering his wife's adultery, walked into the desert and asked Anthony the Great to make him a monk. Tested by the great ascetic with a harshness meant to send an old man home, he obeyed everything without a murmur, and his guileless obedience — the "simplicity" of his name — made him within a few years a wonderworker whom Anthony himself held up as the pattern of the monastic beginner, sending to Paul the demoniacs whom he could not himself cure.

• Peter of Capitolias

  Peter of Capitolias (†715) was a learned priest of Capitolias in Transjordan — the modern Beit Ras in northern Jordan — who was put to death under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid for publicly confessing Christ and rejecting Islam. Mutilated by stages — tongue, hands, feet — and finally crucified, he is among the earliest of the martyrs of the Church under Islamic rule, and his memory belongs to the Antiochian-Jerusalem borderlands where that long witness began.

• Vladimir Yaroslavich of Novgorod

  Vladimir Yaroslavich (1020–1052), eldest surviving son of Yaroslav the Wise and the Swedish princess Ingegerd (Anna of Novgorod), was prince of Novgorod from 1034 until his early death. He is remembered above all as the builder of the cathedral of Holy Wisdom — St Sophia in Novgorod, the oldest church building of the Russian lands still standing — where he was buried and where his relics rest. The Russian Church venerates him among the right-believing princes; his feast is kept on October 4, the day of his repose.

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