Martyrs Probus, Tarachus and Andronicus

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Probus, Tarachus and Andronicus

  Probus, Tarachus and Andronicus (†304) are the chief martyrs of October 12: three Christians of very different stations — Tarachus an aged Roman soldier of sixty-five, Probus a plebeian of Side in Pamphylia, Andronicus a young aristocrat of Ephesus — who were tried three times before the governor of Cilicia, at Tarsus, Mopsuestia and Anazarbus, tortured after each hearing, and finally put to the sword in the amphitheatre of Anazarbus when the wild beasts refused to touch them. Their Acts, cast as the verbatim court record of the three interrogations, have long been counted among the most remarkable martyr-acts to survive from the great persecution.

• St Symeon the New Theologian (1022)

  Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) is the great mystical theologian of Byzantium: monk of Stoudios, abbot of St. Mamas in Constantinople, spiritual son of Symeon the Pious, and the poet of the Hymns of Divine Love. He taught, against the polite religion of his age, that the conscious experience of God — the vision of the divine light, the felt presence of the Holy Spirit — is not the privilege of a vanished apostolic past but the birthright and calling of every baptised Christian now; for this he was tried, exiled, and finally vindicated. Of all the saints, only he, John the Theologian, and Gregory of Nazianzus bear the title "Theologian."

• Cosmas of Maiuma

  Cosmas of Maiuma (†c. 760), called the Hymnographer, the Melodist, and simply "the Poet," is with John of Damascus one of the two great masters of the canon, the hymn-form that has framed Orthodox Matins for thirteen centuries. An orphan adopted by John's father and educated beside John by a learned Sicilian monk, he shared John's life at the monastery of St. Sabas and his defence of the holy icons, and was made bishop of Maiuma, the port of Gaza, around 743. His canons for the Exaltation of the Cross, the Nativity, Theophany, and the days of Great and Holy Week are among the summits of Byzantine hymnography, and their heirmoi are sung as katavasiai through the whole liturgical year.

• Dionysius of Glushitsa

  Dionysius of Glushitsa (1363–1437) was one of the great founders of the Northern Thebaid, the monastic wilderness of the Russian north. Born near Vologda and baptised Dimitry, he was tonsured in 1382 at the island monastery of the Saviour on the Stone (Spaso-Kamenny) on Lake Kubenskoye, and after nine years went out with a single disciple into the forest, where — hearing, the tradition says, the sound of bells on the empty banks of the river Glushitsa — he founded the Monastery of the Protection of the Theotokos, and later the hermitage of Sosnovets for those who sought greater solitude, a women's monastery under the Athonite typikon, and other houses besides. He was a painter of icons as well as a builder of monasteries, and one of the earliest Russian iconographers whose name and hand can be tied to surviving work. Renowned for extreme austerity, for open-handed almsgiving in famine, and for miracles, he reposed at Sosnovets on 1 June 1437 in his seventy-fourth year, and was canonised by the Council of Moscow in 1547.

• Domnina of Anazarbus

  Domnina of Anazarbus (†286) was a Christian woman of Cilicia who confessed Christ before the governor in the early years of Diocletian's reign, was beaten at length and burned with fire, and died of her torments in prison. The Greek synaxarion of October 12 remembers her with the epithet "victorious" (καλλίνικος) and a distich in her honour: though her limbs were wrenched from their joints, she did not deny the true faith. She shares her day with the greater company of Probus, Tarachus and Andronicus, who suffered in the same city eighteen years later.

• Martin of Tours

  Martin of Tours (c. 316–397), whom the Orthodox calendars style "the Merciful," was the soldier who divided his cloak with a freezing beggar at Amiens and saw Christ wearing the half he had given; discharged from the army with the words "I am a soldier of Christ — it is not lawful for me to fight," he became a disciple of Hilary of Poitiers, founded at Ligugé the first monastery in Gaul, and as bishop of Tours from 371 evangelised the pagan countryside, raised the dead, and pleaded — against bishops and emperor alike — for the lives of heretics. The most beloved saint of the pre-schism West, he is commemorated in the Byzantine-Slavic tradition on October 12.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Fiace, disciple of St. Patrick (5th C)
• St. Mobhi of Glasnevin (544)
• St. Edwin, King and Martyr (633)
• St. Wilfrid, archbishop of York (709)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings