Greatmartyr Artemius at Antioch

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Greatmartyr Artemius at Antioch

  Artemius of Antioch (†362) was a high-ranking commander and imperial official under Constantine the Great and Constantius II, who rose to be dux (military governor) of Egypt and was entrusted with the solemn translation of the relics of the Apostles Andrew and Luke to Constantinople in 357. When Julian the Apostate set out to restore paganism, Artemius confronted the emperor at Antioch, openly rebuking his impiety and the torture of Christian bishops; for this he was stripped of rank, cruelly tortured, and beheaded. The Church venerates him as a great-martyr and wonderworker, and his healing shrine at the Oxeia in Constantinople — whose recorded "Miracles of Artemius" are a major source for Byzantine social history — made him the special patron of those suffering from hernia and diseases of the lower body. His feast is October 20.

• St Gerasimus the New, ascetic of Cephalonia (1579)

  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.

• St Jonah, Bishop of Manchuria (1925) (October 7 OC)

• Artemius of Verkola

  Artemius of Verkola was a peasant boy of twelve from the village of Verkola on the Pinega, in the far north of Russia, who was killed by lightning in a summer thunderstorm on 23 June 1545 while working in the field beside his father. Because a sudden death in a storm was read by his neighbours as a stroke of divine anger, his body was not buried in the churchyard but laid in a pine wood, covered with brushwood and birch bark, and left. Thirty-two years later, in 1577, a light was seen over the place; the body was found incorrupt, was carried into the church of St Nicholas at Verkola, and at once became the centre of an extraordinary series of healings during an epidemic that was then wasting the Pinega. A monastery grew up at the spot. He is one of the very few saints of the Russian Church glorified neither for martyrdom nor for asceticism nor for office, but simply as a righteous child, and he is a patron of children and of the Russian North.

• Matrona of Chios

  Matrona of Chios (fifteenth century) was a nun and abbess of the island of Chios, venerated throughout the island as its wonderworking mother. Born Maria in the village of Volissos to wealthy and pious parents, she rejected marriage for the monastic life, distributed her inheritance to the poor, and founded a women's monastery in the Palaiokastro district of Chios, over which she presided as abbess under the name Matrona. Renowned in life and after death for charity to the poor and for the healing of the sick, she reposed about the middle of the fifteenth century; a proper service already composed for her in a manuscript of 1455 fixes the latest date of her repose. She is commemorated on October 20 and again on July 15 for the finding of her head.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Acca, bishop of Hexham (c.740)
• St. Aidan, bishop of Mayo (768)
• SS Bradan and Orora (Crora) of Man

Troparia & kontakia

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