Martyrs Marcian and Martyrius the Notaries

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Marcian and Martyrius the Notaries

  Marcian and Martyrius were two clergy of the Great Church of Constantinople — Marcian a reader, Martyrius a subdeacon — who served together as notaries, the secretaries and record-keepers, of Paul the Confessor, the Nicene archbishop of the capital repeatedly driven from his see by the Arian party. After Paul was exiled and murdered and the Arian Macedonius seized the throne, the two men continued openly to confess the consubstantiality of the Son and to defend the faith of Nicaea. The Arians tried in vain to buy their silence with gold and the promise of high office; when bribery failed, they had them condemned and beheaded, about the year 355. They are commemorated on October 25, and a martyrium was raised over their relics at Constantinople.

• St Tabitha of Joppa

  Tabitha — called in Greek Dorcas, both names meaning "gazelle" — was a woman disciple of the earliest Church at Joppa on the coast of Judea, remembered in the Acts of the Apostles as one "full of good works and almsdeeds" who made garments for the widows of the community. When she fell sick and died, the disciples sent for the Apostle Peter, then at nearby Lydda; coming up to the room where she was laid out and the widows wept over the clothes she had made, Peter put them all out, knelt in prayer, and said, "Tabitha, arise." She opened her eyes and sat up, and the miracle, becoming known through all Joppa, brought many to faith. She is venerated among the righteous and commemorated on October 25.

• Anastasius the Fuller

  Anastasius the Fuller was a craftsman — a fuller, who cleaned and dyed cloth — who lived at Salona in Dalmatia, the great Roman city near the modern Split, at the height of the persecution of Diocletian. Coming (by the tradition) from Aquileia in northern Italy, he settled at Salona and lived his faith so openly that he painted the sign of the Cross on the door of his house and workshop. Arrested and brought to trial for his confession of Christ, he refused to sacrifice, and was condemned to death: a stone was tied about his neck and he was cast into the sea, about the year 304. A Christian noblewoman recovered his body and enshrined it, and his relics became a treasure of the Dalmatian and later the Italian church. He is commemorated on October 25.

• John of Beverley

  John of Beverley († 7 May 721) was a Northumbrian monk and hierarch, trained at Canterbury under Archbishop Theodore and in the monastery of Whitby under the Abbess Hilda, who became Bishop of Hexham in 687 and Bishop of York in 705, ordained the Venerable Bede both deacon and priest, and ended his life as a simple monk in the house he had founded in the woodland of Deira — the Inderawuda that grew into the town of Beverley. He is known almost entirely from Bede's Ecclesiastical History, which devotes a series of chapters to his healings, gathered from men who had been present at them; those chapters make him one of the best-documented wonderworkers of the Anglo-Saxon Church. His shrine at Beverley became one of the great pilgrimage places of medieval England, and he is kept among the saints of the undivided Church honoured by the Orthodox in the British Isles.

Troparia & kontakia

Readings