Beginning of the Great Fast

Saints commemorated

• Ven. Basil the Confessor

  Basil the Confessor (†c. 750) was a monk and fellow-ascetic of Procopius of Decapolis, with whom he shared both the ascetic life and the sufferings of a confessor under the first wave of Byzantine iconoclasm. When the emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717–741) forbade the veneration of the holy icons and set out to compel the monks to abandon them, Basil, like his companion Procopius, stood firm in the Orthodox confession; he was seized, imprisoned, and tortured for his defence of the images, but did not die under his torments. Outliving the persecutor, he returned to his monastic labours and reposed in peace about the year 750. Because he suffered for the faith without being put to death, the Church honours him as a confessor, and keeps his memory on February 28, the day after that of Procopius, with whom his name is always joined.

• Blessed Nicholas of Pskov, fool for Christ (1576)

  Nicholas Salos (†1576), remembered by the people of his city as Mikula the Holy, was the fool-for-Christ of Pskov who for more than three decades feigned madness in the streets for the love of God, and to whom the Church attributes the gifts of prophecy and wonderworking. He is above all the man who stood before Ivan the Terrible in the terrible Lent of 1570, when the Tsar — fresh from the massacre of Novgorod — came with his oprichnina to do the same to Pskov. Meeting the Tsar, Nicholas is said to have offered him a piece of raw meat in the fast, and, when Ivan recoiled that he was a Christian who did not eat flesh in Lent, to have answered that Ivan did far worse, for he devoured the flesh and blood of Christian men. His fearless rebuke, and the sudden death of the Tsar's horse foretold as a sign, are credited by the tradition with turning Ivan from his purpose, so that Pskov was spared the fate of Novgorod. He reposed on February 28, 1576, and — an honour reserved for bishops and princes — was buried within the Trinity Cathedral of Pskov, where his relics rest.

• Kyranna of Thessalonica

  Kyranna (†1751) was a young Greek woman of the village of Ossa (in Turkish Vysoka), in the region of Langadas near Thessalonica, who suffered martyrdom under the Ottoman yoke for her refusal to renounce Christ or to marry a Turk. Beautiful, devout, and steadfast, she was pursued by a Janissary — the local tax-collector — who, unable to win her by persuasion or threats, falsely accused her before the Turkish judge at Thessalonica of having promised to embrace Islam. Before the court Kyranna denied the lie and confessed herself a Christian. Cast into prison and cruelly beaten day after day at her persecutor's bidding, she gave up her soul under the torments on the night of February 28, 1751, and a heavenly light was seen to shine over her body. The Church honours her as a new-martyr and a virgin, on the day of her death.

• Marana and Cyra

  Marana and Cyra (†c. 450) were two well-born women of Beroea in Syria — the city that is now Aleppo — who forsook wealth, marriage, and the world to live as enclosed ascetics in a small roofless enclosure outside their city, walled in behind a low door and a single window through which alone they received a little food. Loading themselves with heavy iron chains and crosses, keeping an almost unbroken silence, and enduring fasts of extraordinary length in the open air through the heat and cold of the Syrian seasons, they persevered in this discipline for some forty years. Twice they broke their enclosure to make pilgrimage — to the holy places of Jerusalem and to the shrine of the Protomartyr Thecla at Seleucia — eating nothing on the whole journey until they had worshipped. Their memory is preserved by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, who visited them and set down their story in his Religious History.

• Nestor of Magydos

  Nestor (†c. 250) was bishop of Magydos, a city of Pamphylia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, and a hieromartyr of the persecution under the emperor Decius. When the imperial edict of sacrifice went out and the Christians of his region were hunted, Nestor, a good shepherd, gave himself to prayer for his flock and did not flee; he was arrested while praying in his own house, brought before the governor, and — steadfastly refusing to sacrifice to the idols and confessing Christ before the tribunal — was tortured and at last crucified, sharing by his death the manner of his Lord's Passion. The Church keeps his memory on February 28.

• Nymphas and Eubulus

  Nymphas and Eubulus were two of the Seventy Apostles — the wider circle of disciples sent out by the Lord (Luke 10) and, in the tradition, reckoned among the first labourers of the Gospel after the Twelve. Both are known from a single mention in the New Testament epistles: Nymphas, greeted by the Apostle Paul in the Letter to the Colossians as one in whose house a church assembled, and Eubulus, named among those who sent greetings to Timothy from Rome in Paul's last letter. Of their lives beyond these notices little is recorded; the tradition honours them as apostolic men and fellow-workers of Paul, and the Church keeps their joint memory on February 28, as it keeps them, with all their company, in the Synaxis of the Seventy on January 4.

• Proterius of Alexandria

  Proterius (†457) was Patriarch of Alexandria from 451 to his death, and a hieromartyr of the Church. A presbyter of Alexandria under the Monophysite patriarch Dioscorus, he was raised to the see when Dioscorus was deposed by the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon (451) for his defence of the heresiarch Eutyches; and as patriarch he upheld the Chalcedonian confession of the one Christ in two natures against the fierce opposition of the Alexandrian populace, who remained loyal to the deposed Dioscorus and to the party that would become the Coptic Church. After years of tumult, on the death of the emperor Marcian the Monophysites set up the priest Timothy Aelurus as a rival patriarch, and a mob fell upon Proterius; he was murdered in the baptistery of his church, about the feast of Pascha in the year 457, his body dragged through the streets and burned. The Church of Constantinople and Rome venerate him as a martyr for the faith of Chalcedon; the non-Chalcedonian Church of Egypt does not.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Llibio of Anglesey (6th C)
• St. Madoc, bishop of Llanmadog (6th C)
• St. Sillan, abbot of Bangor (610)
• Holy Hieromartyr Herefrith, bishop of Lindsey (869)
• Oswald of Worcester and York (t/f from Feb 29th)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings