Bright Saturday

Saints commemorated

• St Theodore the Sykeote

  Theodore the Sykeote (†22 April 613) was the greatest of the holy men of Galatia: born in the village of Sykeon, the son of an innkeeper, he was given from childhood to the martyr George, at whose hill-shrine above the village he became first a boy-ascetic, then a hidden cave-dweller, then the founder of a monastery whose fame filled Asia Minor. He was ordained priest at eighteen, tonsured a monk at Choziba in the Judaean desert, and was at last dragged from his cave to be made Bishop of Anastasiopolis, a burden he bore for some years before obtaining release from the Patriarch to return to his cell. He stood in an iron cage through the winter fast, weighed down with irons; he stopped plagues, locusts, hail and rivers; he cast out demons across the Galatian countryside; he foretold the throne to Maurice and the coming of ruin upon the empire, and blessed Heraclius on his march east. His Life, written by his disciple George of Sykeon, is one of the richest documents of provincial Byzantine society that survives.

• Holy Martyr Leonidas (202)

• Our Holy Father, the monk Vitalis

• Apelles, Lucius and Clement of the Seventy

  Apelles, Lucius and Clement (1st century) are three of the Seventy Apostles, commemorated together on September 10. All three are greeted by name in the letters of Paul: Apelles, "approved in Christ" (Romans 16:10), became bishop of Heraclea; Lucius (Romans 16:21) — whom the Slavic tradition identifies with the Evangelist Luke, while the Greek synaxaria keep him distinct — became bishop of Laodicea in Syria; and Clement, whose name Paul says is "in the book of life" (Philippians 4:3), became bishop of Sardis. Each finished his course as a preacher of the Gospel; no acts of martyrdom are transmitted. They share the day's synaxis listing with no individual propers, and are commemorated again with all the Seventy on January 4.

• Luke the Evangelist

  Luke the Evangelist (first century, reposed in Boeotia at the age of 84 by the most ancient account) is the "beloved physician" of Colossians 4:14, the faithful travelling-companion of the Apostle Paul — "only Luke is with me" (2 Timothy 4:11) — and the author of the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, the largest single contribution to the New Testament and the Church's first written history. The tradition, from Eusebius onward, makes him a native of Antioch in Syria, numbers him among the Seventy Apostles and as one of the two disciples of the road to Emmaus, and — from the sixth century — remembers him as the first painter of icons of the Theotokos. His relics were translated from Thebes to the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople in 357 and lie today in Padua, from which a rib was returned to his ancient tomb at Thebes in 1998. His feast is October 18.

• Nathanael the Apostle

  Nathanael — "Nathanael of Cana in Galilee," the man of whom Christ said "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile" — is known from the Fourth Gospel alone, where Philip brings him to Jesus under the fig tree (John 1:45–51) and where he stands among the seven disciples at the Sea of Tiberias after the Resurrection (John 21:2). April 22 in the Byzantine calendar keeps not his death but "the remembrance of his coming to know Christ" — the day of his calling. Who he was under his other name the Church has never settled: the printed Greek Menaion says outright that Nathanael "is Simon the Zealot"; the Slavonic and Russian books gloss the same commemoration "Apostle Bartholomew (Nathanael)"; Western tradition since the twelfth century, and almost all modern commentary, identifies him with Bartholomew; and Augustine doubted that he was one of the Twelve at all. This entry keeps the name the calendar keeps, and sets out the identifications without adopting one.

• Nearchus

  Nearchus is a martyr of the third century whom the Byzantine synaxarion commemorates on April 22 in a single line — "the holy martyr Nearchus is perfected by fire" — with one verse of epigram and nothing more. The Greek synaxaristes and the modern hagiographers identify him, with reserve, as the Nearchus of the Passion of St Polyeuctus: the Christian soldier of the Twelfth Legion at Melitene in Armenia whose grief at the thought of being parted from his unbaptised friend brought Polyeuctus to Christ and to martyrdom, and who gathered up his friend's body afterwards. If the identification holds, Nearchus is the instrument of one of the most beloved conversions in the martyrologies, and himself died in the flames some time after the man he had won.

• Vitalis of Gaza

  Vitalis (†c. 620) was a monk of the great coenobium of Abba Seridos near Gaza who, at the age of sixty, went to Alexandria and there undertook the strangest and most deliberately scandalous ascetic labour recorded of any Orthodox saint: he wrote down the names of all the prostitutes of the city, hired himself out as a day-labourer, and every evening carried his wage to one of them, paying her not to sin that night, and passing the night himself in prayer in the corner of her room while she slept — binding each to secrecy, and bearing the contempt of the whole city as a fornicating monk. Many of the women were converted. He was struck down at last by a young man who thought he was defending Christ's honour, and died in his hut on his knees, holding a scroll that read "Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come." Only then did the women he had saved come out and tell the truth, and the Patriarch John the Almsgiver, who had refused all along to condemn him on hearsay, buried him with honour.

• Vsevolod-Gabriel of Pskov

  Vsevolod-Gabriel (†1138) was a prince of the house of Kiev — son of Mstislav the Great and grandson of Vladimir Monomakh — who ruled Novgorod and became the first beloved prince of Pskov. Born at Novgorod and given in baptism the name Gabriel, he governed Novgorod for many years as a builder of churches and a protector of the poor, founding the stone Church of Saint John the Forerunner at Opoki and beginning the great works of the city. After a disputed campaign and a falling-out with the turbulent Novgorodians, who expelled him, he was received in Pskov, which took him gladly as its prince; there, in the brief months left to him, he laid the foundation of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, the mother-church of Pskov, and reposed on 11 February 1138. His relics, uncovered incorrupt in 1192 and enshrined in the cathedral he had founded, made Pskov's Trinity Cathedral a place of wonders, and Vsevolod-Gabriel its heavenly patron; his sword, inscribed Honorem meum nemini dabo — "I will yield my honour to no one" — was long kept above his tomb.

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