Sunday of Meatfare

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Hieromartyr Blaise of Sebaste

  Blaise of Sebaste (Βλάσιος; † c. 316) was bishop of Sebaste in Armenia and one of the most beloved hieromartyrs of both East and West. A physician of body and soul before his episcopate, he withdrew during the persecution of Licinius to a cave on Mount Argeus, where the wild beasts of the mountain came to him for his blessing and healing, and would not leave him. Hunters sent to gather beasts for the arena found him instead and led him to the governor Agricolaus. On the road and in prison he worked the wonders for which he is universally invoked — he restored a poor widow's pig snatched by a wolf, and delivered a boy who was choking to death on a fishbone, whence his patronage of the throat and of livestock, and the Western "blessing of throats." Tortured, his flesh torn with iron wool-combs, cast into a lake and drawn out unharmed, he was at last beheaded together with two children and seven women. He is kept on February 11 in the East (February 3 in the West). He is to be distinguished carefully from Blaise of Caesarea the Herdsman, the Cappadocian cowherd-martyr of February 3, with whom, sharing both his name and an association with animals, he is constantly confused.

• Ven. Dimitry of Priluk

• Hieromartyr Blaise, bishop of Sebaste (316)

• St Theodora the Empress (867)

  Theodora (c. 815 – c. 867) was the Byzantine empress who restored the veneration of the holy icons and so ended, once and for all, the long iconoclast controversy. Of a pious Paphlagonian family, she was married to the last iconoclast emperor, Theophilus, whose persecuting policy she never shared, secretly keeping and venerating icons in the women's quarters of the palace. On his death in 842 she became regent for her infant son Michael III, and within a year — having deposed the iconoclast patriarch and set the confessor Methodius on the throne of Constantinople — she convened the council of 843 that solemnly reaffirmed the seventh Ecumenical Council and restored the icons to the churches. That restoration is kept every year as the Triumph of Orthodoxy on the First Sunday of Great Lent, at which the Church still proclaims Theodora's memory. She governed the empire with wisdom for fourteen years until her son and his uncle Bardas thrust her from power; she ended her days in the monastery of Gastria, and is venerated as righteous. She is to be distinguished from Theodora of Alexandria the penitent, from the Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian, and from the several monastic Theodoras of the calendar.

• Demetrius of Priluki

  Demetrius of Priluki (†1392) was a monastic founder of the Russian North and a friend and contemporary of Saint Sergius of Radonezh. Born to a merchant family of Pereyaslavl-Zalessky, he took the monastic tonsure young, founded the Nicholas monastery on the Lake of Pereyaslavl, and was drawn into the circle of Saint Sergius, whose reform of communal (cenobitic) monasticism he embraced and carried northward. Seeking deeper solitude, he journeyed to the region of Vologda and there, about 1371, established the Saviour Monastery at Priluki (Spaso- Prilutsky) on a bend of the river — one of the first cenobitic houses of the northern forests and a mother-house of that region's monastic settlement. Renowned for his ascetic severity, his hidden almsgiving, and his gift of foresight, he reposed on 11 February 1392; his incorrupt relics remained the treasure of the Priluki monastery, and he is venerated as one of the great wonderworkers of the Russian North. Dionisius painted his celebrated vita icon about 1503.

• George the New of Sofia

  George the New (c. 1497 – 1515), called also George of Kratovo, was a young Christian goldsmith burned alive at Sofia (the Byzantine Sredets) in the early years of Ottoman rule, one of the most celebrated new-martyrs of the Balkan Slavs. Born at Kratovo, a mining town of the central Balkans, to a devout Christian family, and skilled in the working of gold and silver, he came as a youth of about eighteen to Sofia, where his beauty and gifts drew the notice of the Turks. Pressed to renounce Christ and embrace Islam, he refused with constancy; brought before the judge and offered wealth and honour to apostatise, he confessed his faith the more boldly, and was condemned to the fire and burned alive on 11 February 1515. His Life, written soon afterward by the priest Peyo of Sofia, is a landmark of South Slavic literature, and his memory is kept with honour by the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian Churches, both of the first two peoples claiming him as their own.

• 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.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Cædmon of Whitby, monk and hymnographer (c.680)
• St. Gobnait, abbess of Ballyrourney, Cork (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings