Day of Rejoicing (Radonitsa)

Saints commemorated

• Ven. Zosima of Solovetsk

• Hieromartyr Simeon, Bishop in Persia, and those with him (343)

  Simeon bar Sabbae (Shemʿon), Bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of the Persian empire, was the head of the Church of Persia and the great hieromartyr of the fierce persecution under Shapur II. On Great and Holy Friday of the year 344, with a company of clergy and faithful — a hundred and more priests, deacons and others, whom later tradition swelled to a thousand and more martyrs — he was beheaded for refusing to worship the sun and to betray his flock to the tax laid on the Christians. With him is remembered the aged eunuch Usthazanes, his own foster-father, who had lapsed and, recalled to repentance by Simeon's reproach, confessed Christ and died before him.

• Acacius the Confessor

  Acacius the Confessor was bishop of Melitene in Armenia in the middle of the third century. Arrested in the persecution of Decius (249–251) and brought before the governor Marcianus, he confessed Christ boldly under torture but was not put to death; released, he bore the marks of his sufferings for the rest of his life and died in peace. His memory is kept on March 31, and the uncovering of his relic — whose year is not transmitted — on September 15.

• Alexander of Svir

  Alexander of Svir (1448–1533) is the great luminary of monasticism in the forests of the Russian north-east, and the one saint of the Russian Church to whom the tradition ascribes an appearance of the Holy Trinity in three Persons, as to Abraham at the oak of Mamre. Born of peasants on the river Oyat and named Amos at baptism, he fled a marriage arranged for him and made his way at nineteen to Valaam; after some twenty years there he withdrew into the wilderness by the Svir, where he lived seven years alone before disciples found him. Out of that solitude grew the Trinity monastery on the Svir, a mother-house of the whole Olonets and Karelian north, and a company of disciples — Athanasius of Syandem, Gennadius and Nicephorus of Vasheozero, Macarius of Oredezh, Adrian of Ondrusov, Gennadius of Kostroma — who carried his rule outward. His incorrupt relics, uncovered in 1641, were seized by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and held for eighty years in a Petrograd medical academy before being identified and returned in 1998.

• Zosimas of Solovki

  Zosimas (†17 April 1478) is the founder of the great monastery of Solovki in the White Sea and the father of coenobitic monasticism in the Russian far north. Born at Tolvui by Lake Onega, he gave away his inheritance, was tonsured, and went looking for a desert; at the mouth of the Suma he met Herman, who told him of an uninhabited island where he had spent six years with Sabbatius. About 1436 the two crossed the sea to the Solovetsky islands, and Zosimas, seeing in the air a vision of a shining church, built there the wooden Transfiguration church that became the Lavra of the north. He brought Sabbatius's relics from the Vyg in 1465, was made abbot by the brethren when the igumens sent from Novgorod could not endure the climate, foretold at Martha Boretskaya's table the beheading of six Novgorod boyars, and is honoured as the patron of beekeepers. His relics were translated with Sabbatius's on August 8, 1566, which is his second commemoration.

British Isles and Ireland

• Hieromartyr Donnan of Eigg and fifty-two monks with him (c.616)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings