Hieromartyr Januarius and Companions

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Hieromartyr Januarius and Companions

• Alexius of Bortsurmany

  Alexius Gnevushev (1762–1848) was a village priest of the Volga country who served one parish, the church of the Dormition at Bortsurmany in the Kurmysh district of Simbirsk province, for some sixty years and never held any other. Shaken in 1796 by having let a parishioner die without the Mysteries, he took upon himself a rule of life that belonged to the desert rather than to a parish house — daily Liturgy, the full monastic office, fifteen hundred prostrations a day with the Jesus Prayer, one meal, a hair shirt — and became one of the great clairvoyant elders of the Russian nineteenth century, in the same spiritual country as Seraphim of Sarov, who is remembered to have sent pilgrims on to him. He died on Great Thursday, 21 April 1848, in his eighty-sixth year, blessing the people from the window of his cell, and was glorified by the Russian Church in 2000; the uncovering of his relics is kept on August 4.

• Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus

  Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus were officials of the court of Diocletian — pagans by upbringing and by office — who were converted by what they saw at the trial of the Great Martyr George: his endurance under torture, the wonders worked through him, and his refusal to be broken. Having believed, they declared themselves Christians before the emperor and reproached him for his impiety and cruelty, and were condemned. Quadratus was beheaded; Isaac and Apollos were left to die of hunger in prison, about the year 303. The Church commemorates the three together on April 21, two days before the feast of the martyr whose witness converted them.

• Januarius of Benevento

  Januarius, Bishop of Benevento in Campania, was beheaded near Pozzuoli about the year 305, in the persecution of Diocletian, together with a company of six: his own deacon Festus and his lector Desiderius, the deacons Sossius of Misenum and Proculus of Pozzuoli, and two laymen, Eutychius and Acutius. The Byzantine synaxaria keep the whole company on April 21; the West keeps Januarius on September 19. His relics were carried to Naples, of which he became the great patron; there, from the fourteenth century onward, the periodic liquefaction of a relic of his blood has made him one of the most famous martyrs of the Latin world — though the Orthodox Church honours him, then as now, simply as a hieromartyr who confessed Christ before a magistrate and died for it.

• Maximian of Constantinople

  Maximian, a Roman by birth who had lived as an ascetic and spent his own inheritance burying the bodies of holy men, was raised from the presbyterate to the throne of Constantinople on 25 October 431, four months after the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus deposed Nestorius. His two and a half years in the see were given almost wholly to peace: he cleared the capital and the neighbouring sees of Nestorian bishops, and he laboured — pressing even St Cyril of Alexandria to set his Twelve Anathemas aside for the sake of concord — for the reconciliation of Alexandria with John of Antioch and the Eastern bishops, which was achieved in the Formula of Reunion of 433. He reposed in peace, on Great and Holy Thursday of 434, and is commemorated on April 21.

• Theodore of Perge

  Theodore was a young Christian of Perge in Pamphylia, on the south coast of Asia Minor, who was crucified for refusing to sacrifice to the idols in the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius (138–161). His passion is one of the very few in the calendar in which the martyr dies on a cross in imitation of his Lord, hanging three days in prayer, and one of the few in which the martyr's mother, Philippa, stands beside him to the end and is crowned with him. Two of the soldiers who guarded him, Socrates and Dionysius, confessed Christ at the sight of his deliverance and were beheaded, and the pagan priest Dioscorus, challenged to prove his own gods, confessed Christ in the fire and perished giving thanks. The company is commemorated on April 21.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Beuno, abbot of Clynnog Fawr (c.640)
• St. Maelruba of Applecross (722)
• St. Eingan (Eneon), Hermit of Llyn, Bangor

Troparia & kontakia

Readings