Ascension of the Lord

Saints commemorated

• Apostle Andronicus of the Seventy

• Holy Martyr Solochon (298)

  Solochon, Pamphamer and Pamphalon were Egyptian soldiers of a Roman legion moved to Chalcedon on the Asian shore opposite Byzantium, put to death there about the year 298 in the persecution of Maximian and Diocletian. Ordered by their tribune, Campanus, to sacrifice to the idols with the rest of the unit, the three refused; Pamphamer and Pamphalon died under the tortures, and Solochon, who survived them, was hung by one hand with a weight fastened to his leg and had a writing-stylus driven through his ear. Carried half-dead to the house of a Christian widow, he strengthened the faithful who gathered to him, prayed, and gave up his spirit. Their memory is kept on May 17.

• Adrian of Ondrusov

  Adrian of Ondrusov (†1549/1550) was, in the world, Andrei Zavalishin, a landowner of the Olonets country north-east of Lake Ladoga who, hunting a stag through the forest, came upon the hermitage of Alexander of Svir and was converted by the meeting. He supplied the hermit with bread for years, was tonsured at last on Valaam, and about 1520 founded on a peninsula of Lake Ladoga the hermitage of Saint Nicholas at Ondrusov, of which he became igumen; there he is said to have won over the brigands of the lake, one of whose chiefs gave the place its name. Called to Moscow to stand godfather at the baptism of a daughter of Ivan the Terrible, he was seized on the road home by peasants who believed he carried money, and killed, his body hidden in a marsh. Two years later, by his own appearing to his monks, the body was found incorrupt and brought back to the monastery. The finding is kept on May 17 and the burial on August 26.

• Andronicus and Junia

  Andronicus and Junia are the two Christians of the first generation whom the Apostle Paul greets at Romans 16:7 as "my kinsmen and my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me" — the only persons in the New Testament of whom that last phrase is said. The Byzantine tradition numbers Andronicus among the Seventy and makes him bishop of Pannonia, and honours Junia with him as his synergos, his fellow-labourer in the Gospel; both are remembered as having suffered for Christ. Their relics, hidden in the persecutions and long anonymous, were brought to light outside Constantinople at the Gate of Eugenius, and identified there by revelation. They are kept on May 17, and again on February 22 with the finding of those relics, and Andronicus a third time on July 30 with his fellow-apostles of the Seventy.

• Dodo of Gareji

  Dodo (†c. 623) was the first and closest disciple of David of Gareji, one of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers who established monasticism in the Georgian lands, and the founder of the second of the great cave-monasteries of the Gareji wilderness — the house called Dodo's Rqa, "Dodo's ridge," cut into the cliff-face across the ravine from David's own lavra. A nobleman of Kartli who gave away his inheritance to follow David into the semi-desert of Kakheti, he became there the father of a large community of hermits living in caves hewn from the soft rock, and reposed in extreme old age about the year 623. His relics lie at Dodo's Rqa. The Georgian Church keeps him with his teacher in the week after the Ascension; the Slavic and American calendars fix his commemoration on May 17.

• Euphrosyne of Moscow

  Eudokia Dmitrievna (c. 1353 – 1407), daughter of the grand prince of Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod, was the wife of Dmitri Donskoy, the victor of Kulikovo, and after his early death the guide of her sons and of the principality of Moscow through eighteen dangerous years. Beneath the dress of a grand princess she wore iron chains and kept a hidden ascetic discipline, and she spent her wealth on churches: the stone church of the Nativity of the Theotokos in the Kremlin, raised in memory of Kulikovo, and above all the Ascension Convent within the Kremlin walls, which she founded and which became for five centuries the burial place of the women of the Muscovite house. When her children were grown she took the monastic habit there, on 17 May 1407, with the name Euphrosyne — "gladness" — and reposed seven weeks later, on 7 July, at the age of fifty-four. Her commemoration on May 17 is the feast of that tonsure.

• Nectarius and Theophanes of Meteora

  Theophanes and Nectarius, brothers of the noble Epirot family of the Apsarades of Ioannina, are the founders of the Monastery of Varlaam at Meteora, the second in size and honour of the rock-monasteries of Thessaly. Coming to the pillars of Meteora in the second decade of the sixteenth century, they took possession in October 1517 of a rock that had lain deserted for nearly two centuries since the death of the hermit Varlaam who first scaled it, restored his ruined chapel of the Three Hierarchs, and then spent twenty-two years hauling stone, brick and timber up the cliff-face in order to build, in a little over twenty days, the great church of All Saints that still stands. They ruled the community they had gathered in a strict coenobitic discipline and left a written foundation-account of their work. Theophanes reposed on 17 May 1544 and Nectarius in 1550; their relics are kept at Varlaam, and the Church commemorates the two brothers together on the day of Theophanes's repose.

• Nicholas of Sofia

  Nicholas the New of Sofia (1510 – 17 May 1555) was a shoemaker of Ottoman Sofia, born at Ioannina in Epirus of Christian parents, whose martyrdom in the middle of the sixteenth century became one of the great causes of the Bulgarian Church under the Turkish yoke. Made drunk by Muslim acquaintances and circumcised while insensible, he was thereafter claimed as a convert to Islam; he answered publicly that he had never left Christ and never would, was beaten, imprisoned and tried, and on 17 May 1555 was stoned to death by the mob outside the city at the place called the Three Wells, his body afterwards burned. His Life and Praise were written within a few years by Matthew the Grammarian of Sofia, and a diocesan council under the metropolitan James numbered him among the saints. He is one of the martyrs by whom the city of Sofia is chiefly known in the Orthodox calendar.

• Stephen I of Constantinople

  Stephen (c. 867 – 893) was the youngest son of the emperor Basil I the Macedonian and the brother of the emperor Leo VI the Wise, ordained to the diaconate by the great patriarch Photius and raised by his brother to the throne of Constantinople in 886, at little more than nineteen years of age, when Photius withdrew from it. He held the patriarchate for seven years and reposed in peace in 893, not yet thirty, and was buried in the monastery of the Sikelia. The Church remembers him not for any act of government — his youth and his short tenure left him little scope for one, and the Photian quarrel he inherited outlasted him — but for what his contemporaries thought worth recording of him: his abstinence, his mildness, his readiness to intercede for those in trouble, and his personal care for widows and orphans. He is one of the few Byzantine patriarchs canonised who were also born in the purple.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Madern, hermit in Cornwall (545)
• St. Cathan, bishop of Bute (6th C)
• St. Mailduf, abbot of Malmesbury (673)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings