Ven. David of Thessalonica; Tikhvin Icon

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. David of Thessalonica

  David was an Athonite monk of the Skete of Saint Anne who was hanged at Thessalonica on 26 June 1813 for confessing Christ before the Ottoman authorities. He came of the Kydonians of Aivali (Ayvalık) on the Asia Minor coast, a town bound to the Holy Mountain by long ties of dependency and patronage. Consumed by the desire for martyrdom that marked the Kollyvades generation, he first went to Magnesia to denounce Islam publicly and was only beaten and driven out; obtaining at length the reluctant blessing of his elder, he went to Thessalonica intending to recall an apostate monk to the faith. The Turkish authorities learned of it, arrested him, and the judge — fearing precisely that the renegade might be won back — ordered his immediate execution. He is one of the last of the Athonite new-martyrs of the Turkish period.

• Saint of the day

  Tikhvin Icon

• Saint of the day

  

  David of Thessalonica

  David the Dendrite is the most beloved of the ascetics of Thessalonica and one of the best documented of the tree-dwelling hermits of the Christian East. A Mesopotamian by birth who came west as a young monk to the monastery of the holy martyrs Theodore and Mercurius outside the city walls, he refused to be made abbot and instead climbed into an almond tree beside the church, where he lived exposed to sun, frost and rain for three years until an angel bade him come down. From the cell he then occupied he healed, exorcised, counselled and prophesied for decades. In extreme old age he was sent as the city's ambassador to the emperor Justinian at Constantinople to plead that Thessalonica not be stripped of the prefecture of Illyricum; there he carried live coals and incense in his bare hands before the emperor and the senate without being burned, and won his city's cause. He died on the voyage home, about 540, within sight of the Thessalonian shore, having accomplished exactly the "one last work of love" the angel had foretold.

• Dionysius of Suzdal

  Dionysius was the cave-dwelling founder of the Pechersky (Caves) monastery of the Ascension at Nizhny Novgorod, the teacher of a generation of northern ascetics, and one of the most formidable churchmen of the age of Sergius of Radonezh and Dmitry Donskoy. Tonsured at the Kiev Caves and coming north to the Volga with an icon of the Mother of God from that monastery, he dug himself a cave in the bank above Nizhny Novgorod about 1335 and gathered a brotherhood that produced Saints Euthymius of Suzdal and Macarius of Unzha. Made bishop in 1374, he preached against the Strigolniki, survived a Tatar arrow, and stood almost alone against the attempt of Grand Prince Dmitry to impose his confessor Mityai on the metropolitan throne. He went twice to Constantinople, was raised to archbishop in 1382, and in 1384 was named metropolitan of Russia by the Patriarch — but on his way home was seized and imprisoned at Kiev by Prince Vladimir Olgerdovich, and died there on 15 October 1385, buried in the cave of Saint Anthony where his own monastic life had begun.

• John of Gothia

  John, bishop of the Goths of the Crimea, is one of the very few named figures through whom the history of the Gothic Church in the Crimea can be seen at all. Born at Partenit under the mountain of Ayu-Dag on the southern Crimean coast, he was consecrated bishop about 758 — not in the Empire, where the hierarchy was then iconoclast under Constantine V Copronymus, but in Georgia, which had kept clear of the heresy — and governed the Gothic see of Doros in the Crimean mountains. In 787 he led his people in a revolt against the Khazars, who then held the peninsula: the rising took the fortress of Doros and the mountain passes, but it collapsed within the year, and John was imprisoned at Phoulloi. He escaped across the Black Sea to Amastris in Paphlagonia, lived there some four years, and died there about 791, having foretold his own death within forty days of hearing that the Khazar ruler was dead. His relics were carried home to Partenit, to the church of the Apostles Peter and Paul which he had built at the foot of Ayu-Dag.

• Tikhon of Lukhov

  Tikhon of Lukhov (†16 June 1503), called Timothy in the world, was a nobleman in military service in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania who in 1482 left his country rather than accept the union with Rome, crossing into Muscovy in the train of Prince Feodor Belsky. He refused the rewards of his new service, gave away what he had, took the habit with the name Tikhon, and settled in the forest of the Lukh country on the border of the Kostroma land. There he lived by the work of his hands — a skilled copyist of books and a turner of wooden vessels — refused ordination to the priesthood out of humility, and formed with two companions, Photius and Gerasim, the community that became the Nikolo-Tikhonov monastery. He died so poor that his disciples had nothing to bury him in until the bishop of Suzdal sent a vestment. His relics were found incorrupt in 1569, and the healings that followed established the veneration of one of the most-loved wonderworkers of the Kostroma and Ivanovo country.

British Isles and Ireland

• Translation of the relics of St. Brannock of Braunton
• St. Corbican (8th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings