12th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Andrew Stratelates and Companions

  Andrew, called Stratelates — "the General" — was a Roman field commander of the eastern armies under Maximian who won a victory over a Persian invasion of the Syrian frontier with a small detachment of pagan soldiers whom he had first persuaded to call, in the battle, upon a God they did not yet worship. Denounced for it, tried, tortured and released by an emperor who feared what the army would do if its favourite were executed, he was baptised at Tarsus with his men, and then hunted down and beheaded with them in the passes of the Taurus on the pretext of desertion, about the year 300. The synaxarion numbers the company 2,593. A spring of water broke out at the place of their blood, for which Andrew had prayed as he died, and the Greek verses for the day turn on the exchange: the lakes of blood they set up, and the lakes of water he set up for them. He is one of the great soldier-martyrs of the Byzantine calendar, and the largest single company of martyrs kept on any day of August.

• Martyr Andrew Strateletes and 2,593 soldiers with him in Cilicia (ca. 289)

• Eutychian and Strategius

  Eutychian and Strategius are two martyrs of whom the Greek synaxarion for August 19 has kept four things and nothing else: their names, that Eutychian was a soldier, that they were perfected by fire, and two couplets of verse composed on the puns their names make. Neither the persecution, nor the place, nor the year, nor the manner of their arrest has come down. They are recorded here at the length the record allows, which is short, and no life is constructed for them.

• Gennadius of Kostroma

  Gennadius of Kostroma and Liubimograd (early sixteenth century – 1565) was a Russian monastic founder, a disciple of Cornelius of Komel and, through him, an heir of the great northern tradition of forest-dwelling ascetics. Born at Mogilev in a wealthy family under the name Gregory, he abandoned home and riches as a youth, was tonsured by Cornelius in the Vologda forest, and after sharing his master's flight into the deeper wilderness founded, on the shore of Lake Sura in the Kostroma country, the Monastery of the Transfiguration (afterwards called the Gennadiev Monastery). Famed for his labours, his charity, and a gift of spiritual counsel and foresight, he reposed on January 23, 1565, and was glorified when his relics were uncovered incorrupt in 1646.

• Gerasimus, Pitirim and Jonah of Perm

  Gerasimus, Pitirim and Jonah were three successive bishops of Great Perm, seated at Ust-Vym on the Vychegda, who in the fifteenth century carried forward the mission begun by Stephen of Perm among the Zyrians (Komi) and the pagan tribes of the far north-east of Russia. Gerasimus (†c. 1441) and Pitirim (†1455) were both martyred — the one strangled by a heathen of his own household, the other killed in a raid of the pagan Voguls (Mansi) — while Jonah (†1470) completed the conversion of Great Perm on the upper Kama and reposed in peace. Venerated together as the wonderworking hierarchs of Perm, their relics rest in the cathedral of Ust-Vym, and they are commemorated as a company on January 29.

• Theophanes the New of Naousa

  Theophanes, called the New to distinguish him from the older saints of his name and the Wonderworker for what was done through him, was a sixteenth-century monk of Ioannina who became abbot of Docheiariou on Mount Athos, and who lost that office because he rescued a boy. When his sister's son was carried off to Constantinople in the devshirme, the levy of Christian children for the janissary corps, Theophanes went after him, got him out before his conversion to Islam was complete, brought him back to the Holy Mountain and tonsured him. The brotherhood, terrified of Ottoman reprisal, turned against their abbot; rather than let the house be divided over him, Theophanes left — took his nephew, left Athos altogether, and began again in Macedonia. He founded a monastery at the skete of the Forerunner near Veria and set his nephew over it, and a second at Naousa, dedicated to the Holy Archangels, and governed both as their common father until he died in great old age on 19 August. He is one of the patron saints of Veria and Naousa, and the whole shape of his life is a single choice made twice: to lose position in order not to lose a person.

• Timothy, Agapius and Thecla

  Timothy, Agapius and Thecla are three of the earliest named victims of the Great Persecution in Palestine, put to death in 304, its second year, under the governor Urbanus. They are not synaxarion figures but people whose deaths were recorded, within living memory and probably from the writer's own eyes, by Eusebius of Caesarea in his little book On the Martyrs of Palestine. Timothy, a learned and eloquent teacher of the faith, was tortured at length and then burned to death over a slow fire at Gaza — a mode of execution designed to be as long as possible; the Greek verses for the day turn the horror into an image of worship, the furnace a censer and the martyr the incense in it. Agapius and Thecla, condemned in the same season, were given to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre. Their memory stands on August 19 immediately after that of Andrew Stratelates, and their arena is the same one into which, days later, the eight martyrs of Agapius and his Companions deliberately walked.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Clydog, king and martyr (492)
• St. Mochta, 1st bishop of Louth, Ireland (534)
• St. Credan, abbot of Evesham (c.780)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings