Forty-two Martyrs of Ammoria

Saints commemorated

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  Forty-two Martyrs of Ammoria

  The Forty-Two Martyrs of Amorion (†845) were the Byzantine commanders and officers taken captive when the great Phrygian city of Amorion — the cradle of the reigning imperial dynasty — fell to the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim in August 838, the calamity of the reign of the emperor Theophilus. Carried off to the caliphal capital of Samarra on the Tigris, they were held in prison for seven years, courted and threatened by turns to embrace Islam, and drawn into repeated debates on the truth of the two faiths. Steadfast to the end, they were led out on March 6, 845, and beheaded on the river-bank, their bodies cast into the water. Among them the tradition names Theodore (called Krateros, "the Mighty"), Constantine, Aetius, Theophilus, Callistus, Bassoes, and Melissenus, with their companions to the number of forty-two. Celebrated at once in a martyrdom-account written soon after their death, they are among the most honoured witnesses of the long Byzantine–Arab frontier war, hymned as "towers and guardians of the realm of the Romans."

• Arcadius of Cyprus

  Arcadius (†c. 361) was a monastic ascetic of the island of Cyprus in the age of Constantine the Great and Constantius, remembered above all as the spiritual father and teacher of the holy martyrs Julian the Physician and Eubulos, who suffered on the island under Julian the Apostate. From his youth he gave himself to the ascetic life, and by his teaching and example he formed disciples in the faith for which they went to their death. He is kept on March 6. The record of his life is thin — a synaxarion memory rather than a full biography — but the Church honours him among the venerable fathers of Cyprus, and distinguishes him carefully from the later Arcadius who was archbishop of the island.

• Conon and his son Conon of Iconium

  Conon and his son, also named Conon, were martyrs of Iconium in Lycaonia (Asia Minor) in the third century, about the years 270–275. Left a widower, the elder Conon withdrew with his young son to a monastery, and there the father was granted the gifts of healing and of power over demons: he is remembered as one who cast out devils, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, and preached Christ among the pagans. Father and son together confessed the faith in time of persecution and were put to death for it, and the Church keeps them as monk-martyrs on March 6. They are to be carefully distinguished from the two other martyrs named Conon kept the day before, on March 5.

• Hesychius the Wonderworker

  Hesychius the Wonderworker (eighth century) was a monastic ascetic of Bithynia in Asia Minor, born at the coastal town of Adrineia and glorified for the solitary life he led on Mount Maionis, where he endured the assaults of demons, of wild beasts, and of robbers, and was granted the gift of wonders. The Greek calendar keeps him on March 6, styling him "the Wonderworker" (ὁ Θαυματουργός); the Slavic books and the Orthodox Church in America keep the same Bithynian ascetic on March 5 under the epithet "the Faster." His life is known only in brief from the synaxarion, but he is honoured among the venerable fathers of the Byzantine ascetic tradition.

• Job of Anzersk

  Job of Anzersk (c. 1635–1720), in the great schema named Jesus (Iisus), was a Russian ascetic of the far North, founder of the Golgotha-Crucifixion Skete on Anzer, an island of the Solovki archipelago in the White Sea. Born at Moscow and long a married parish priest of the capital — the tradition makes him a confessor and spiritual father to the court of Peter the Great — he was slandered and exiled to the Solovetsky Monastery, where he was tonsured a monk as Job. Withdrawing to the greater solitude of Anzer, he became head of its Trinity Skete, received the great schema with the name Jesus, and, after a vision of the Mother of God upon a hill he thereafter called Golgotha, founded there the Skete of the Crucifixion. He reposed on March 6, 1720, and was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church in the year 2000. He is not to be confused with the Old Testament patriarch Job the Long-suffering (May 6), whose name he received at his tonsure, nor with Job of Pochaev (†1651), nor with Job of Ushchelsk (†1628, August 5) — the confusion likeliest of all, since that Job was also a hieromonk of Solovki and also a saint of the Russian north.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Sithney, missionary abbot (529)
• SS Cyneburgh and Cyneswith, abbesses of Castor and St. Tibba (c.680)
• St. Billfrith, the Goldsmith, hermit (8th C)
• St. Baldred, hermit at Tyningham (756)
• St. Fridolin of Ireland, Enlightener of the Upper Rhine (538)
• St. Cadroel, monk and bishop (976)
• St. Sezin of Guic-Sezni (c.529)

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