Beginning of the Great Fast

Saints commemorated

• St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem

  Sophronius the Sophist (c. 560 – 638) was Patriarch of Jerusalem in the last years before the Arab conquest, and one of the towering figures of seventh-century Orthodoxy. A rhetorician of Damascus turned monk, he was for decades the companion and disciple of John Moschus, with whom he wandered the monasteries of Palestine, Egypt, Sinai and the West gathering the sayings that became the Spiritual Meadow; healed of an eye disease at the shrine of Cyrus and John, he wrote their Miracles, and he composed the Life of John the Almsgiver of Alexandria. As a hymnographer he gave the Church a wealth of stichera and the learned anacreontic odes, and above all the great consecratory prayer of the Great Blessing of the Waters at Theophany, "Great art thou, O Lord." Raised to the throne of Jerusalem in 634, he spent his brief patriarchate as the first and most formidable opponent of Monotheletism — his Synodical Letter is the founding document of the Orthodox defence of the two wills of Christ, the cause Maximus the Confessor would carry to martyrdom. He lived to see Islam overwhelm the Holy Land, preached the Saracens' seizure of Bethlehem at the very Nativity, and negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem to the Caliph Umar; he died soon after, on March 11, 638.

• St Euthymius, Bishop of Novgorod

  Euthymius II (c. 1380s – 1458), Archbishop of Novgorod from 1434 to his death, was the great builder-hierarch of the last age of the Novgorod Republic. Born in the city and baptized John, given by his parents to God in fulfilment of a vow, he was tonsured young at the Vyazhishchi monastery of Saint Nicholas, served as its steward under Archbishop Symeon, and after a long delay — for there was then no metropolitan resident in Rus' — was consecrated archbishop in 1434. Through fires, Muscovite pressure, and the last decades of Novgorod's freedom he adorned the city with churches and rebuilt its cathedral of Holy Wisdom; his most famous monument is the Faceted (Vladychny) Chamber of the archbishop's court, raised in 1433 with Western masters. A defender of his Church's ancient liberties and a lover of learning who fostered the copying of books, he reposed at Vyazhishchi on March 11, 1458; his relics were found incorrupt, and he was numbered among the saints at the Council of 1549.

• St Sophronios, patriarch of Jerusalem (638)

• St John Moschos, author of the Spiritual Meadow (622)

• Holy Martyr Pionius (250)

  Pionius (third century, †c. 250) was a learned presbyter of the church of Smyrna who was arrested, tried, and burned alive in the persecution of the emperor Decius, about the year 250. His martyrdom is preserved in the Martyrdom of Pionius, one of the most vivid and historically trustworthy of all the early acts of the martyrs, which records that he was seized on a Saturday, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Polycarp of his own city, together with the Christian woman Sabina and Asclepiades; that he bound ropes about his own neck and theirs so the crowd would know they went to prison and not to sacrifice; and that he answered his judges with long and fearless speeches before he was fastened to the stake and given to the flames. He gave up his spirit with joy, and the Church keeps him with his companions on March 11.

• Epimachus of Pelusium

  Epimachus of Pelusium (†c. 250) was an Egyptian martyr of the Decian persecution. A native of Egypt, he lived for a long time as a solitary on Mount Pelusium; hearing that Christians were being persecuted at Alexandria, he came down to the city, publicly smashed a number of pagan idols, and confessed himself a Christian. Brought before the eparch, he refused to sacrifice and was subjected to prolonged and savage torture — during which a drop of his blood, falling into the blind eye of a watching woman, restored her sight and brought her to faith — before being beheaded. He is distinguished in the calendars as Epimachus "the New," and is commemorated on October 31, with a further commemoration of the transfer of his relics on March 11.

• Sophronius of the Kiev Caves

  Sophronius was a recluse of the Far Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra, one of the monks of that house whose ascetic life is known only from the liturgical commemoration of the Caves fathers and whose relics rest in the Far (Theodosian) Caves. The Canon to the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves remembers his solitary struggle in enclosure and says that he was counted worthy to hear the singing of angels. He is usually placed in the thirteenth century, but nothing of his history survives; his memory is kept on May 11, again on March 11 in Kievan usage, and with the whole company of the Far Caves fathers on August 28.

• Sophronius of Vratsa

  Sophronius of Vratsa (1739–1813), born Stoyko Vladislavov, was a bishop of the Church of Bulgaria and one of the fathers of the Bulgarian National Revival. A priest of Kotel who copied out Paisius of Hilendar's Slavo-Bulgarian History and carried its call for national awakening, he was made Bishop of Vratsa in 1794, taking the name Sophronius; driven from his see by the lawlessness of the age, he withdrew at last to Wallachia, where he wrote and printed the Nedelnik (Kyriakodromion, "the Sunday Book," 1806) — the first printed book in modern Bulgarian — and his celebrated autobiography, The Life and Sufferings of Sinful Sophronius. A tireless labourer for the enlightenment and the liberation of his people, he died in Bucharest about 1813 and was glorified by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 1964; he is commemorated on March 11.

• Trophimus and Thalus

  Trophimus and Thalus (Thallus) were two brothers, martyrs of Laodicea, who suffered for Christ in the persecution of Diocletian about the year 300. Seized as Christians and refusing to sacrifice to the idols, they were beaten and stoned, and at the last crucified, giving up their spirits upon the cross in imitation of their Lord. The tradition remembers that even in their torments they praised God and prayed for their persecutors, and that wonders attended their deaths. They are commemorated together on March 11.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Oengus the Culdee, compiler of the first Irish Martyrology (824)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings