Martyrs Agathopedes, Theodulus and Their Companions

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Agathopedes, Theodulus and Their Companions

• Our Holy Father Mark of Trache (ca. 400)

• Agathopodes and Theodulus

  Agathopodes, an aged deacon, and Theodulus, a young reader, were clergy of the church of Thessalonica who during the Great Persecution of Diocletian refused to surrender the sacred Scriptures or to deny Christ, and were drowned in the sea with stones about their necks about the year 303. The elder and the youth, united in one confession and one death, are honoured together as martyrs of the Thessalonian church.

• Argyra of Prussa

  Argyra was a young married woman of Prussa (Bursa) in Bithynia who, having refused the advances of a Turkish official's son and refused with them the invitation to apostatise, was denounced on a false charge, flogged, and shut up in prison at Constantinople, where she spent seventeen years under repeated interrogation, beating and the abuse of her fellow prisoners without yielding, sustained by fasting and prayer. She died in her cell on 5 April 1721, aged about thirty-three. Some years later her body was found whole and incorrupt and fragrant, and on 30 April 1735 her relics were translated with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch to the church of St Paraskeve, where they are still venerated. She is commemorated on April 30, the day of the translation.

• Job of Moscow

  Job was the first Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, raised to that dignity in 1589 by Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople, and the last great churchman of the house of Rurik's Muscovy. Born at Staritsa of a tradesman's family, he rose through the northern monasteries to the metropolitan throne, and as patriarch organised the new Russian patriarchate, canonised a company of Russian saints, and sent missions to Siberia and Georgia. In the Time of Troubles he refused to acknowledge the pretender known as the False Dmitri, and for that refusal was stripped of his patriarchal vesture in the Dormition Cathedral by the pretender's men and driven into exile at Staritsa, where he died blind on 19 June 1607. His relics, found incorrupt, were carried to Moscow in 1652, and he was glorified by the Russian Church in 1989.

• Mark the Athenian

  Mark, called "the Athenian" from his native city, is honoured as one of the most extreme of the desert solitaries: the tradition tells that he lived ninety-five years utterly alone on a wild mountain beyond the deserts of Egypt (the "Mountain of Thrace" or of Ethiopia), never in all that time seeing the face of a man, until at the very end of his life the monk Serapion was led to him by God to witness his repose. His story, like that of Onuphrius or Paul of Thebes, celebrates the hidden saints known to God alone.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Began, abbot of Kill-Beggan (6th C)
• St. Derfel-Gadarn, hermit of Llanderfel (6th C)
• SS. Probus and Grace
• St. Ethelburga (Æthelburh) abbess of Lyminge (c.647)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings