4th Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Patrick, Bishop of Prussa

• Caluf of Egypt

  Caluf was a Christian of Thebes in Upper Egypt, put to death in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian about the year 303. Brought before the governor of the city and ordered to sacrifice, he refused; he was hung head downward and beaten, and when he was asked how he could bear it, he answered that he endured everything in expectation of the life to come. Since neither promises nor torture moved him, he was thrown into a fire and gave up his soul in it. Nothing else of him is transmitted: he is one of the very many Egyptian martyrs of the Great Persecution whose memory the Church kept when their histories were already lost.

• Cornelius of Komel

  Cornelius of Komel (1457 – 19 May 1537) was the founder of the monastery of the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Komel forest south of Vologda, and the most influential teacher of monks in the Russian north in his generation. Born of the boyar family Kriukov at Rostov and formed at the monastery of Cyril of White Lake, he spent some twenty years seeking a solitude that the fame of his own holiness kept taking from him, and settled at last in 1497 in an abandoned robbers' hut in the Komel woods. There he built two churches, fed the whole countryside through a famine, and wrote for his brotherhood a Rule — one of the earliest original Russian monastic rules — which quietly takes what it needs from Joseph of Volokolamsk and from Nilus of Sora, the two men whose disciples were then dividing Russian monasticism between them. From his community came a whole generation of founders: Cassian and Laurence of Komel, Cyril of Novoezersk, Gennadius of Kostroma, Adrian of Poshekhonye and Herodion of Iloezersk. He died at eighty, praying for the deliverance of his house from a Tatar raid, and his commemoration was established by the Church on 25 January 1600.

• Cornelius of Paleostrov

  Cornelius of Paleostrov was a monk of Pskov who at the end of the fourteenth century crossed into the Olonets country and became the founder of monastic life on Palei Island in Lake Onega — the house afterwards known as the Paleostrovsky monastery of the Nativity of the Mother of God. He raised two churches for the brethren who gathered to him, one of the Nativity of the Theotokos and one of the Prophet Elias, and passed his own last years apart from them in a cave on the island, in chains and unbroken prayer. He reposed about 1420; his disciple Abramius brought his relics up from the cave into the monastery church and was in time buried beside him, and the two are honoured together as the founders of the house.

• Demetrius Donskoy

  Demetrius Ivanovich (12 October 1350 – 19 May 1389), Grand Prince of Moscow, is honoured by the Russian Church as a right-believing prince: the ruler who, having received the blessing of Sergius of Radonezh, defeated the army of Mamai on the field of Kulikovo between the Don and the Nepryadva on 8 September 1380, and so broke for the first time the assumption that the Horde could not be beaten in the open field. He came to the throne a child of nine and was brought up under the guardianship of the metropolitan Alexis of Moscow; he built the first stone walls of the Kremlin, gathered the Russian principalities under Moscow, and paid for his victory two years later when Tokhtamysh burned the city. He died at thirty-eight, and the epithet Donskoy, "of the Don," which he earned at Kulikovo, has been his name ever since. He was numbered among the saints in 1988, at the millennium of the Baptism of Rus.

• Euphrosyne of Moscow

  Eudokia Dmitrievna (c. 1353 – 1407), daughter of the grand prince of Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod, was the wife of Dmitri Donskoy, the victor of Kulikovo, and after his early death the guide of her sons and of the principality of Moscow through eighteen dangerous years. Beneath the dress of a grand princess she wore iron chains and kept a hidden ascetic discipline, and she spent her wealth on churches: the stone church of the Nativity of the Theotokos in the Kremlin, raised in memory of Kulikovo, and above all the Ascension Convent within the Kremlin walls, which she founded and which became for five centuries the burial place of the women of the Muscovite house. When her children were grown she took the monastic habit there, on 17 May 1407, with the name Euphrosyne — "gladness" — and reposed seven weeks later, on 7 July, at the age of fifty-four. Her commemoration on May 17 is the feast of that tonsure.

• 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.

• John of Uglich

  John of Uglich (c. 1477 – 19 May 1523) was a prince of the house of Moscow who spent thirty-two years in prison for no fault of his own and was numbered among the saints for the manner in which he bore it. He was the elder son of Andrew Vasilyevich the Great, appanage prince of Uglich; when Andrew was arrested in 1491 by his brother the Grand Prince Ivan III, the two boys were taken with him, and John — a child of about fourteen — passed the whole of the rest of his life in confinement, first at Pereslavl-Zalessky and then in the Saviour-Priluki monastery near Vologda, in chains. He is remembered as having accepted it without bitterness, giving himself to prayer and to the services of the monastery that was also his prison; shortly before his death he was tonsured into the great schema with the name Ignatius, and he died at about forty-six. He was buried beside Demetrius of Priluki, and healings were reported at his tomb.

• Memnon the Wonderworker

  Memnon was an ascetic of the Egyptian desert who from his youth gave himself to the monastic life, was set over one of the Egyptian monasteries as abbot, and became famous for the gifts that followed his labours: clairvoyance, and a wonderworking power over the calamities of the countryside. The synaxarion remembers three of his miracles in particular — a spring of water opened in the waterless wilderness at his prayer, a plague of locusts destroyed as it stripped the harvest, and shipwrecked men saved who called on his name at sea — and adds that after his death the mere invocation of his name drove away locusts and broke the deceits of the demons. He is commemorated as "Memnon the Wonderworker," and no fuller Life of him has come down.

• Nina of Georgia

  Nina (Nino, c. 280 – c. 335) is the Enlightener of Georgia, the Equal-to-the-Apostles whose preaching converted the kingdom of Iberia (eastern Georgia) to Christ in the first quarter of the fourth century. A Cappadocian by birth, kinswoman of the Great-martyr George and, by the Georgian tradition, niece of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, she came to Iberia a lone captive maiden, bearing a cross of grapevine twigs bound with her own hair. By healing, prayer, and the quiet witness of her ascetic life she won first the poor and the sick, then Queen Nana, whom she cured, and at last King Mirian, struck blind and lost in a sudden darkness while hunting and restored to sight when he called upon "the God of Nina." Iberia was declared a Christian kingdom about the year 326; a bishop and clergy were sought from Constantine the Great, and the first cathedral rose at Mtskheta over the buried Robe of Christ, at the Life-giving Pillar (Svetitskhoveli). Nina withdrew to Bodbe in Kakheti, where she reposed and is buried. Her grapevine cross is the emblem of Georgian Christianity, and she is one of the few women the Church honours as Equal-to-the-Apostles.

• Patrick of Prusa

  Patrick, bishop of Prusa in Bithynia, was put to death with three of his priests — Acacius, Menander and Polyaenus — at the famous hot springs of that city, in the early persecutions; the received notices place him in the first century, about the year 100. What has made his passion memorable is not the manner of his death but the argument that preceded it: brought to the springs and ordered to sacrifice to the gods who were thought to warm them, Patrick answered the governor Julius with a discourse on divine providence — that the one Creator made both the fire beneath the earth and the healing waters above it, the one prepared for the punishment of the impenitent and the other given freely for the good of all men. He was thrown into the boiling water and came out unharmed; and when that failed, he and the three priests were beheaded and so received their crowns together.

• Sergius of Shukhtom

  Sergius of Shukhtom (c. 1530 – 19 May 1609) was a schema-monk of the Vologda north whose long life divided into two halves: some fifty years of ascetic wandering and pilgrimage, in the course of which he worshipped at the holy places of Palestine, Constantinople and Greece and at Solovki in the White Sea, and six last years of stability in the little monastery of Shukhtom near Cherepovets, where he was tonsured in 1603 by Archimandrite Isaiah and given the name Sergius. His asceticism was of the severest northern kind — perpetual fasting, and sleep taken only sitting up — and the tradition credits him with unceasing prayer, clairvoyance and the working of miracles. He died at seventy-nine and was buried beneath the floor of the monastery church, which after the monastery's suppression became the parish church of the Protection of the Mother of God; his shrine remained there, and he is honoured among the saints of the Vologda land.

• Theotima

  Theotima is one of the saints of whom the Church has kept only the name, the manner of death and the day. The Greek synaxarion for May 19 records her in a single clause — "the holy martyr Theotima is perfected by the sword" — and the calendars add a date of about 311, at the very end of the Great Persecution. Nothing else has come down: not her city, not the persecutor, not her age or state of life. She is entered here at that value, without supplement, because the alternative to an honest short entry is an invented long one.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Dunstan, 25th archbishop of Canterbury (988)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings