Leavetaking of Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Eusebius, Bishop of Samosata

  Eusebius, bishop of Samosata on the Euphrates from about 361, was the strongest Nicene hierarch of the Syrian provinces in the generation of the Arian ascendancy, and the closest episcopal ally in the East of Basil the Great, some twenty of whose surviving letters are addressed to him. He refused, at the threat of losing his right hand, to surrender the record of the election of Meletius of Antioch; exiled to Thrace by the Arian emperor Valens in 374, he crossed Syria, Phoenicia and Palestine in the dress of a soldier, secretly ordaining presbyters, deacons and bishops for the orphaned Orthodox churches. Restored after Valens's death, he was killed at Doliche by a roof-tile flung by an Arian woman, and died forbidding under oath that anyone avenge him. The Church keeps him as a hieromartyr on June 22.

• St Alban, First Martyr of Great Britain (early 3rd c.)

  Alban is the protomartyr of Britain: a citizen of the Romano-British town of Verulamium who sheltered a Christian priest fleeing persecution, was converted by him, and when the soldiers came exchanged cloaks with him and gave himself up in his place. Refusing to sacrifice, he was led out of the town and beheaded on the hill above the river Ver, where a church stood over his grave by the fifth century and where St Albans Abbey stands today. He is the earliest named Christian of the British Isles, attested by Gildas in the sixth century and told at length by Bede; the year of his death is disputed among the Severan, Decian and Diocletianic persecutions. He is commemorated on June 22 in Orthodox usage.

• Galacteon, Juliana and Saturninus

  Three martyrs of Constantinople whom the synaxaria join on June 22 and of whom they transmit almost nothing but the manner of their deaths: Galacteon was drowned in the sea, and Juliana was burned alive together with her son Saturninus, for no cause but that they were Christians. No reign, no magistrate, no year and no connection between the two executions is given. They are among the many companies of the fixed calendar preserved by a single line, and are recorded here at the length the record actually supports.

• Gregory of Wallachia

  Gregory the Teacher — Grigorie Dascălul — was a monk of Neamț formed in the Paisian tradition, one of the great translators of the Greek Fathers into Romanian, who was drawn out of the monastery in 1823 to be Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia in the wreckage left by the revolution of 1821. He filled the empty sees with Romanian bishops, revived the schools and the press, and in 1829 was deposed and exiled to Chișinău by the Russian military administration whose demands upon the clergy he had refused. He returned in 1833 to a Church he had barely a year left to serve, and died on 22 June 1834. The Romanian Orthodox Church glorified him in October 2005; his relics rest at the monastery of Căldărușani.

• Nicetas of Remesiana

  Nicetas, bishop of Remesiana in Dacia Mediterranea — the modern Bela Palanka in south-eastern Serbia, on the road from Naissus to Serdica — was the apostle of the Bessi, a Thracian mountain people whom he brought to Christ and taught to sing the psalms in their own tongue, "turning wolves into sheep" in the phrase of his friend Paulinus of Nola. He was a catechetical writer of real weight: his surviving Instruction for Candidates for Baptism is the earliest text known to use the phrase "the communion of saints," and a long tradition, now contested, ascribed to him the Te Deum. He is commemorated on June 22, on which day the calendars also carry a Martyr Nicetas the Dacian who is very probably himself.

• Zeno and Zenas of Philadelphia

  Zeno was a man of substance in Philadelphia in Arabia — the old Ammonite capital, the modern Amman — who, when the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian reached the province, freed his servant Zenas, gave away his property to the poor, and went with him to confess Christ before the governor. Master and servant were tortured together and beheaded about the year 304. The pair are a favourite of the synaxaria precisely for the order of the acts: the manumission and the almsgiving come first, and the confession follows from them, so that the martyrdom is presented as the last step of a life already surrendered.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Aaron the Hermit (c.552)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings