1st Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Agrippina of Rome

  Agrippina was a Roman virgin of the third century who refused marriage, consecrated herself wholly to Christ, and — in the persecution the Greek acts assign to Valerian (253–259) — presented herself before the tribunal of her own accord and confessed the faith. She was beaten with rods until her bones were broken and bound in chains, from which an angel loosed her, and she died of the injuries. Three Christian women, Bassa, Paula and Agathonike, carried her body out of Rome and by sea to Sicily, where it was laid at Mineo in the interior of the island; there her tomb became one of the great healing shrines of the Sicilian Greeks, and she remains to this day the patroness of the town. She is one of the small group of Roman martyrs whose cultus was carried by relics into the Byzantine world and returned to Rome only as a memory: the Greek Menaia keep her on June 23, and the Sicilian and Italo-Greek tradition keeps her with a festivity older than the Norman conquest of the island.

• Martyr Agrippina of Rome (3rd c.)

• Commemoration of the Vladimir Icon of the Most Holy Mother of God

• Aristocles, Demetrian and Athanasius

  Three clerics of the Church of Cyprus — a presbyter, a deacon and a reader — put to death at Salamis about the year 306, in the last and worst of the persecutions. Aristocles was a priest of Tamassos in the copper country of the interior who fled the persecution into a cave on the mountain, was rebuked there by a vision, and came down again to die; on the road he fell in with the deacon Demetrian and the reader Athanasius at the church of the Apostle Barnabas, told them what he had seen, and the two chose to go with him. All three preached openly against the idols in Salamis, were arrested, and were beheaded together. They are among the small number of named Cypriot martyrs of the great persecution, and their memory is kept at Tamassos to this day.

• Artemius of Verkola

  Artemius of Verkola was a peasant boy of twelve from the village of Verkola on the Pinega, in the far north of Russia, who was killed by lightning in a summer thunderstorm on 23 June 1545 while working in the field beside his father. Because a sudden death in a storm was read by his neighbours as a stroke of divine anger, his body was not buried in the churchyard but laid in a pine wood, covered with brushwood and birch bark, and left. Thirty-two years later, in 1577, a light was seen over the place; the body was found incorrupt, was carried into the church of St Nicholas at Verkola, and at once became the centre of an extraordinary series of healings during an epidemic that was then wasting the Pinega. A monastery grew up at the spot. He is one of the very few saints of the Russian Church glorified neither for martyrdom nor for asceticism nor for office, but simply as a righteous child, and he is a patron of children and of the Russian North.

• Etheldreda of Ely

  Etheldreda — Æthelthryth in her own tongue, Audrey in the mouths of later Englishmen — was a princess of the royal house of East Anglia who passed through two marriages without surrendering the virginity she had vowed, was for twelve years queen of Northumbria, and at last obtained her husband's leave to take the veil. In 673 she founded the double monastery of Ely on the island in the fens that had come to her as a marriage gift, and ruled it as abbess with a severity she imposed first on herself: one meal a day, wool rather than linen, and prayer from the night office until daybreak. She died on 23 June 679 of a tumour in the neck, which she received as the just penalty for the necklaces of her girlhood. Sixteen years later her sister Seaxburh raised her body and found it incorrupt, the surgeon's incision healed to a scar. Bede, who tells her story at length and adds a hymn of his own composition in her honour, made her the most celebrated of Anglo-Saxon women saints; Ely remained her city, and her name survives, by an odd descent, in the English word tawdry.

• Eustochius, Gaius and their Companions of Ancyra

  A converted pagan priest and the household of his own kinsman, put to death at Ancyra in Galatia in the last of the great persecutions. Eustochius had served the idols; watching the Christians die, and seeing the wonders worked at their martyrdoms, he came over to the faith, was baptised by Eudoxius, bishop of Antioch, and was ordained presbyter. Preaching afterwards at Lystra in Lycaonia, he brought his nephew Gaius and Gaius's whole household to Christ — among them Probus, Lollius and Urban. Denounced and arrested, they were sent under guard to the governor Agrippinus at Ancyra, tortured together without distinction of age or sex, and at last beheaded. Their memory is kept on June 23, the day of the martyr Agrippina, and the synaxarion notice is all that survives of them.

• Herman of Kazan

  Herman of Kazan (sixteenth century, died 1567) was a monk of the school of Joseph of Volokolamsk who became the first abbot of the Dormition monastery of Sviyazhsk and, from 1564, the second archbishop of the newly Christian region of Kazan. A learned copyist of books and a builder of churches and monastic libraries, he laboured to enlighten the Muslim and heathen peoples of the middle Volga. Summoned by Ivan the Terrible in 1566 to be metropolitan of Moscow, he dared to rebuke the Tsar's cruelties, was cast into disgrace, and died at Moscow on November 6, 1567. His relics were later enshrined at Sviyazhsk, and his repose is his principal feast.

• Nicetas of Thebes

  Nicetas was a monk of Thebes in Boeotia, the "seven-gated" city of the old Greek epic, who was tonsured at the age of sixteen and gathered about him a small company of ascetics — the monks Daniel, Theodore and Gregory are the three the synaxarion names — drawn by the report of his character rather than by any office he held. He received the gift of wonderworking, and, as the notice puts it, the hospitality of Abraham: the charism of receiving whoever came and sending them away rested in soul. He lived to a great age and reposed in 1079. The record of him is a single synaxarion notice and one anecdote of a journey to Patras; he belongs to that large class of Byzantine ascetics of the middle period whose sanctity was local, unliterary, and nonetheless kept in the books of the Church.

• Theodore of Rostov and Suzdal

  Theodore, a Greek by birth, was consecrated in 991 or 992 — within a few years of the baptism of Rus' — as the first bishop of Rostov, and so the first hierarch sent into the wholly pagan forest country of the upper Volga and the Kliazma. The Merya and Slav population of Rostov would not receive him and drove him out; he withdrew to Suzdal, where his preaching took root, and there he baptised and taught until his repose in 1023. He is honoured as the founder of the see that Leontius, Isaiah and Ignatius afterwards made famous, as the enlightener of the Suzdal land, and — because his body was found incorrupt — as a wonderworker. His relics rest in the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Suzdal.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Mochaoi, abbot of Nendrum (498)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings