Ven. Sampson the Hospitable of Constantinople

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Ven. Sampson the Hospitable of Constantinople

  Sampson the Hospitable was a Roman-born physician who gave away a great inheritance, settled at Constantinople, and turned his own house into a free surgery for the poor of the City, treating the sick without payment and lodging those who had nowhere to go. Ordained priest by the patriarch, he cured the emperor Justinian of an illness his physicians had given up, and asked in return not gold but the founding of a xenon — a hospital and hostel — which was built beside the Great Church and bore his name for six hundred years. He reposed in peace about 530 and was buried in the church of the Martyr Mokios, where a fragrant myrrh flowed from his tomb and the sick were healed. He is numbered among the unmercenary physicians, and is one of the very few saints whose memorial is a working institution.

• St Severus the Priest (6th c.)

• St Joanna the Myrrh-bearer (1st c.)

  Joanna was the wife of Chuza, the steward of Herod Antipas, and one of the women who followed Christ from Galilee, supported His ministry out of their own means, and came to the sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection. Saint Luke names her twice and only twice — among the women healed of infirmities who "ministered unto them of their substance" (Luke 8:3), and among those who brought the news of the empty tomb to the apostles and were not believed (Luke 24:10). The tradition adds one act to the Gospel record: that when Herodias had the head of the Forerunner thrown away in an unclean place, it was Joanna who recovered it and buried it in a vessel on the Mount of Olives, where it lay until the First Finding. She reposed in peace in the first century. Her fixed commemoration is June 27; her great commemoration, the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, is movable.

• Ambrose of Optina

  Ambrose of Optina (1812–1891) is the most celebrated of the elders of the Optina hermitage and one of the best-loved saints of nineteenth-century Russia. A Tambov priest's-family son who entered Optina in 1839 after a sickbed vow, he was formed by the elders Leonid and Macarius, and from 1860 until his death was the spiritual father to whom all Russia came — peasants, merchants, bishops, and writers, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy among them. Bedridden for much of his life, he received the stream of visitors daily for three decades, answered thousands of letters, helped prepare Optina's famous patristic translations, and founded the Shamordino convent for women whom no other monastery would take. He reposed at Shamordino on October 10, 1891, and was glorified in 1988, the first of the Optina elders to be canonised.

• George the Hagiorite

  George the Hagiorite — Giorgi Mtatsmindeli, "George of the Holy Mountain" — was the greatest of the Georgian translators, abbot of the Monastery of the Iberians (Iviron) on Mount Athos from 1044, and the man to whom the Georgian Church owes the received text of its Scriptures, its Menaion, its Triodion and its Synaxarion. Born about 1009 in Trialeti and educated for twelve years at Constantinople, he was tonsured at Khakhuli, sought out the recluse George on the Black Mountain above Antioch, and came to Athos in 1040 to take up the unfinished work of Euthymius the Iberian. He wrote the Life of John and Euthymius on which nearly all knowledge of Iviron's founders depends, defended the apostolic standing of the Georgian Church at Antioch, and died at Constantinople on 29 June 1065 while bringing eighty Georgian orphans home to Athos to be trained. He is kept on June 27. He is not the George of the May 13 Greek notice, who was Euthymius' immediate successor.

• Martin of Turov

  Martin was the cook of the bishops of Turov, on the Pripyat in the Turov–Pinsk country of what is now southern Belarus, and served four of them in succession — Simeon, Ignatius, Joachim (attested 1114–1146) and George. The last of these released him from the kitchen on account of his age; rather than leave, the old man took the monastic habit and lived alone in the bishop's monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb. Years of heavy work had left him chronically ill, and in one attack he lay three days unable to move, with no one to bring him water. He called on the passion-bearers Boris and Gleb, and on the third day they came to him "as they are painted in their icon," gave him to drink, and healed him. He lived another year, told the story to his spiritual father, and reposed after 1146. It is one of the smallest and most domestic of the Russian miracle-narratives, and one of the most affecting.

• Serapion of Kozheozero

  Serapion was a Tatar prince of Kazan, born Turtas Gravirovich, who was taken to Moscow after the campaigns of the 1550s, was baptised there with the name Sergius, and became — in one of the more remarkable conversions in the Russian record — a monk of the far northern forests. About 1560 he found the hermit Niphon living alone on a peninsula in Lake Kozhe, in the Kargopol country beyond the Onega, joined him, was tonsured Serapion, and after Niphon's death in Moscow held the little community together through famine, obtained from Tsar Theodore Ioannovich in 1584 the charter that gave it land, and from Patriarch Job the antimensia for its two churches. He governed nearly thirty years, resigned in 1608, and reposed on 27 June 1611, leaving forty monks where he had found one hermit.

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