St Theodore Tyro (the Recruit)

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Theodore the Recruit

  Theodore the Recruit (†c. 306) — Tyron, "the recruit" or "the conscript," from the Latin tiro — was a young soldier newly enrolled in the Roman legion, stationed at Amasea in Pontus during the persecution of Maximian, and one of the two great warrior-martyrs named Theodore whom the Church honours. Refusing to sacrifice to the gods, and given a stay in which the authorities hoped he would relent, he instead set fire by night to the temple of the Mother of the gods (Cybele/Rhea); arrested and racked, comforted in prison by a vision of Christ, he was at the last burned alive, and gave up his soul in the flames. His body was buried at Euchaita by a pious woman, Eusebia, and Gregory of Nyssa preached his praise at the shrine there. He is famous above all for a posthumous wonder: when Julian the Apostate secretly ordered the food of Constantinople defiled with blood offered to idols during the first week of Lent, Theodore appeared to the archbishop and bade the faithful eat boiled wheat (kollyva) instead — for which the Church keeps his memory each year on the First Saturday of Great Lent, besides his fixed feast on February 17.

• Martyr Eudoxia of Heliopolis

• Agapius of Vatopedi

  Agapius of Vatopedi (13th century) was a young monk of the Holy Mountain, a novice at the Trinity cell of Kolitsou, a dependency of the great monastery of Vatopedi. Carried off by Turkish raiders and sold into slavery at Magnesia, he spent many years in chains, praying continually to the Mother of God, until she appeared to him and set him free, his fetters falling away and the doors of his prison opening of themselves. Yet when he returned to the Holy Mountain, his elder, holding that a debt of obedience was owed even to an earthly master, sent him back to his captor. His unresisting obedience so astonished and moved the Turk that he came to Athos with his two sons and received holy Baptism, and all three ended their days as monks — a story the Athonite tradition treasures as a parable of obedience and of the power of the Theotokos.

• Antonina of Nicaea

  Antonina of Nicaea (†c. 302) was a Christian woman of Nicaea in Bithynia who suffered martyrdom in the persecutions of the late third and early fourth centuries. Arrested for her confession of Christ and brought before the governor, she refused every inducement and threat to sacrifice to the idols; she was subjected to a succession of savage tortures — the rack, fire, and imprisonment — which she endured with unshaken constancy, and at last was put to death. The Church honours her among the martyrs of Nicaea and keeps her memory on March 1.

• Domnina the Younger of Syria

  Domnina the Younger (†c. 450–460) was a Syrian ascetic of the region of Cyrrhus, one of the enclosed holy women whose lives Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, set down from his own knowledge in his Religious History. Born of pious and well-to-do parents, she forsook the world for a life of extreme austerity, dwelling in a little hut of reeds built in the garden of her mother's house, clothed in haircloth, eating only lentils moistened with water, and going out only to the village church for the morning and evening services. Above all she was known for her ceaseless weeping — her veil and her cheeks perpetually wet with the tears of compunction — and for a boundless charity, giving away to the poor and to passing strangers all that her mother's estate produced. She reposed in peace in the mid-fifth century, and the Church honours her among the venerable ascetics of Syria, of particular note in the Antiochian tradition to which she belongs.

• Eudocia of Heliopolis

  Eudocia of Heliopolis (†c. 152–170) was a wealthy Samaritan woman of Heliopolis in Phoenicia — the great sun-city the Romans called Baalbek — who lived by her beauty as a famed and dissolute courtesan, and amassed a fortune from her many lovers. Overhearing through a wall the monk Germanus reading aloud of the Last Judgement and the torments and rewards to come, she was pierced to the heart, sought him out, and was converted; baptised by the bishop Theodotus, she gave her whole fortune to the poor, entered a convent, and gave herself to so severe a repentance that she was counted worthy of the gift of wonders, raising the dead and turning her former companions and their persecutors to Christ. After many years as a nun and at length abbess, she was seized in a renewed persecution and beheaded for the faith. The Church honours her as a venerable-martyr — a monastic who sealed her repentance with her blood — and keeps her as one of its great models of conversion, that the deepest sinner may become the purest saint.

• Marcellus and Anthony

  Marcellus and Anthony were two early martyrs commemorated on March 1, of whom the synaxarion preserves only that, having confessed Christ, they were cast into the fire and perished in the flames — shining, in the words of the notice, brighter than gold tried in the furnace. Nothing further of their place or age is securely transmitted; the Church keeps their memory among the martyrs of the day.

• Martyrius of Zelenets

  Martyrius of Zelenets (†1603) was a Russian monastic saint, the founder and first abbot of the Trinity monastery of Zelenets — the "Green Island" in the marshes east of the river Volkhov, in the Novgorod land. Born Menas in the town of Velikiye Luki and orphaned in childhood, he was raised in piety by a priest, was tonsured under his own spiritual father, and after years of shared cell-life withdrew into the deep forest, guided (the tradition holds) by visions of the Mother of God and of a radiant cross of stars. On the wooded island he found there he raised a church of the Life-giving Trinity and gathered a brotherhood, becoming their abbot; he was granted the gift of wonders, and reposed in great old age in 1603, having dug his own grave and taken leave of his monks with a final charge to trust in the Holy Trinity and the Mother of God.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. David of Wales (6th C)
• St. Marnock of Kilmarnock (625)
• St. Swithbert the Elder of Northumbria, bishop of the Frisians (713)
• Holy Martyr Monan of St. Andrew’s (874)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings