Bright Tuesday

Saints commemorated

• Apostles of the Seventy Aristarchus, Pudens and Trophimus

  Aristarchus of the Seventy was a Macedonian of Thessalonica and one of the most constant companions of the apostle Paul: seized by the Ephesus mob in the riot of the silversmiths, he accompanied Paul through Greece and to Jerusalem, sailed with him on the prisoner's voyage to Rome, and is greeted in the epistles as Paul's "fellow prisoner" and "fellow worker." The Byzantine tradition numbers him among the Seventy and makes him bishop of Apamea in Syria; the tradition of his April feast holds that he was beheaded at Rome under Nero, at the time of Paul's own martyrdom. He is commemorated on September 27 with the apostles Mark and Zenas, on April 15 with Pudens and Trophimus, and with all the Seventy on January 4.

• Holy Martyr Sabbas the Goth (372)

• Basilissa and Anastasia of Rome

  Basilissa and Anastasia were noble Christian women of Rome, disciples of the apostles Peter and Paul, who devoted themselves to gathering and burying the bodies of the martyrs of the Neronian persecution. For this — and for their own bold confession of Christ — they were arrested, tortured and beheaded at Rome about the year 68. They are honoured as martyrs and as among the earliest confessors of the Church in the capital.

• Pudens of the Seventy

  Pudens was a Christian of Rome, named by the Apostle Paul in the Second Letter to Timothy, and is numbered by the Church among the Seventy Apostles. Tradition makes him a Roman of rank whose house was a gathering-place of the apostles, and who was beheaded at Rome with the apostles Aristarchus and Trophimus under Nero. He is commemorated on April 15 with his companions, and among the Seventy on January 4.

• Raphael, Nicholas and Irene of Lesbos

  The strangest entry in the modern Greek calendar, and one of the few saints in this collection whose whole biography reached the Church after their cult did. For five centuries the people of Lesbos walked up on Bright Tuesday to a ruined enclosure at Karyes, above the village of Thermi north-west of Mytilene, without being able to say why: there had been a monastery there, it was remembered, and the monks had been killed by the Turks, and that was all. In 1959 the ground was being cleared to build a chapel when the workmen uncovered a grave, and from that year the dead began — in the accounts of a very large number of islanders — to appear and to say who they were: Raphael, hieromonk and abbot, a native of Ithaca; Nicholas, his deacon, of Thessaloniki; Irene, the twelve-year-old daughter of the village headman; and with them Irene's parents Basil and Maria, the schoolmaster Theodore, and Irene's fifteen-year-old cousin Eleni. They were tortured, the accounts say, from Great Thursday until Bright Tuesday, 9 April 1463, ten years after the fall of Constantinople; Raphael died with a saw through his jaw, tied to a tree; Irene had an arm cut off before her parents' eyes and was suffocated in a burning earthenware jar. They asked for an icon, for a service, and for their graves to be found, and all three were given them: the icon by Photios Kontoglou, the office by the hymnographer Gerasimos Mikragiannanites, and the relics between 1959 and 1961. Their commemoration is movable — it is kept on the anniversary as the Church counts it, the Tuesday of the Renewal, and has no fixed date in the general calendar.

• The Six Thousand Martyrs of David-Gareji

  The largest single martyrdom in the history of the Georgian Church, and the one commemoration of the Georgian calendar that is fixed to Bright Week rather than to a day of the month. In 1616, in the aftermath of the devastation of Kakheti by Shah Abbas I of Persia, the whole brotherhood of the cave-monasteries of the David-Gareji wilderness — reckoned by the Georgian tradition at six thousand monks — was cut down by the shah's troops in the paschal season, at the altar, in their festal vestments, immediately after they had received Holy Communion. The tradition relates that the shah, hunting in the semi-desert, saw from his camp a line of lights moving on the mountain at midnight and was told that these were monks going round their church with candles for the Resurrection of Christ, and that he gave the order for their slaughter on the spot; that an angel warned the abbot Arsenius that night and left each man free to flee or to stay; that all but two novices stayed; and that the two who had hidden returned and were killed when they saw the crowns descending from heaven, two of which floated empty in the air. Their bones were gathered later in the century by King Archil and laid in a great stone vessel beside the altar, where they were reported to stream myrrh. The brotherhoods of the David and the Baptist monasteries asked Catholicos Anthony I to compose their service and to appoint the Tuesday of Bright Week as their day, and it has been kept so ever since.

• Trophimus of the Seventy

  Trophimus was a disciple and travelling-companion of the Apostle Paul, named several times in the New Testament, and is numbered by the Church among the Seventy Apostles. An Ephesian and a Gentile Christian, he shared Paul's journeys and sufferings, and by tradition was beheaded at Rome together with the apostles Aristarchus and Pudens in the persecution of Nero. He is commemorated on April 15 with his fellow-labourers, and among the Seventy on January 4.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Ruadhan, hermit and abbot of Lothra (584)
• St. Mundus, abbot in Argyle (c.962)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings