St Stephen, Bishop of Perm

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  St Stephen, Bishop of Perm

  Stephen, bishop of Great Perm (c. 1340–1396), is the apostle of the Permians and Zyrians — the Finno-Ugric people known today as the Komi, on the Vychegda and the upper Kama in the Russian north-east. A cleric's son from Veliky Ustyug who had heard Zyrian spoken in the markets of his childhood, he was tonsured at Rostov, learned Greek in order to read the Fathers in the original, and there did the thing for which he is remembered: he devised an alphabet for the Permian tongue — the Abur or Anbur script — and translated the Scriptures and the offices into it, so that when he went out to the Vychegda in 1379 he could preach, catechise, baptise, and celebrate the Liturgy in the language of the people he came to. He felled their sacred birch, outfaced their chief sorcerer, was consecrated their first bishop in 1383, founded churches, monasteries, and schools among them, fed them in famine and defended them from tax-farmers and raiders, and died at Moscow on 26 April 1396. He is one of the very few missionaries of medieval Christendom, East or West, to have given a people its literacy in order to give it the Gospel.

• Hieromartyr Basil, bishop of Amasia and Righteous Virgin Glaphyra (322)

  Basil — in the Greek sources Basileus (Βασιλεύς), "the king," not the commoner Basileios — was bishop of Amasea in Pontus in the first decades of the fourth century, a subscriber of the canons of Ancyra (314) and Neocaesarea (c. 315), and one of the hierarchs destroyed in the last persecution the Roman world saw: that of Licinius, who turned on the Church in his eastern half of the empire in the years before his defeat by Constantine. His fall was occasioned by his sheltering the fugitive virgin Glaphyra, a maidservant of the empress Constantia who had fled Licinius's advances to Amasea and spent her mistress's money on the bishop's new church. Summoned to Nicomedia, Basil refused to sacrifice and was beheaded about the year 322; his body, flung into the sea, was recovered at Sinope after an angel three times directed his companion Elpidephorus to it, and was buried in the church he had built. He is honoured on April 26 together with Glaphyra.

• Glaphyra the Virgin

  Glaphyra was a Christian virgin of the imperial household at Nicomedia, a maidservant of the empress Constantia, wife of Licinius and half-sister of Constantine the Great. When the emperor conceived a passion for her, she took refuge with her mistress; and Constantia, putting out the report that the girl had gone mad and was dying, dressed her in men's clothing, gave her money and an escort, and sent her east out of reach. At Amasea in Pontus she was sheltered by the bishop, the hieromartyr Basil, and gave every coin she had to the church he was then building, writing to the empress for more when the funds ran short. That letter betrayed her: Licinius, learning she was alive, sent for her and the bishop together — but Glaphyra was already dead when the order reached the city, about the year 322. Basil was taken and beheaded, and the Church keeps the two of them together on April 26, the virgin whose flight cost the bishop his life.

• Joannicius of Devič

  Joannicius (Serbian Joanikije, popularly Janićije) was a Serbian hermit of the first half of the fifteenth century who withdrew from the world as a young man into the gorge of the Ibar, lived in a cave above the Crna Reka — the Black River — and afterwards buried himself deeper still in the forests of the Drenica in Kosovo. There, tradition says, the despot Đurađ Branković brought him a daughter afflicted in her mind; the hermit healed her, and the grateful prince built on the spot the monastery which took its name from the healed maiden — Devič, "the maiden's place." Joannicius reposed there, by the received reckoning on 2 December 1430, and his relics remained in the monastery church, where for five centuries they were sought above all by the mentally ill and the possessed, Serbs and Albanians alike. He is one of the last of the medieval Serbian ascetics, and his shrine became in the twentieth century one of the most bitterly contested holy places in the Balkans. The wider Orthodox calendars keep his memory on April 26.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Trudpert of Muenstethal (644)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings