Martyrs Anicletus and Photius of Nicomedia

Saints commemorated

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  Martyrs Anicletus and Photius of Nicomedia

• Hieromaryr Alexander, Bishop of Comana (3rd c.)

  Alexander, called the Charcoal-burner, is one of the most attractive figures of the third-century Church in Pontus: a trained philosopher who hid his learning and his birth under the soot of a coal-seller's trade in the marketplace of Comana Pontica, and who was drawn out of that concealment by Gregory the Wonderworker of Neocaesarea when the city could not agree on a bishop. Proposed in mockery and elected in earnest, he governed Comana with the wisdom his rags had hidden, and ended his life a martyr by fire. His story is told at length in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus, which makes him one of the very few minor saints of the fixed calendar with a genuinely fourth-century literary witness behind him. He is commemorated on August 12.

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• Anicetus and Photius

  Anicetus and his nephew Photius were martyred at Nicomedia about the year 305, in the last and fiercest of the imperial persecutions, under Diocletian. Anicetus, an officer of rank in the city, stepped forward when the emperor had an instrument of execution set up in the public square to terrify the Christians, and denounced both the machine and the gods it was meant to defend; Photius, seeing his uncle tortured and preserved, embraced him before the tribunal and confessed the same faith. The passion that has come down to us is a long chain of failed executions — a lion that fawned, a wheel that stopped, a fire that went out, molten tin that cooled, horses that would not tear them — ended at last by a great furnace into which the two went with a crowd of the faithful. Their memory is kept on August 12 throughout the Orthodox world, and their names are invoked, with the other holy martyrs, in the prayers of the Lesser Blessing of Waters.

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• Castor the Venerable

  Castor is a venerable monastic commemorated in the Greek synaxaria on August 12, of whom the books preserve one clause: ὁ Ὅσιος Κάστωρ ἐν εἰρήνῃ τελειοῦται — "the venerable Castor is perfected in peace." No country, no century, no monastery and no act is transmitted, and the notice carries the standing formula for a monastic who died a natural death rather than a martyr's. He is entered here because the commemoration is genuine and consistently printed for the day, and because an honest record of such a saint is worth more than a constructed one.

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• Gerontius and the Martyrs of David-Gareji

  In the summer of 1851 a raiding party of Dagestanis fell upon the ancient cave-monastery of David-Gareji in the semi-desert of Kakheti, plundered the church and the cells, and put to death seven of the brethren: the hieromonks Gerontius and Serapion, the hierodeacon Otar, the monks Herman, Bessarion and Michael, and the eighteen-year-old novice Simeon. Their deaths were recorded two years later by the hieromonk Isaac of Gelati, who had been in the monastery and survived; his account, which reports that the bodies of the slain were seen shining with a divine light, is the source of everything that is known of them. They are the last of a line of Gareji martyrs stretching back to the six thousand slain on Bright Tuesday in 1616, and they are commemorated on August 12.

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• Palamon of Egypt

  Palamon was an anchorite of the Upper Thebaid in the first quarter of the fourth century, and the spiritual father of Pachomius the Great. When the young Pachomius, newly baptised, came to the desert near Sheneset looking for a teacher, it was Palamon who — after first refusing him, and warning him at length that the life was harder than he supposed — received him, clothed him, and trained him for some seven years in an ascesis of extreme severity: bread and salt without oil or wine, vigils that consumed half the night and often all of it, unremitting manual work, and unbroken prayer. Everything that Pachomius afterwards built at Tabennisi — the first fully organised coenobium in the history of Christian monasticism — he built out of what Palamon had taught him. The old man himself wrote nothing, founded nothing, and is known entirely from the Lives of his disciple. He is commemorated on August 12.

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• Pamphilus and Capito

  Pamphilus and Capito are a pair of martyrs entered in the calendars on August 12, of whom the tradition preserves only that they were beheaded and where their memory was kept: in the quarter of Constantinople which the Greek books call ta Olybriou, printed in the modern English lists as "Oliurea." No emperor, no persecution, no century, no acts and no relics are transmitted. They belong to the very large class of Constantinopolitan commemorations that survive as a name, a verb and a shrine, and this entry records exactly that and no more.

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• Sergius and Stephen

  Sergius and Stephen are two monastic fathers commemorated together in the Greek synaxaria on August 12, of whom the record preserves two names and one verb: they reposed in peace. No country, no monastery, no century, no relationship and no act is transmitted. They belong to the substantial class of paired ascetic commemorations that the Constantinopolitan synaxarion carries without lives, and this entry states what is known and declines to supply what is not.

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• Twelve Soldier-Martyrs of Crete

  A company of twelve soldiers martyred in Crete, commemorated on August 12 in the Greek synaxaria, of whom nothing survives but the number, the island, the profession and the manner of their death: they were beheaded. No names, no emperor, no persecution and no year are transmitted, and the commemoration is absent from the Slavonic books and from the OCA calendar for the day. This entry records what the Greek synaxarion transmits and does not supply what it does not.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Seigine (Ségéne mac Fiachnaí), abbot of Iona (652)
• St. Molaise (Laisrén mac Nad Froích) of Devenish (563)
• St. Janbert, 13th archbishop of Canterbury (792)
• St. Merewenna of Marhamchurch
• St. Ust (Justus), hermit of Cornwall

Readings

Troparia & kontakia