Memorial Saturday

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Therapon

  Therapon of White Lake (1337–1426) was a Russian nobleman of Volokolamsk who took the monastic habit at forty in the Simonov monastery at Moscow, went north into the wilderness of Beloozero with St Cyril of White Lake, and founded there — between two small lakes in the Vologda forests — the monastery that bears his name, the Ferapontov, whose Nativity cathedral would later be covered with the frescoes of Dionysius. Called south again in 1408 by Prince Andrew of Mozhaisk, son of Dmitri Donskoy, he founded a second house, the Luzhetsky monastery on the Moscow river, and governed it as archimandrite for eighteen years until his death at the age of ninety. He is one of the founding fathers of the "Northern Thebaid," and one of four saints of the name Therapon whose commemorations crowd the second half of May.

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• Trans. Rel. Ven. Nilus of Stolbensk

  Nilus of Stolobny (died 1554) was one of the great hermit-ascetics of northern Russia, who spent twenty-six years in absolute solitude on a wooded island in Lake Seliger, in the Tver borderlands, and there founded — after his death — one of the most famous monasteries of the Russian Church, the Nilov Hermitage (Nilova Pustyn). Renowned for extremes of self-denial, above all his vow never to lie down but to sleep upright, leaning on two wooden hooks set into the wall of his cell, he became after his repose a wonderworker venerated across Russia, his image reproduced in countless carved wooden figures. His feast is December 7; the uncovering of his relics is kept on May 27.

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• Hieromartyr Therapon, bishop of Sardis (259)

  Therapon, bishop of Sardis in Lydia, was a hieromartyr of the third century who converted and baptised great numbers of the pagan Greeks of Asia and was put to death for it, about the year 259, under a governor whom the passion names Julian. He was dragged from prison to prison across Asia Minor — Sardis, Sinaon in Phrygia, Ancyra in Galatia — and was killed at last on the bank of a river called the Astala, stretched naked on the ground between four stakes and flogged to death. The most memorable thing transmitted about him is what followed: the stakes, soaked with the martyr's blood, put out green shoots and grew into tall trees, and the leaves of those trees healed the sick who came to them. His memory is the second commemoration of May 27 in the Greek Menaion and the first in the Slavonic and OCA calendars.

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• Holy Martyrs Theodora and Didymus (304)

  Theodora, a Christian virgin of Alexandria, and Didymus, a Christian soldier who saved her honour at the cost of his life, were martyred together in the persecution of Diocletian in the year 304. Condemned for her refusal to marry or to sacrifice, Theodora was sentenced to the brothel — the punishment reserved for consecrated virgins, designed to destroy what the sword could not. Didymus came in among the crowd in his uniform, drove the men out, gave the girl his own military clothing, and sent her away in it while he remained behind in her place. When he was condemned for it, Theodora came of her own will to the place of execution and demanded to die with him; the prefect Eustratius had them both beheaded and their bodies burned. Their passion is one of the most striking of the Diocletianic acts and is very probably the source of the story Ambrose of Milan tells of "the virgin of Antioch."

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• Holy New Confessor John the Russian (1730)

  John the Russian (c. 1690–1730) was a Ukrainian soldier of the army of Peter the Great who was taken prisoner by the Tatars in the Pruth campaign of 1711, sold into slavery in Cappadocia, and spent the remaining nineteen years of his life as the stable-slave of a Turkish cavalry officer at Prokopion, refusing under torture and then under kindness alike to renounce Christ. He slept among the animals, gave away what little he had, and kept the fasts and the vigils of the Church in a Muslim household; his holiness was recognised by Christians and Muslims of the town before his death on 27 May 1730. His relics were found incorrupt, survived an attempt to burn them in 1832, and were carried by the refugees of the 1924 population exchange to Euboea, where his shrine at Nea Prokopi is one of the great pilgrimage places of the Greek world. He is honoured as a confessor — a martyr in will though not in blood — and is one of the most popular saints of modern Greece.

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• Saint David of Garesjei (6th c.)

• Venerable Bede (Baeda) (735)

  Bede (c. 673–735), monk and presbyter of the twin monastery of Wearmouth–Jarrow in Northumbria, is the greatest scholar of the early English Church and the first historian of the English people. Given to the monastery at the age of seven, he never willingly left it, and in the ordered round of the offices he produced the biblical commentaries, the De temporum ratione that fixed the Church's science of the calendar, the two Lives of St Cuthbert, and above all the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731), the book to which everything known about the conversion of England ultimately goes back. It is largely through Bede that reckoning from the Incarnation — anno Domini — passed into general use. He died at Jarrow on the eve of the Ascension in 735, dictating to the last, and his relics rest at Durham. The Church commemorates him on May 27; the epithet Venerabilis, attached to his name within a century of his death, has never been replaced by another.

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• Helladius the Hieromartyr

  Helladius is remembered in the books as a bishop "in the East" — that is, somewhere in the vast Roman Diocese of Oriens, the territory of the Antiochene patriarchate — who was thrown into a fire for his faith in Christ and came out of it unhurt, and who died afterwards of the beating inflicted on him. His service adds one further detail, and it is the one his commemoration is really built on: that the Lord Jesus Christ came to him in his prison and healed his wounds. Neither his see nor the name of his persecutor has been transmitted, and the sources are divided over his century, some placing him among the Christians who suffered in the Persian invasions of the Roman East, others four centuries later. He is a saint of whom the Church has kept the substance — a bishop, a fire, a scourging, a visitation — and lost every circumstance.

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• Jonah of Moscow

  Jonah (†1461) was the last Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia to be styled by the old title and the first to be consecrated in Moscow by Russian bishops alone — the hinge on which the Russian Church turned from dependence on Constantinople to self-government. Tonsured at twelve in a monastery of his native Galich, and afterwards a monk of the Simonov monastery at Moscow, where the Metropolitan Photius found him asleep in the bakery with his right hand set in the gesture of blessing and prophesied that he would be a great hierarch, he was made Bishop of Ryazan and Murom, was twice passed over for the metropolitanate, and finally received it in 1448 after the Russian Church had deposed Isidore for accepting the union of Florence. He governed thirteen years, was credited with the deliverance of Moscow from the Tatar raid of 1451, and reposed in 1461; his relics were found incorrupt in 1472 and lie in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin. He was glorified by the Council of 1547.

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• Photius of Kiev

  Photius (c. 1370s–1431) was a Greek monk of the Peloponnese who was sent from Constantinople in 1408 to be Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus' and governed the Russian Church for twenty-two years from Moscow. He came to a metropolitanate half-ruined by the wars of Edigu and the Lithuanian pressure on its southern dioceses, and left it richer, better ordered, and canonically one: he recovered the alienated properties of the see, put down the Strigolnik heresy at Pskov and Novgorod, and after ten years of struggle obtained in 1420 the suppression of the rival Lithuanian metropolitanate set up under Gregory Tsamblak. A learned writer of epistles and instructions, he stood as regent-guardian of the boy grand prince Vasily II in the opening of the great Muscovite civil war. He reposed on July 2, 1431, having foreseen his end, and his incorrupt relics were uncovered in the Dormition cathedral of the Kremlin in 1471. He is not the ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople of the same name.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Melangell, Virgin-hermitess of Wales (6th C)

Readings

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