Albianos the Venerable

Our Venerable Father Albianos

Venerable

Commemorated 25 May — Reposed in peace; synaxarion notice only

Albianos is a monastic saint of whom the calendar of Constantinople preserves one clause. Under May 25, beside the Third Finding of the Precious Head of the Forerunner and the martyr Celestine, the Greek Menaion notes that "the venerable Albianos is perfected in peace" — Ὁ ὅσιος Ἀλβιανὸς ἐν εἰρήνῃ τελειοῦται — and nothing further is transmitted: no monastery, no country, no century, no act. The two words that are transmitted are nonetheless informative, and they are what keep him a distinct commemoration: ὅσιος, the title of a monastic saint, not of a bishop or a martyr; and ἐν εἰρήνῃ, the synaxarion's formula for a peaceful repose as against a violent one. He is therefore not to be identified without more with the hieromartyr Albian of Anaea, who bore the same rare name and was burnt in a furnace under Diocletian, and whom the same books keep three weeks earlier on May 4.

The notice, and what it says

The whole of the record is the synaxarial notice for May 25. In the Greek books it follows immediately upon the notice of the martyr Celestine, in the ordinary telegraphic style of the calendar of the Great Church: a name, a title, and a mode of departure. Albianos is given the title ὅσιος — in this collection's vocabulary, venerable — which the Byzantine calendar reserves for those who pleased God in the monastic life, in contrast to ἅγιος μάρτυς for those who died by violence and ἱερομάρτυς for a bishop or priest so dying. And he is said to have been perfected ἐν εἰρήνῃ, "in peace," the standing formula for a saint who reposed of natural causes at the end of an ascetic life.

From these two data alone, nothing can be reconstructed of his history; but they are enough to place him in a class. He belongs with the great body of monastic saints of the Greek East — desert fathers of Egypt and Palestine, hermits of Bithynia and the Asian coastlands, coenobites of the Constantinopolitan monasteries — whose lives were never written or whose vitae perished, and whose names survived only because they had been entered in a diptych or a synaxarion before the record was lost. English and Slavonic derivative lists render him "Saint Olbian, monk," reproducing exactly the same two data.

Feast and commemoration

May 25 (church date; New Calendar civil May 25; Old Calendar civil June 7), kept in Greek synaxarial usage as a minor commemoration of a day given almost wholly to the Third Finding of the Head of the Forerunner. No proper office is appointed; his name is carried in the synaxarion read at Matins, and where he is commemorated liturgically it is from the common of a venerable father. He is not carried in the day-lists of the Orthodox Church in America or of the Russian Church, whose May 25 gives the Finding, Therapon of Cyprus, Urban of Rome and (in Russian usage) Innocent of Kherson.

Hymns

Troparion

In thee, O Father, the image of God was preserved unclouded, for thou didst take up the Cross and follow after Christ; and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to overlook the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Albianos, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Albianos has no individual iconography, and for a saint transmitted as a bare name none would be expected. Where he is depicted at all it is in the menologion cycles — the calendar registers painted along the walls of Athonite and Balkan katholika, and the illustrated menaia — where the day's minor saints appear in small standing figures beside the principal commemoration. The type would be the common one for a ὅσιος: a bearded monk in the dark mandyas and cowl or with the head uncovered, one hand raised in blessing or holding a scroll, without the martyr's cross and without the omophorion of a bishop — precisely the type that distinguishes him, in paint as in the synaxarion, from the hieromartyr bishop Albian of Anaea, who is painted as a hierarch. No pre-1900 image identifiable as this Albianos was located; the few images returned under the name belong to the bishop of Anaea and would prejudge the identity question above, so none is stored.

Disputed questions

Is he the same as Albian of Anaea? This is the substantive question, and it cannot be closed. Ἀλβιανός is a rare name, and the calendar carries two bearers of it within three weeks: the hieromartyr bishop of Anaea in the province of Asia, scourged, seared with red-hot irons and burnt in a heated furnace with his disciples about the year 304 (kept May 4, with an entry of his own, Albian of Anaea); and the ὅσιος of May 25, who reposed in peace. Duplication of a single saint under two dates, with the details drifting apart, is a well-attested accident of synaxarial transmission, and it is entirely possible that the May 25 notice is a degenerate doublet of the May 4 martyr, his episcopal rank and his fiery death having dropped out. Against that stands the fact that the Byzantine books themselves keep the two apart and give them incompatible titles and modes of death — a hieromartyr burnt alive is not "perfected in peace." This entry follows the calendar as received and treats them as two, while recording the possibility that they are one; the two entries carry reciprocal notes. The question is flagged rather than resolved.
Date. None is transmitted, and none is guessed here; the entry therefore carries no century and indexes among the saints whose era the sources do not fix.
Order or place. Some modern lists silently attach him to Anaea, borrowing the epithet of the May 4 saint. There is no warrant for it in the Greek notice, and this entry gives him no epithet of place — hence the bare form of his name here.