Alexius of Bithynia

Our Father among the Saints Alexius, Bishop in Bithynia

Bishop

Alexius is a bishop in Bithynia commemorated in the Greek synaxaria on June 10, of whom the record preserves nothing but the name, the province, and the fact that he reposed in peace. The Greek calendars carry him with a distich and state expressly that no further details of his life survive. His notice is given here at the length the sources permit.

Nothing is known beyond the heading of the notice. He was a bishop; his see lay in Bithynia, the province of north-western Asia Minor whose sees included Nicaea, Nicomedia, Chalcedon and Prusa, and which is unusually well represented in the June synaxarion — the day's principal saint, Timothy of Prusa, is a Bithynian hierarch too. Which see was Alexius's, in what century he held it, and what he did in it, the sources do not say. He ended his life peacefully (ἀπεβίωσε εἰρηνικά), which in the idiom of the synaxaria distinguishes him from the martyrs.

The name Ἀλέξιος is from ἀλέξω, "to ward off, to defend" — the defender — and it was borne after the eleventh century by five Byzantine emperors and by four emperors of Trebizond, a usage which makes it a common name in the later Greek world but which tells us nothing about this bishop, whose commemoration may well be older.

Feast and commemoration

June 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 23), among the minor commemorations of the day in the Greek calendars. He has no proper office; the common of a hierarch is used, and in practice his name is read in the synaxarion at Orthros with the others of the day.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)

O God of our fathers, who dealest ever with us according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of Thy hierarch Alexius, guide our life in peace.

Iconography

No established type exists. In a composite menologion icon of the month of June he would be painted as a hierarch — phelonion, crossed omophorion, blessing hand, Gospel-book — identified only by the inscription of his name and, where the painter is careful, by the addition "of Bithynia" to distinguish him from the far better-known Alexis of Moscow, whose type (a Russian metropolitan in white klobuk) is entirely different. No pre-1900 icon of this Alexius has been located, and any image inscribed simply "Ὁ ἅγιος Ἀλέξιος" would more probably belong to Alexis the Man of God.

Disputed questions

The century is unknown and is omitted from the entry's record; he indexes under unknown. His notice is not dated in any source consulted.
The see is unnamed. "Of Bithynia" is a provincial, not an episcopal, designation, and the Greek books do not resolve it. The slug follows the calendars.
Not to be confused with Alexis of Moscow, the metropolitan and wonderworker (February 12), nor with Alexis the Man of God (March 17), nor with Alexis Toth, the confessor of Orthodoxy in America (May 7). The English rendering of the name varies between Alexis and Alexius across this corpus, following the usage of the calendars in each case; the Greek is Ἀλέξιος in all of them.
A Greek commemoration only. He does not appear in the Russian menologion or the OCA's calendar for June 10.