Callista, Evodus and Hermogenes
The Holy Martyrs Callista and her Brothers Evodus and Hermogenes
Martyr · d. c. 309
Commemorated 1 September
Callista and her brothers Evodus and Hermogenes were three siblings of Nicomedia who confessed Christ together and were beheaded around the year 309, in the last great persecution before the peace of the Church. They are commemorated together on September 1.
The record of these martyrs is among the briefest in the calendar: the synaxaria commemorate a sister and her two brothers, natives of Nicomedia in Bithynia — the imperial residence where the persecution begun under Diocletian burned longest — who were arrested as Christians in its final years, confessed the faith with one voice, and were executed by the sword, around 309, in the reign of Galerius or Maximinus Daia. Later tradition embellishes little; their joint commemoration preserves what the Church chiefly remembered of them, that a household went to death together undivided.
Feast and commemoration
September 1 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 14). No proper service is appointed; the common of martyrs serves where their memory is kept liturgically.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (from the common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No pre-modern icon of the three has been identified. They would be depicted as a woman and two men bearing martyrs' crosses.
Disputed questions
- Names and identity. Some manuscripts of the synaxaria transmit the sister's name in variant forms (Kalliste; in some sources a martyr Calodota appears in a similar grouping), and the year is approximate, fixed only by the persecution's chronology.
- Not to be confused: the brother Evodus of this company (†c. 309, Nicomedia) is distinct from the Apostle Evodus of Antioch of the Seventy, first bishop of Antioch after Peter (†1st c., commemorated September 7). The brother Hermogenes is likewise distinct from Hermogenes the Martyr of July 24, a bare name of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, and from the Hermogenes of Menas, Hermogenes and Eugraphus (December 10).