Leo of Mandra

Our Venerable Father Leo, who lived in the Mandra

Venerable

Leo "of the Mandra" is one of the many saints of the Byzantine calendar who survive in a single line. The Synaxarion of Constantinople commemorates him on July 11 with a couplet and the formula that he "was perfected in peace" — that is, that he died a monk's death and not a martyr's. Neither his century, nor his country, nor the identity of the mandra in which he lived is transmitted. He is recorded here at the length the record allows, and no more.

Everything known of him is in the synaxarion notice: he was a monk; his ascetic life was lived in a place called ἡ Μάνδρα; and he ended his life in peace, the standard formula (ἐν εἰρήνῃ τελειοῦται) by which the Byzantine calendars distinguish an ascetic's repose from a martyr's death.

The word μάνδρα means an enclosure or a sheepfold, and in Christian Greek it is a standing metaphor for a monastery — the fold within which the flock is kept — which is why the superior of a monastery is an archimandrite, "chief of the fold." The epithet may therefore mean no more than "of the monastery"; it may equally be a place-name, since several localities in the Greek world bear or bore the name Mandra, among them the town in western Attica near Eleusis. Nothing in the transmitted notice decides between them, and the saint has been read both ways: as a solitary attached to a particular monastic enclosure, and as an ascetic of a place called Mandra.

The verses set over his commemoration in the printed synaxaria play, as such distichs regularly do, on his name and on the paradise from which mankind was expelled: having gone out from the earth, Leo, thou revellest now in that delight which the first earth possessed of old — the earth of Eden, the delight (τρυφή) which Paradise is called in the Greek of Genesis. The point of the couplet is that the ascetic who renounced the present earth is restored to the earthly Paradise that Adam lost.

Feast and commemoration

July 11 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 24). The commemoration is Greek and comes from the Constantinopolitan synaxarion tradition; it does not appear in the Slavonic books or on the OCA calendar, and the day belongs, in every usage, to Euphemia. He has no service: the Menaion's provision for him is the common of a venerable father.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved with exactness; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to overlook the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Leo, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.

Iconography

No image of Leo of Mandra is known, and none is to be expected: a saint transmitted by one line of synaxarion, without century, country or narrative, gave the painters nothing to work from. Were he to be painted, it would be in the undifferentiated type of the venerable father — an elder in the black monastic habit and the great schema, white-bearded, blessing with the right hand and holding an unrolled scroll in the left, the inscription Ο ΟΣΙΟΣ ΛΕΩΝ beside his head. The Menologion of Basil II, the ordinary first resort for the minor saints of the fixed year, covers September to February only and cannot serve a July commemoration; a search of Wikimedia Commons returns nothing.

Disputed questions

Century and country are wholly unattested. He is placed here in no century, and indexes under the unknown-century listing.
The meaning of "Mandra" — a common noun for a monastic enclosure, or a place-name — is undecided; see above.
Not to be confused with the many other Leos of the calendar, in particular Leo the Great, Pope of Rome (†461, February 18), Leo of Catania the wonderworker (†c. 785, February 20), and the martyr Leo who suffered at Patara with Paregorius.