Macedonius the Martyr
The Holy Martyr Macedonius
Martyr
Commemorated 28 June — Martyrdom; the manner and date are not transmitted
Macedonius is a martyr of the Greek synaxarion of June 28, named without country, date, or account of his passion. The commemoration stands in the middle of a group of similarly bare martyr-notices for the day — a hieromartyr in Libya, two children, three martyrs of Galatia, seventy martyrs of Scythopolis — which together represent the layer of the Constantinopolitan synaxarion in which the name alone survived.
What is transmitted
The Greek books for June 28 give Ὁ Ἅγιος Μακεδόνιος ὁ Μάρτυς with no further notice: no city, no emperor, no manner of death. This is not unusual for the day; the June 28 entry in the Synaxarion of Constantinople is unusually crowded with such names, and their brevity is a fact about the transmission rather than about the saints.
The name is Greek and geographical — "the Macedonian," a common personal name in the Hellenistic and Roman East — and cannot by itself be used to place him.
Feast and commemoration
June 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 11), in the Greek books; the Slavonic Menaion does not carry him. No proper service; the common of a martyr is used.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Macedonius, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No image of this Macedonius is known and none can be securely attributed, the name being shared with a patriarch and a hermit who both have established types. He would be shown, if painted, in the plain martyr type — tunic, mantle, and the cross of martyrdom in the right hand. No image has been stored, and a candidate inscribed simply "St Macedonius" would be more likely to depict the patriarch of Constantinople, who is painted in episcopal vesture with the omophorion, than this martyr.
Disputed questions
- No date, no place. century is omitted; the entry indexes under unknown.
- Not to be confused with the several better-attested Macedonii of the calendar: Macedonius the Patriarch of Constantinople (†516), the confessor deposed by the emperor Anastasius, kept on April 25; Macedonius the Hermit, "the barley-eater" of Syria (January 24), one of the ascetics of Theodoret's Religious History; and the Macedonius martyred with Tatiana and Modestus in Phrygia (September 12). None of these is a martyr of June 28.
- The name is also, in a wholly different context, that of the fourth-century heresiarch Macedonius, whose followers the Pneumatomachi were condemned by the Second Ecumenical Council; the coincidence of name has no bearing on this saint and is noted only to forestall the confusion.