Reginos of Skopelos

Origins and the defence of Orthodoxy

Reginos was born toward the end of the third century at Livadeia (Livadia), a town of Boeotia in central Greece, to Christian parents who raised him in the faith and in learning. He came to manhood in the years of the Church's great struggle against Arianism — the heresy that denied the full divinity of the Son — in the generation after the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325). The tradition of the island he would serve remembers him as present at the Council of Sardica (modern Sofia) about the year 343, the great synod summoned by the emperors Constans and Constantius to vindicate the Nicene faith and the cause of Athanasius of Alexandria against the Arian party; there, it is said, the young Reginos distinguished himself among the fathers by the force and clarity with which he confuted the heretics. Whether he sat as a bishop already or was present in a lesser capacity the sources do not make plain, but the memory binds him from the first to the Nicene confession he would seal with his blood.

Bishop of Skopelos

On the repose of the bishop of Skopelos — one of the islands of the Northern Sporades, off the coast of Thessaly — Reginos was, the tradition relates, chosen and acclaimed by the whole people as their shepherd, and consecrated to the see. Of his episcopate the record is brief: he governed the island church in peace and taught his flock the Orthodox faith through the middle years of the fourth century, when the Arian controversy still troubled the East and the old paganism, though failing, had not yet died.

Martyrdom under Julian

The peace of the Church was broken by the accession of the emperor Julian, called by the Church the Apostate — Constantine's nephew, who had been reared a Christian and turned back to the worship of the old gods, and who in his brief reign (361–363) set himself to revive paganism and to strip the Church of its standing, dismissing Christians from office and stirring up their persecution. When the storm reached the islands, Reginos was seized for his open confession of Christ and his refusal to sacrifice to the idols. After imprisonment he was condemned, and on 25 February 362 was led out and beheaded; the synaxarion tradition remembers that he was not alone, but suffered together with some forty fellow-confessors. So the bishop who had withstood the Arians in the council-hall gave his life under the last of the pagan emperors, and Skopelos received a martyr for its patron.

Veneration and relics

Reginos has been from ancient times the patron saint of Skopelos. A monastery dedicated to him stands on the island and preserves his holy relics, to which the faithful of the Sporades resort in great numbers on his feast, and where healings and other miracles are attributed to his intercession; his name is a favourite among the island's children. A portion of his relics is kept and venerated far to the south, at the church of the Archangel Michael Trypiotis in Nicosia, Cyprus. His feast on February 25 is observed as a local holiday on Skopelos, where he is honoured as the island's founding hierarch and protector.