Stephen of Constantinople
Our Venerable Father Stephen, Founder of the Almshouse at Constantinople
Venerable · d. c. 614
Commemorated 27 February — The courtier who founded and served an almshouse for the aged at Constantinople
Stephen (†c. 614) was a man of the imperial court at Constantinople under the emperor Maurice who renounced rank and wealth for the sake of the poor, founding at Constantinople a home for the aged — an almshouse or gerokomeion — and giving himself to the personal service of the old and destitute who sheltered there. Having exchanged the honours of the palace for the labour of charity, he became a monk in spirit and in deed, and reposed about the year 614, honoured by the Church as a father who made the love of the poor his whole ascetic discipline. He is commemorated on February 27.
Stephen belonged to the court of Constantinople in the reign of the emperor Maurice (582–602), a man of standing among the officials of the palace. The brief notice the synaxaria preserve of him turns entirely on the great renouncing of his life: that he left the honours and comforts of the court and devoted himself, and his substance, to the service of the poor — and specifically of the aged poor, those least able to provide for themselves and most easily forgotten.
He founded at Constantinople a home for the elderly — a gerokomeion, one of the charitable houses the Christian capital raised for the care of the old, the sick, the orphan, and the stranger — and, not content to endow it and withdraw, he served in it himself, tending the aged with his own hands, feeding, washing, and comforting them, and treating the poor whom the world despised as the very image of Christ. In this labour he found the whole of the monastic vocation: the humbling of self, the crucifixion of comfort, and the love of God met and served in the person of the neighbour. He continued in this ministry into the reign of Maurice's successors and reposed in peace about the year 614, and the Church enrolled him among the venerable — a saint glorified not by the desert or the pillar but by the almshouse, in the tradition of the great philanthropists of the Christian East.
Feast and commemoration
Stephen is kept on February 27 (church date; Old Calendar civil March 12), in the Byzantine synaxaria and the calendars that follow them, among the saints of the day.
He is not to be confused with Stephen I, Patriarch of Constantinople (†893, May 17), the son of Basil I and brother of Leo VI — a distinct saint whose epithet is likewise "of Constantinople," and who, like this Stephen, is remembered above all for his care of widows and orphans.
Iconography
Stephen is depicted as an aged, bearded saint in modest monastic or lay dress; the narrative type, where it is used, shows him ministering to the old within his almshouse. The stored image is the miniature of the Menologion of Basil II (Constantinople, 985): the aged monk stands in prayer before the buildings of his foundation — the ladder set against the unfinished upper storey — the manuscript's image of the founder before his almshouse.