Ven. Sabbas the Sanctified
Polyeleos. Kept with the Polyeleos at Matins.
Fast day.
Commemorated today
- Our Venerable, Godbearing Father Sabbas the Sanctified (533)Monastic · d. 533 life on this site
The life we have written
Venerable Sabbas the Sanctified
The young monk who sought silence became the father of a great Palestinian lavra whose pattern of prayer, solitude, hospitality, and common worship shaped Orthodox life for centuries.
- Era
- 439–532
- Region
- Cappadocia, Jerusalem, and the Judean Desert
- Category
- Desert Father, priest, founder, and monastic legislator
- Feast
- December 5
- Holy Martyr DiogenesMartyr
What is known
A martyr died rather than deny Christ. The word is Greek for witness, and the Church uses it in that sense: the death is testimony, not merely a fate. Most of these deaths fall in the Roman persecutions before 313, though the title is not restricted to them.
Kept in the Greek tradition.
Beyond this, no life of them survives that could be checked — which is true of most of the saints kept on any given day. The commemoration is the record.
- Nektarios the Bulgarian
What is known
Kept in the Greek tradition.
Beyond this, no life of them survives that could be checked — which is true of most of the saints kept on any given day. The commemoration is the record.
- St Cosmas the Protos of Mount Athos and his companions (c. 1274)d. c. 1274
What is known
The title places them at Mount Athos. The year given is about 1274.
They are kept together rather than separately, and for most of them the number, the place and the manner of death are the whole of what is recorded.
Appointed readings
- Wisdom of Solomon 3:1–9
- Wisdom of Solomon 5:15–6:3 continues in 6
- Wisdom of Solomon 4:7–15
- Luke 6:17–23
- Galatians 5:22–6:2 continues in 6
- Matthew 11:27–30
About this page. This is the Menaion date — the fixed calendar. Parishes on the New Calendar keep it on December 5 by the civil calendar. On the Julian calendar this same commemoration is kept on December 18 by the civil calendar. The movable cycle, which turns on the date of Pascha and changes every year, is on the calendar page. Where a life has been written on this site the name links to it; where it has not, only what the commemoration itself attests is shown, and nothing is added to it.