Commemoration. A commemoration with its own hymns at Vespers.
Commemorated today
- Saints Athanasius the Great and Cyril of Alexandria life on this site
The life we have written
Saint Athanasius the Great of Alexandria
Driven from his cathedral again and again, Athanasius spent his life defending the truth that the Son who saves us is not a creature reaching upward, but God Himself coming down to rescue His creation.
- Era
- c. 296–373
- Region
- Alexandria, Egypt, and the Roman Empire
- Category
- Hierarch, Church Father, and defender of the Nicene faith
- Feast
- January 18; also commemorated May 2
- Zenia the MartyrMartyr
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.
Appointed readings
About this page. This is the Menaion date — the fixed calendar. Parishes on the New Calendar keep it on January 18 by the civil calendar. On the Julian calendar this same commemoration is kept on January 31 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.