Commemoration. A commemoration with its own hymns at Vespers.
Commemorated today
- Holy Myrrhbearer Mary Magdalene, Equal-to-the-ApostlesApostle life on this site
The life we have written
Holy Myrrh-bearer and Equal-to-the-Apostles Mary Magdalene
The first person to see the risen Christ and the first sent to tell anyone — and the saint about whom the West was wrong for fourteen hundred years.
- Era
- First century
- Region
- Magdala in Galilee, Jerusalem, and — by Eastern tradition — Ephesus
- Category
- Myrrh-bearer, Equal-to-the-Apostles
- Principal feast for this profile
- July 22
- Martyr Markella of ChiosMartyr
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.
The title places them at Chios.
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 July 22 by the civil calendar. On the Julian calendar this same commemoration is kept on August 4 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.