Fast day.
Commemorated today
- Begin Nativity Fast
What is known
This is a feast of the Church rather than the commemoration of a person, so there is no life behind it to tell.
- Our Venerable Father Paisius Velichkovsky (1794)Monastic · d. 1794 life on this site
The life we have written
Venerable Paisius Velichkovsky
He spent years searching for a spiritual father and never found one — so he became what he could not find, and rebuilt the interior life of the Orthodox world by refusing to pass on a text he had not checked.
- Era
- 1722–1794
- Region
- Poltava in Ukraine, Mount Athos, and Moldavia
- Category
- Monk, elder, and translator
- Feast
- November 15
- Guria, Shamuna, and Habib, Martyrs and Confessors of EdessaMartyr
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 Edessa. 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.
- Thomas II the New, Archbishop of ConstantinopleHierarch
What is known
A hierarch is a bishop — including patriarchs, metropolitans and archbishops. The Church commemorates bishops in this rank whether they are remembered chiefly for teaching, for governing, or for holding a see through a difficult century.
The title places them at Constantinople. 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.
About this page. This is the Menaion date — the fixed calendar. Parishes on the New Calendar keep it on November 15 by the civil calendar. On the Julian calendar this same commemoration is kept on November 28 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.