Commemorated today
- Prophet HoseaProphet
What is known
A prophet in the Orthodox calendar is almost always one of the Old Testament prophets, commemorated by the Church that reads them as speaking of Christ.
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.
- Holy Martyrs Cosmas and Damian, the Unmercenaries of Cilicia (4th century)Martyr · 4th century life on this site
The life we have written
Holy Unmercenary Physicians Cosmas and Damian of Asia Minor
These brother physicians treated the sick without demanding payment, revealing medicine as a work of skilled compassion and every gift as something received from God for the service of our neighbour.
- Era
- Date uncertain; traditionally early Christian centuries
- Region
- Asia Minor or Mesopotamia
- Category
- Physicians, wonderworkers, and unmercenaries
- Feast
- November 1
- Monastic Martyr Andrew of CreteMartyr
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 Crete.
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 October 17 by the civil calendar. On the Julian calendar this same commemoration is kept on October 30 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.