Synaxarion of the Translation of the Relics of Saint Nektarios the Wonderworker

 Synaxarion

By Monk Gerasimos Mikragiannanitis

On the 3rd of this month [September], we celebrate the translation of the honorable relics of our Holy Father Nektarios the Bishop of Pentapolis and Wonderworker, which took place in the year of our salvation 1953.

Verses

Your relics appeared from the earth Father,
Showing its hidden grace to all.
On the third the bones of Nektarios appeared out of the earth.

Synaxarion of Saint Nicholas Cabasilas

 By Monk Gerasimos Mikragiannanitis

On the 20th of this month [June] we commemorate Venerable Nicholas Cabasilas.

Verses

You clearly became a joint-partaker with the Saints,
Having lived a holy life Nicholas.
We celebrate the divine Nicholas with glorious praises.

Synaxarion of Saint Lydia of Philippi

By Monk Gerasimos Mikragiannanitis

On the 20th of this month [May], 

we commemorate Saint Lydia of Philippi.

Verses

Your entire household believed in Christ Lydia,
Appearing as the first of Philippi O Saint.

Blessed Lydia was a merchant of purple cloth in the city of Thyatira in Philippi, and as one who revered God she adorned herself with blameless conduct. When she came to the heaven-traversing and divinely-sounding Paul, she listened to his teachings, and accepted the light of the gospel. Her entire household believed in Christ, and were baptized in the stream of the Zygakti River. Thus she conducted herself according to the gospel, and attended to the blessed Apostles in her home, while serving the Lord with virtuous works and good acts. Her life came to an end in an apostolic manner, and departed to the heavenly mansions, having inherited the heavenly Kingdom.

Synaxarion of the Holy Venerable Martyrs Olympia and Euphrosyne of Karyes

 By Monk Gerasimos Mikragiannanitis

Synaxarion

On the 11th of this month, we commemorate the Holy Venerable Martyrs Olympia and Euphrosyne of the Sacred Monastery of Karyes in Thermi of Lesvos, who contested in the year 1235.

Verses

Olympia having lived venerably,
Was seen as a Martyr of the Lord at the hands of pirates.
On the eleventh Olympia reposed having suffered and bewailed.

Blessed Olympia was born in Peloponnesos in the year 1200 to pious parents who were from Constantinople. Her father was a priest and her mother was the daughter of a priest, and it is unknown why and when they moved to Peloponnesos. At the age of ten she was orphaned of her parents, having departed life, so she was sent by her relatives to the Monastery of Karyes, which is located in Thermi on the island of Lesvos, where the abbess was her maternal aunt, whose name was Dorothea, and there she completely dedicated herself to God. When she became 19 years old, she was tonsured a nun, in the year 1219, and in her 25th year, the abbess Dorothea having died, she became abbess of this Monastery in the year 1225. After 10 years had passed, on the 11th of May in the year 1235, a swarm of pirates attacked the Monastery, striking like wild wolves, causing the nuns to scatter, plundering and destroying everything. At that time there were 30 monastics living in asceticism there, six of whom were dishonored by the savage barbarians, fleeing in grief to the mountains. However Olympia, as the abbess, stayed behind with a sister who was advanced in age, whose name was Euphrosyne, to withstand the rage of the assaults of the pirates. They suspended Euphrosyne onto a tree, which they set on fire; while they burned the body of blessed Olympia with burning torches. Then taking a fiery iron rod, they passed it right through her ears, and in this manner was her martyric end. Then the pirates, to complete their barbaric mania, took the body of the Martyr, and nailed it to a board of wood, and this is how she was buried, after the barbarians fled, by certain Christians, being unable to remove the nails, cutting the flesh of the blessed one by removing the nails, which numbered 20, the same number that were found with the bones of the Martyr, when her grave was discovered.

How the Greatest and Most Prolific Hymnographer of the Orthodox Church in the 20th Century Received His Talent

Elder Gerasimos Mikragiannanitis as a young monk.

 

Elder Gerasimos Mikragiannanitis, who would become renowned as the Great Hymnographer of the Holy and Great Church of Christ under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, was a young monk of around 22 years of age, when he had been left alone in the Cell of the Honorable Forerunner, in the then forbidding Skete of Little Saint Anna on the Holy Mountain. He had been abandoned by his Elder of four years, Hieromonk Meletios Ioannidis, who, around the year 1927, out of unbridled fervor, joined the Zealots and left the Holy Mountain to fight on the side of the Old Calendarists in Athens. Elder Meletios had asked Monk Gerasimos to leave the Holy Mountain and join him in the world, but the young monk recognized that his Elder had been deluded by the Zealots to leave the place of his repentance to serve as a priest in the world for a cause that was leading towards schism, and not wishing to go back into the world, which he had already forsaken, Gerasimos remained behind alone.