Our Holy Father, the Martyr Pachomius
Commemorated May 21
Born in Little Russia, he was taken by the Tartars as a boy and sold to a Turkish tanner as a slave. He spent twenty-seven years in slavery in Usaki in Asia Minor, and was forced to embrace Islam. He went off to the Holy Mountain, became a monk and spent twelve years near the monastery of St Paul. He resolved to suffer for Christ. His spiritual elder, Joseph, sent him off to Usaki, where he showed himself to his former owner as a Christian, wearing his monastic habit. The Turks gave him over to torture, then threw him into prison and finally beheaded him on May 8th, 1730, on Ascension Day. Many miracles were wrought by his blood and his relics, his body being buried on the island of Patmos in the Church of St John the Theologian. Thus this villager from Little Russia became a martyr and wears the wreath in the Kingdom of Christ.
Troparion
In thee, O father, was manifestly preserved what is in the image of God, for having taken up the cross, thou didst follow Christ and by thine own example hast taught that the flesh is to be despised as transient, but that particular care should be bestowed on the soul as a thing immortal; wherefore together with the angels rejoiceth also thine, O ascetic Pachomius, spirit.
Kontakion
As a keeper of fasts pious and skilled, as an honoured voluntary martyr and one that in the desert led the life of a hermit, — let us worthily extol in hymns Pachomius, the ever to be praised; for he hath trodden the serpent under his feet.
Source: Crkveni Kalendar
