adelheid von burgund

Venerated on this day, on the occasion of her death in 999 (*931), the feast of Saint Adelaide (Adélaïde, see more on her namesakes) celebrates her involvement with palace intrigues and the complicated power struggle for Lombardy and Burgundy. A strategic first marriage saw Adelaide wed to Lothar II of Italy, producing a daughter, Emma who went on to become queen of Western France. Quite the soap opera to follow, Lothar was poisoned in 950 by rival for the throne Berengar II while visiting Turin.

Widowed Adelaide intended to rule in her murdered husband’s stead and her subjects seemed amenable to that arrangement but Berengar wanted to assert his legitimacy by arranging Adelaide’s marriage morganatic marriage to his son Aldabert. Adelaide wasn’t having this as it would mean forfeiting her territorial-holdings and so fled to Como to seek refuge in her stronghold there. Captured and imprisoned in Garda, a priest helped her escape to Canossa and sought sanctuary with Otto I, King of East Francia. The two eventually married and having secured dominion over a large swath of land with his wife’s contribution and a decisive victory against Hungarian incursions at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, extending his control all the way to the Elbe and thus established the Ottonian dynasty of The Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans, crowned emperor and empress (a significant break with tradition in acknowledgement of Adelaide’s standing and respect) by the pope in 962. After her husband died, Adelaide was regent to two generations of Ottos to follow, and once her grandson was able to rule in his own right, she devoted herself to acts of charity, founding and restoring religious communities. Their daughter Matilda was also a regent and first princess-abbess of Quedlinburg, the convent founded by her grandmother, also called Matilda, in 936. Because of her long, colourful court life, Adelaide is designated, among other things, patron and protector of in-laws, exiles, empresses and step-parents.

odile of alsace

Though no longer officially commemorated on the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, Saint Odile’s cult was an extemely popular one (see previously), rapidly spreading across central Europe from the ninth century onward, with many chapels, churches and wells dedicated to the abbess born blind in France and Germany. According to her hagiography, daughter of the wealthy duke of Alsace, Etichon also called Aldaric, was bade be taken away by her mother Bethswinda to be raised by peasants in distant Burgundy rather than suffer the indignity of a handicapped child. Aged twelve, Odile was baptised, miraculously restoring her sight, prompting her brother, Hughes, to bring her back home. This reunion enraged her father so much that he let us wrath loose on both siblings, striking Hughes dead. Odile was able to revive her brother and they fled into the Rhin valley where a cliff face opened up to hide them from her father’s pursuers. Going on to found several religious communities, Odile’s father repented in his old age and endowed the abbeys his daughter had established. Expiring herself at the convent of Niedermünster in 720, Odile briefly returned from the dead at the insistent prayers of the sisterhood to describe the wonders of the afterlife, afterward taking communion alone and dying a second time. With many of the fountains associated with her credited with curing vision ailments, Odile is the patron of good eye-sight (and protector of the blind and partially-sighted) as well as the whole of the Alsace region and is sometimes venerated as a companion of Saint Lucy, with whom she shares this feast day.

barbara of heliopolis

Venerated on this day as a saint and martyr, Barbara was a third century Greek maiden, a steadfast convent and affiliated with the Fourteen Holy Helpers and enjoys an extensive and varied patronage. Barbara was, according to her hagiographer and the Golden Legend, the daughter of a wealthy and prominent pagan whom was seeking to strengthen local allegiances through strategically marrying her off, keeping her locked away in a tower to spare her from outside influence, though in this splendid isolation, Barbara yet became a Christian and rejected the betrothal her father had arranged. Suspecting it was one of her attendants that introduced his daughter to the gospel, her father ordered an adjoining private bath house be added to the tower. The final straw for her father was Barbara’s architectural input to her new quarters, installing three windows to represent the Holy Trinity instead of the two that her father originally designed. Flying into a rage, the father drew his sword, but through the power of prayer, Barbara created a rift in spacetime and opened a portal in the wall of the tower that led her to a remote mountain gorge. There one shepherd betrayed Barbara’s act of teleportation to her father’s men, transformed into stone and his flock of sheep into locusts for divulging her whereabouts. Barbara was captured a brought before the prefect for sentencing brutally tortured though refusing to relent. Daily for some weeks, Barbara would be nightly bathed in a miraculous, healing light and emerge from her prison cell with no wounds or signs of the previous beatings. Burning her failed as well so her father undertook to carry out the punishment of the condemned by beheading Barbara himself. This finally worked but in retribution, Barbara’s father was struck by lightning afterwards and consumed by flames. Due to circumstances surrounding her death, Barbara is invoked against flame and lightning and by extension is the patron saint of dynamiters, pyrotechnicians, artillery and mining—that is any professional who face the danger of sudden and violent death in discharge of their duties, and might not have the change to repent their sins or receive extreme unction at the moment of expiring. According to some sources, the barbiturate family of drugs synthesised first by chemist Adolf von Baeyer (not to be company that was originally a dyestuffs factory founded by Fredrich Bayer) in 1864 on her feast day and are so called in her honour.

cecilia, you’re breaking my heart

Venerated as an early Roman martyr by the Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican confessions, Sancta Caecilia (previously) is considered the patron of music and musicians from the account that as the hired band played for her coerced wedding to a pagan noble called Valarian, she sat apart and sang to the true God in her heart. In turn, for her piety, Cecilia was promised a guardian angel who would punish her husband if he failed to respect her sexual autonomy and would love him otherwise.  Intrigued, Valarian asked to see this angel, to which Cecilia replied he could on the condition of being baptised a Christian by Pope Urban. Valarian humoured his bride but saw the angel of God and professed his conversion, earning them all a torturous death sentence. Pope Sixtus V declared Cecilia—along with Gregory the Great (the chant one, not the calendar one)—co-patrons of sacred music in 1585 with the first recorded music festival held in her honour taking place at Évreux in the Eure in 1570.

ss. crispin and crispinian

Twin brothers from a wealthy third century patrician family, they fled to the provinces to escape persecution for their Christian faith, eventually settling in Soissons (capital of the Belgic tribe of the Suessiones)—evangelising to the native population by day and funding their mission and aiding the poor by making shoes at night.

Their enterprise drew the attention of Gaulish governor (a Vicarius—a vicar, that is a deputy of Rome) Rixius Varus, who is said to have martyred with zeal hundreds of Christians under Emperor Diocletian before eventually repenting, converting and becoming a victim of the machine himself, who devised cruel, elaborate tortures for the brothers using their own cobbler’s implement before tying millstones around their necks and tossing them into the River Aisne. The pair survived to Varus’ acute frustration, at this juncture the Emperor intervening and putting them to death by beheading on this day in the year 286. Crispin and Crispinian’s patronage includes shoemakers, saddlers, tanners and lace workers. A number of battles fall coincidentally on their feast day, symbolism and significance applied retroactively, though sometimes noted by contemporaries—with the most famous being the 1415 Battle of Agincourt (cemented in popular imagination by Shakespeare’s Henry V “Band of Brothers” speech)—others being the Siege of Lisbon (1147), the Battle of Balaclava (1854), the Second Battle of el Alamein and the Battle of Henderson Field at Guadalcanal (1942).

gummarus of lier

Cousin to Pepin the Short, Carolingian king of the Franks, and entrusted with responsibility over several offices of the royal court, the saint hailing from a town outside of Antwerp is venerated on this day, on the occasion of his peaceful death in 774 (*717).

Regrettably Pepin had arranged the marriage of Gummarus to a noble woman called Guinmarie, whose relationship was not the happiest and to make amends, Pepin allowed Gummarus to accompany the king and his retinue on several military campaigns. Looking forward to a quiet retirement, Gummarus built a hermitage in the woods at Nivesdunc, now consecrated as a chapel to Saint Peter with the city having grown around the site. Beatified after a number of miracles were attributed to his intercession, Gummarus was given the patronage over difficult marriages, courtiers, separated couples, lumberjacks and invoked against bone fractures (having been associated with miraculous mending a damaged tree) and with no explanation—glove makers (gantiers) and hernia sufferers.

liber pontificalis

Notably the first of the early popes not to be venerated as a saint in the Roman Rite (though fêted in the Eastern Orthodox Church on 27 August and on 4. Pi Kogi Enavot in the Coptic Church, one of the calendar’s epagomenal, “monthless” days), Liberius (*310 - †366) was Bishop of Rome from May of 352 until this death, on this day. Liberius was the first pontiff to associate the winter solstice—celebrated at the time as Sol Invictus—with Christmas, not only as means of co-opting a popular pagan holiday but also in line with the reasoning that great figures did not live life in fractions of years.  This date was also championed by his predecessor Pope Julius I and penned down in subsequent years.

zwei kleiner jägermeister

Today marks the veneration of Saint Eustace (Eustachius) on the occasion of his martyrdom in 118 AD, whose life and legend were limned out and elaborated by medieval troubadours—beginning with a Roman General called Placidus separated in a wood from the rest of his hunting party while pursuing a stag. The deer at first gives chase but then charges back and leaves the hunter awestruck by a vision of the Cross in the antlers of the deer, followed by a booming commandment that Placidus and his family are to be baptised by the bishop of Rome. Placidus complies and takes the name of Eustace (from the Greek for “steadfast”). Soon afterwards, Eustace receives a second message that he and his family—much like Job—will be made to suffer a series of ordeals including loss of property and status.

Eustace contrives a plan to escape this fate and requests to resign his military commission to move out to the provinces—to which his superiors are amenable. Upon arriving at the first ferry crossing, however, they find that they don’t have sufficient fare and the boat’s pilot abducts Eustace’s wife Theopista and abandons Eustace and his four children. They are compelled to continue travelling on foot but have to cross the river at some point. Eustace successfully manages with the two unnamed children and attempts to do so with Agapius and Theopistus but fails and losses them to the swift current. Rather broken and alone, Eustace is employed tending a farmstead and protecting the fields for fifteen years when two envoys of the emperor find Eustace and summon him back to Rome to suppress an uprising, offering him back his former rank and position. The unrest is not started by those upstart Christians as one might suspect and might make for a better narrative but rather a run-of-the-mill skirmish at the frontier. Eustace is dispatched back to the ferry-point and puts down the rebellion and his reunited with his wife—sort of like Penelope and Odysseus, who recognises him after all these years, and with word spreading about the happy coincidence two soldiers come forward who were separated from their father while crossing the river but were rescued and raised respectively by a lion and a wolf and the parents realise it’s their children Agapius and Theopistus. Liking a good reunion story, the whole family is feted once they return to Rome by Emperor Hadrian (presumably the unnamed ones as well—let’s call them Barron and Tiffany) and after their lavish celebratory dinner and asked to make propitation to the pagan gods. Speaking for his whole entire family whom had yet to be consulted on their father’s plan for immortality, Eustace refused and Hadrian had them thrown to the lions, who declined to pounce. Frustrated, Hadian had Eustace and his family put in a brazen bull. They all expired this time but their bodies were uncorrupted by the heat and flames. With several miracles and interventions attributed to him, Eustace is considered the patron saint of firefighters and along with his co-patron Hubertus who had a similar, transformative vision the protector of huntsmen.

saint cassian of imola, pray for us

Fourth century tutor and teacher, Cassian—whose martyrdom is venerated on this day (†303), refused to make sacrifices to the gods of the Romans—as was ordered by Emperor Julian the Apostate (the epithet a gift of the church he distrusted)—and so was turned over to his pupils, judging that their education and emendation should be an effective prescriptive. Cassian was bound to a stake and the students tortured him to death, stabbing him with their pointed styluses—eager to get revenge for the punishments and trials that their teacher had inflicted on them. This act is recounted in several contemporary cultural sources including the Annie Dillard novel The Living, John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and the namesake of a teachers’ lounge at the Bethel College of Liberal Arts in Kansas and the parable open to interpretation. Cassian is the patron of the commune of Bologna, México City, Las Galletas in Tenerife as well as educators, stenographers and parish clerks.

holy fool

Today [N.S. 15 August] marks the veneration of the Blessed Basil of Moscow (*1469) on the occasion of his death in 1557 and his subsequent glorification (canonisation) the following year.
An adherent of the Russian version of foolishness for Christ is known as yurodivvy (юродивый), Basil went about unclothed in all weather and weighed himself down with chains, though managing to pilfer items from the markets to aid the poor—especially championing those who were ashamed to ask for charity and shaming those who were above sharing their blessings of wealth with the less fortunate. The saint is the namesake of course of the church in Red Square associated with the Kremlin—also known as the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, commissioned by Ivan the Terrible after Basil’s rebuke to the czar that he was ignoring his spiritual duties.

vita panteleímon

Sharing his feast day with the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers in Western traditions—as one of the Holy Unmercenary Healers in Orthodox contexts, meaning that he did not expect or accept payment for his services, Saint Pantaleon (from the Greek Παντελεήμων for all-compassionate, *275 - †305) was one of the personal physicians to Roman Emperor Galerius who was won over to the church by a local bishop that taught faith was the better medicine.
Finding himself invested with miraculous healing powers, Pantaleon evangelised and eventually drew out the ire of his chief patient, who ordered him put to death, calling his miracles trickery. His executioners employed various means of torture to him, including nailing his hands to his head, which mostly backfired until giving up the ghost himself. He is venerated across Europe—especially in Italy where he is said to furnish lottery numbers in the dreams of winners and as the target of gentle ridicule San Pantaleone is the origin of the word pantaloons and associated slap-stick. After the mutiny was suppressed, the Russian Imperial battleship Potemkin was reflagged as the Panteleimon—Пантелеи́мон.

канонизация царской семьи

Formally glorified—elevated to sainthood as martyrs and righteous passion-bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church on 1 November 1981 and then in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) the murdered last imperial family, the Romanovs (see previously), and the domestics that died along with them are commemorated on this day (Old Style, 4 July), the day after they were assassinated by Bolshevik operatives in 1918 at Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. Two members of their entourage were not canonised owing to the fact that their professed faith was respectively Roman Catholic and Lutheran, and the whole veneration was certainly not without controversy with opponents pointing out that the Romanovs were not killed for their faith and the flagging leadership of Nicholas II had caused suffering and enabled the revolution in the first place, counting some proponents who advocate the doctrine of tsarebozhiye (Царебожие, Tsar-as-God, deification) and that the last emperor was capable of spiritually redeeming the Russian people.

śmigus-dyngus

The second day of Bright Week—the Octave of Easter, is a public holiday in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia as an extension of Eastertide and events sometimes traditionally include egg races and other activities to use up, put away the festoonery—a pretty practical idea, which in parts of central Europe, including parts of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine they had down to a science, once at least though the practise seems to be less and less common.
Called in Polish above and Oblévačka in Czech, “Wet Monday” (or simply Dyngus Day by diaspora) was chance for adolescents to throw water on each other and flirtatiously beat each other with willow branches that made up traditional egg trees and decorative boughs. With suspected roots in pagan fertility ceremonies and the welcoming of spring countered by Christian missionaries trying impose their religion on the natives, linguists conjecture that śmigus refers to baptism—an involuntary or unwanted one at that, going all the way back to the conversion of Mieszko I, the Duke of the Poles in 966 (coincidentally also on this day)—and Dingnis—from the old German for ransom—refers to the tribute that one can pay in leftover eggs to avoid getting doused or whipped.

7x7

rebirth of a salesman: revisiting a 1969 documentary that revealed how evangelism and door-to-door sales converged

новогоднее дерево: the evolution of the Yolka New Year’s Tree—from its pagan roots to Soviet anti-religious symbolic staple (see also)

mamurluk: also home to the Museum of Break-Ups, a new gallery space dedicated to hangovers opens in Zagreb

now that’s a name i’ve not heard in a long time: a fan-made Obi-Wan Kenobi Star Wars story

intern’yet: reportedly, Russia successfully unplugs from the world wide web and replaced global portals with domestic ones

bergkristall: Adalbert Stifter’s timeless, beloved 1845 novella

open conference bridge: a team of volunteers are retrofitting and reviving a network of payless, pay phone booths to bring community cohesion

andreasnacht

The apostle opting to be crucified saltire to differentiate his martyrdom from that of Jesus and patron of Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Scotland, Romania, Barbados, Burgundy, miners (hence the crossed pick and hewer that symbolises the trade), fishmongers, pregnant women, rope-makers, butchers and singers—interceding on counts of sore throat and other respiratory distress and incidence of lycanthropy, this day and evening marks the Feast of Saint Andrew.
Brother of Peter and as fishermen become fishers of men, Andrew is referred to as Πρωτόκλητος, the First-Called, apostolic succession in the Orthodox tradition following him rather than his sibling (Andrew introduced Peter to Jesus), as it does in the Roman Catholic Church.  Syncretically recognised as the beginning of Advent and marking the end of pre-winter slaughter of livestock, before seasonal trappings overtook folk superstitions, this night was especially viewed as an ideal occasion for divination, carromancy—predicting the future by interpreting the form hot candle wax takes cooled in water (see also)—especially, and magic spells. Furthermore, it was believed that from this night until the eve of the Feast of Saint George, it was a particularly active time for vampires and werewolves, with the latter being granted the license to prey on whatever they choose and, natural or supernatural, the power to speak to humans on this night.

common ära

Doing some research with some historic church texts in German, I kept running across the abbreviation v. u. Z.—unfamiliar but I quickly surmised its meaning from context clues as “before our era,” a way of BC/AD without a specifically Christian reference point. Ironically—while this term is used in contemporary, secular papers as something synonymous with CE/BCE, it was being used here in a hagiographical and historic milieu to avoid the paradox that Jesus’ birth year did not coincide with the beginning of the era, but rather from three to six vor der Zeitrechnung.

thrones and dominions

Located in the closed research town of Sarov (its original name restored in 1995 by President Boris Yeltsin at the residents’ request from its designation as Arzamas-16, affectionately referred to as Los Arzamas after its sister city, Los Alamos) the Russian Federal Nuclear Centre is receiving some gentle scrutiny and rebuke for the purchase of some icons and other religious material related to native saint Seraphim (*1754 - †1833).
Although the former presence of a monastery at this location does not exactly account for the connection with the popular figure or explain while his holy relics were taken on an October 2016 Soyuz mission to the International Space Station—Joseph of Cupertino (the Italian village in Apulia and not the Apple headquarters its named after) a reported dullard of a priest however with a penchant for levitation and in general the capacity for wonder and awe is the patron of astronauts and cosmonauts (Feast Day 18 October), having met his untimely demise during preparations for another celebration involving fireworks and an accident that launched Joseph into the sky, honouring a local seems like a wise thing to do in any case. Before travelling into space, Seraphim’s mortal remains were feared destroyed in the Bolshevik Revolution until later discovered as an exhibit in a museum of superstition, saved and subsequently repatriated to Sarov.

xристос воскрес! воістину воскрес!

день святого патрика

The observance of the Feast of Saint Patrick of course spread with the Irish diaspora across the world and was probably readily adopted by surrounding host communities in part due to the fact that it was the one exceptional day during Lent when prohibitions on food and drink were relaxed—though that indulgence has been much abused. Parades and associated festivities have taken place in Russia since 1992 and nearly every year thereafter through the auspices of the Russian Celtic Society. In 2017, the Russian Orthodox Church even added Saint Patrick to their menologium—the liturgical calendar—along with thirteen other post-Schism ancient saints (enlighteners, converters) of Western countries, though the holiday is observed on 30 March [Old Style for 17 March].

game of domes

The Russian armed forces are soliciting donations to build (in record time—to be completed by the 2020 seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II) a massive cathedral in Patriot Park. Meant to unite and inspire the Russian people, this planned symbol of the role of the Orthodox Church in the army reminds some of the establishing shots of Westeros in the Game of Thrones or an anti-flak battery. Learn more and find more reporting from foreign bureaus at the BBC’s News from Elsewhere at the link above.