Feast day of Menas of Egypt; Great Vespers service by Ecumenical Patriarch

The Church today venerates the memory of Menas of Egypt.

St. Menas contested in the Asia Minor province of Phrygia, in 296, during the reign of Diocletian and Maximian.

A soldier distinguished for his valor, he renounced his rank and withdrew to devote himself to ascetical struggles and prayer in the mountainous wilderness. Filled with zeal, however, he presented himself at a pagan festival and declared himself to be a Christian. After enduring terrible tortures St. Menas achieved the crown of martyrdom when he tormentors beheaded him.

The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, His All-Holiness Bartholomew I, on Tuesday, on the eve of the feast day, officiated at a Great Vespers service at the cathedral of St. Menas of Samatya, or Hypsom-A-theia, in the center of the ancient Bosporus metropolis.

In the Cretan capital of Irakleio, where St. Menas is the city’s patron saint, the Nov. 11 feast day is annually celebrated with brilliant splendor and reverence. Nevertheless, the ongoing lockdown in the country, due to the coronavirus pandemic, allows only very limited forms of public assembly, while as of last Saturday all services in places of worship throughout Greece are conducted without worshippers.

Sadly, for Irakleio’s faithful, this year’s litany of the saint’s holy relics and icons will not take place.

From northern Greece, the Metropolitan of Kastoria, His Eminence Seraphim, bemoaned the fact that the faithful of his Metropolis this year will not be able to venerate the holy icon and relics St. Menas, nor partake in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, which he reminded has been the object of blasphemous slander by some quarters in the recent period.

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