Saint Nektarios Orthodox Church · Patristic Calendar Greek Orthodox Parish

The Saints of True Orthodoxy

The martyrs, confessors and righteous ones who kept the apostolic Faith unaltered, glorified and venerated by our Church.

The Church of the True Greek Orthodox Christians of Greece is also referred to as the Genuine Orthodox Church of Greece, or GOC.

The face of the struggle

Holy New Martyr Catherine of Mandra

†15 November 1927 · the first martyr of the Church Calendar

On the feast of the Holy Archangels, 8 November 1927, the police of the state Church came to Mandra, near Megara, to seize the priest who served according to the Church Calendar. Catherine had walked her children home first. Then she turned back, and stood in the church with the faithful to protect him. She was beaten there among them, and died seven days later, at dawn on the first day of the Nativity Fast, on 15 November 1927.

She is the first martyr of the Church Calendar, and her face is the face of the whole struggle: not a nun of the desert, not a bishop in exile, but a young mother in her own village church, struck down by the enforcement of an innovation, by men who called themselves Orthodox and used the power of the state to silence those who kept what the Church had always kept. Every confessor of our century stands in her line.

Her memory is kept in our parish with a memorial, and her feast is kept on 15 November according to the Patristic Calendar.

Read her full martyrdom

Feast: 15 November, Patristic Calendar
Reposed: 15 November 1927, aged 27
Glorified: 6/19 September 2014

The night of 7 November 1927

Catherine Routis, née Peppas, was born in 1900 in the village of Mandra, in Attica, and married Constantine Routis. When the hierarchy of the Church of Greece imposed the Revised Calendar in 1924, the two of them took their place among the faithful who would not accept it, attending the services and the public confessions of the Patristic Calendar at real cost to themselves.

On the eve of the feast of the Holy Archangels the faithful of Mandra gathered in their church for Vespers and Matins with Father Christopher Psallidas, one of the few priests of the region still serving according to the Church Calendar. At the beginning of Matins the police surrounded the church. Their orders came from the new-calendar Archbishop of Athens: arrest the priest and disperse the faithful.

The police broke the windows and demanded entry. The faithful, who had just received Holy Communion, formed a living wall of women around their priest. "You will arrest our priest only over our dead bodies," Catherine said.

Seven days

The police fired their rifles over the crowd to terrify it. Another woman, Angeliki Katsarellis, was struck in the temple. Catherine did not move. When she saw a policeman raise the butt of his rifle against Father Christopher, she covered the priest with her own body and received the blow to the back of her head. She fell with her blood on the church floor, whispering, "Most Holy Theotokos."

They carried her to the Annunciation Hospital in Athens, where she lay motionless for seven days. Unable to speak, she gestured for paper and pencil to write a last word to her husband, commending their two children to his care; the elder was four years old, the younger only a few months.

At dawn on 15 November 1927, the first day of the Nativity Fast according to the calendar she had shed her blood to defend, she gave her soul into the hands of Christ. She was twenty-seven years old. Her funeral was attended by thousands.

Why she is the face of the struggle

She is the first canonised martyr of the Church Calendar, and she is not a remote figure: not a nun of the desert, not a hierarch in exile, but a wife and mother of a village parish, who had walked her children home and then went back for her priest.

Her death is the permanent answer to everyone who says that the calendar question was a harmless administrative adjustment. It was decided by police at a church door, and it was paid for in blood, in our own century and in our own land.

Every confessor since stands in her line, and our parish keeps her memory with a memorial, and her feast on 15 November.

Glorified as a saint by the Holy Synod of the Church of the True Greek Orthodox Christians on 6/19 September 2014, the first canonised martyr of the Church Calendar.

These are the saints of Orthodoxy across twenty centuries, from the Apostles to our own day: the martyrs of the persecutions, the Fathers of the Ecumenical Councils, the confessors of the holy icons, the ascetics of the Holy Mountain, and the confessors and martyrs of the Patristic Calendar in our own century. The recent names are not a new sanctity. They are the newest branch of a tree rooted in the Apostles, kept in the same calendar, the same worship and the same faith as Saint Athanasius and Saint Maximus, Saint Mark of Ephesus and Saint Gregory Palamas.

We are a Patristic Calendar Greek Orthodox parish, under the omophorion of the Church of the True Greek Orthodox Christians of Greece, holding the ancestral Julian Calendar and the apostolic Faith unaltered in doctrine, worship and discipline, in canonical continuity with the pre-innovation Orthodox Church. The saints are the life of the Church made visible, and the Church has never been without them. We keep, as the Church has always kept, the memory of all who held the Faith from the Apostles to our own day, and the Church has gone on glorifying her confessors and martyrs in our own century as in every century before it.

All feast days are given according to the Patristic Calendar, the ancestral Julian Calendar which the Church has kept unbroken since the First Ecumenical Council. The civil date falls thirteen days later.

Confessors and martyrs of the last century

The saints of the struggle for the Church Calendar and against ecumenism, in Greece, Romania and the Russian diaspora.

15 November

Patristic Calendar

Holy New Martyr Catherine of Mandra

†1927

A young mother of Mandra near Megara. On the feast of the Holy Archangels, 8 November 1927, when the police of the state Church came to seize the priest who served according to the Church Calendar, she returned to the church after seeing her children home and stood with the faithful to protect him; beaten there, she died seven days later at dawn on the first day of the Nativity Fast. She is the first martyr of the Church Calendar, killed by the enforcement of the innovation itself. Glorified in September 2014.

7 September

Patristic Calendar

Saint Chrysostomos the New Confessor

former Metropolitan of Florina, †1955

Born in Madytos of Eastern Thrace on the feast of Saint John Chrysostomos in 1870, a hierarch of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, he returned to the Church Calendar in 1935 together with two other Metropolitans and led the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece through exile and persecution until his repose, preferring hardship with the people of God to honor and comfort with the innovating hierarchs. He is the father of the whole struggle. Glorified by synodal act on 8 May 2016, confirmed at Parnes on 15 May 2016.

3 October

Patristic Calendar

Saint Ieronymos of Aegina

hieromonk and hesychast, †1966

A Cappadocian refugee ordained in his homeland and brought to Greece by the exchange of populations, he lived as a hermit on Aegina, a confessor, healer and clairvoyant elder. In 1940 he returned to the Church Calendar, saying that the Church of Greece had fallen ill by changing the festal calendar, and remained a faithful child of the Genuine Orthodox Church until his last breath; his funeral was served by Metropolitan Akakios of Attica. Even the innovators honor him, since the holiness of his life cannot be denied. Glorified in September 2014.

22 July

Patristic Calendar

Holy Hieromartyr Joseph of Desfina

†1944

A priest of the Genuine Orthodox Church murdered by Communist forces in 1944 for Christ and for the faith he served. Glorified in September 2014.

8 December

Patristic Calendar

Saint Parthenios of Chios

ascetic of the Skete of the Holy Fathers, †1880

Elder of the Skete of the Holy Fathers on Chios, in the line of the Kollyvades. Glorified in September 2014.

14 October

Patristic Calendar

Saint Pachomios of Chios

ascetic of the Skete of the Holy Fathers, †1905

Elder of the same Skete and the spiritual guide of the young Anastasios Kephalas, who became Saint Nektarios of Aegina, the patron of our parish. Glorified in September 2014.

Feast day

see parish calendar

Saint John the New Merciful of Amphiale

Confessor, the Elder of the Poor

George Vaxevanopoulos of Piraeus, who set out as a young man for the Holy Mountain and was turned back by a vision to care for his mother and sisters, and was told he would one day be ordained to save many souls. Ordained deacon and priest in October 1943, under the Occupation, by Bishop Germanos of the Cyclades, he founded the Monastery of Saint Demetrios at Amphiale, gave away everything he had to the poor, and was the confessor of Saint Chrysostomos of Florina himself. Glorified at his monastery on 15 April 2018.

15 January

Patristic Calendar

Saint Hieronymos of Parnitha

hieromonk and confessor, †1943

Born in Crete in 1867, he fled to the Holy Mountain as a young man, lived first in the coenobium of Saint Paul and then as a hesychast, was ordained priest, ate very little and served the Divine Liturgy daily. He labored for the small flock of the Genuine Orthodox Christians, resisting the calendar innovation of 1924 with vigor; when the innovators sought to arrest him and send him into exile, he was preserved in ways his flock called miraculous, and he prayed for his persecutors. He reposed at the Monastery of Saint Paraskevi, Acharnes, on 15 January 1943, and his canonization was proclaimed there on 26 May 2024.

23 April

Patristic Calendar

Saint Myrtidiotissa of Kleisoura

ascetic, †1974

Sophia Chotokouridou, a refugee from Pontus, who lived for fifty years as an ascetic and fool for Christ in the fireplace of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kleisoura in Macedonia, healed by the Mother of God and feeding the poor from her own hunger. In October 1971 she was tonsured a nun with the name Myrtidiotissa by Archimandrite Cyprian, afterwards Metropolitan of Oropos and Fili, and she reposed on the feast of Saint George, 23 April 1974. The new-calendar Church honors her too, under her baptismal name.

19 June

Patristic Calendar

Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco

the Wonderworker, †1966

Archbishop of the Russian Church Abroad, ascetic, healer and defender of the Church Calendar, who openly supported the Old Calendarists of Greece and consecrated hierarchs for them. Glorified in 1994.

8 November

Patristic Calendar

Saint Philaret of New York

the Confessor, First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad, †1985

He refused a Soviet passport in Manchuria at the cost of years of hardship, led the free Russian Church for twenty-one years, and wrote the Sorrowful Epistles to the primates of the Orthodox Churches warning them of the heresy of ecumenism. Under him the Church Abroad glorified Saint John of Kronstadt, Saint Herman of Alaska, Saint Xenia of Petersburg, the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia and Saint Paisius Velichkovsky, and in 1969 recognized the hierarchy of the Genuine Orthodox Church of Greece. His relics were found incorrupt in 1998.

15 June

Patristic Calendar

Saint Glicherie of Romania

Metropolitan and Confessor, †1985

Imprisoned and persecuted under both the royal and the communist regimes for keeping the Church Calendar, he led the Church of Romania which kept the Patristic Calendar, and was glorified in 1999.

9 November

Patristic Calendar

Saint Nektarios of Aegina

Metropolitan of Pentapolis, the Wonderworker, †1920

The patron of our parish. He reposed four years before the innovation, slandered by his own hierarchy and vindicated by God. His teaching that outside the Church there are no mysteries and no grace is the witness that the later confessors simply kept.

2 March

Patristic Calendar

Saint Nicholas Planas of Athens

priest, †1932

The simple priest of Athens who served the Divine Liturgy every day for fifty years. In 1926 he blessed the first headquarters of the Religious Community of the Genuine Orthodox Christians in Athens, and he never accepted the new calendar. His life was published by the Old Calendar Holy Transfiguration Monastery in 1981, a decade before the official Church followed with a glorification of its own.

The Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia

Glorified on 1 November 1981 by the free Russian Church under Saint Philaret, at a time when the official Church in Moscow was forbidden even to name them. Their synaxis is kept on the Sunday nearest 25 January. Those named here are above all the hierarchs who refused to submit to the Soviet-controlled hierarchy, holding that a Church administration which serves the persecutor has placed itself outside the Church.

25 March

Patristic Calendar

Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow

Confessor, †1925

He anathematized the Bolsheviks in 1918 and, after a brief trial of the new calendar in 1923, restored the Church Calendar in Russia.

7 November

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Joseph, Metropolitan of Petrograd

†1937

Head of the hierarchs who broke with Metropolitan Sergius after the Declaration of 1927; shot in Chimkent together with Saint Cyril of Kazan.

7 November

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Cyril, Metropolitan of Kazan

†1937

Named first in Saint Tikhon's testament as his successor, the senior hierarch of the Russian Church; his letters from exile against the Sergianist compromise are the theological foundation of the Catacomb Church.

27 September

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Peter, Metropolitan of Krutitsa

Patriarchal Locum Tenens, †1937

Twelve years in prison and exile for refusing every concession the state demanded; shot in 1937.

31 July

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd

†1922

Martyred for resisting the schismatic Living Church and the seizure of church vessels.

25 January

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Vladimir, Metropolitan of Kiev

†1918

The first hierarch martyred under the Bolshevik yoke, for which reason the Synaxis of the New Martyrs is kept near his day.

15 December

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Hilarion, Archbishop of Verey

†1929

Theologian of the unity of the Church, who taught that outside her visible boundaries there is neither mystery nor grace; died of typhus on the way from Solovki to exile.

4 July

Patristic Calendar

The Holy Royal Martyrs

Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexei, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, †1918

Together with the Grand Duchess Elizabeth the New Martyr, 5 July, the first of the whole company glorified in 1981.

Various

Patristic Calendar

The Catacomb Confessors

among the many glorified in 1981

Hieromartyrs Seraphim of Uglich, Victor of Glazov, Damaskin of Glukhov, Seraphim of Dmitrov, Maximus of Serpukhov, Demetrius of Gdov, Arsenius of Serpukhov and Andronik of Perm, who held that the faith cannot be kept by a hierarchy that serves those who persecute it.

The Saints of Alaska and America

The apostles and martyrs of the Orthodox mission in the New World, venerated by us as the pattern of a mission which converts rather than compromises.

31 March

Patristic Calendar · also 23 September

Saint Innocent of Alaska

Enlightener of the Aleuts, Apostle to America, Metropolitan of Moscow, †1879

Missionary priest at Unalaska and Sitka, translator of the Gospel into Aleut, first Bishop of Kamchatka and Alaska and at the last Metropolitan of Moscow. He crossed the Aleutians in a kayak to baptize and teach, and his whole labor was to bring the peoples of the north into the Church as she is, without altering her faith or her services.

13 December

Patristic Calendar · glorification 27 July

Saint Herman of Alaska

Wonderworker of all America, †1836

The monk of Spruce Island, defender of the Aleuts against the Russian traders. The first saint of America, glorified in 1970.

12 September

Patristic Calendar

Holy Martyr Peter the Aleut

†1815

Tortured to death in California by Latin friars for refusing to renounce Orthodoxy and accept the Roman faith; a plain witness that those who died in that age did not consider Rome a sister Church.

2 July

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Juvenaly of Alaska

†1796

Hieromonk of the first Valaam mission, martyred on the Alaskan mainland while preaching the Gospel.

Confessors, teachers and martyrs of the Russian Church and her missions

20 December

Patristic Calendar

Saint John of Kronstadt

the Wonderworker, †1908

Glorified in 1964; he foretold the catastrophe of Russia and taught that the Church is one and that heterodox worship is not hers.

24 January

Patristic Calendar

Saint Xenia of Petersburg

Fool for Christ, †about 1800

Glorified in 1978.

15 November

Patristic Calendar

Saint Paisius Velichkovsky

†1794

Father of the Philokalic revival in Moldavia and Russia; glorified in 1982.

2 January

Patristic Calendar · also 19 July

Saint Seraphim of Sarov

Wonderworker, †1833

He foretold a time when the bishops of Russia would become so impious that they would depart from the faith itself.

30 April

Patristic Calendar

Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov

Bishop of the Caucasus, †1867

His writings on prayer and on the delusions of Latin and Protestant spirituality are standard reading in our monasteries.

6 January

Patristic Calendar · also 10 January

Saint Theophan the Recluse

Bishop of Tambov, †1894

Translator of the Philokalia into Russian and teacher of the inner life.

7 October

Patristic Calendar

Saint Jonah of Hankou

Bishop of Manchuria, †1925

The young bishop of the Russian emigration in Manchuria, who in three years built orphanages, schools and a free pharmacy for the refugees before dying at thirty-seven; glorified in 1996.

10 June

Patristic Calendar

The Holy Martyrs of China

Hieromartyr Metrophanes and the 222 with him, †1900

The Chinese Orthodox of Peking, priest, catechists, women and children, slaughtered in the Boxer rising for refusing to deny Christ; glorified in 1902.

The pillars of the Orthodox confession

The calendar question and the heresy of ecumenism are only the latest form of a struggle as old as the Church, and these are the saints to whom we appeal in it, since each refused a union with heresy which the hierarchs of his own day had accepted.

19 January

Patristic Calendar

Saint Mark of Ephesus

†1444

The one bishop who would not sign at Florence, whose refusal alone preserved the Orthodox East from the union with Rome which emperor and patriarch had already accepted. In matters of the faith, he taught, there is no room for compromise.

6 February

Patristic Calendar

Saint Photios the Great

Patriarch of Constantinople, †about 893

The first to expose the addition to the Creed and the claims of the Roman see, and president of the Council of 879 which forbade any alteration of the Symbol of Faith.

14 November

Patristic Calendar · Second Sunday of Great Lent

Saint Gregory Palamas

Archbishop of Thessalonica, †1359

Defender of the uncreated light and of hesychast prayer against the Latin learning of Barlaam.

21 January

Patristic Calendar · also 13 August

Saint Maximus the Confessor

†662

A simple monk who broke communion with every patriarchate of the East when they fell into Monothelitism, saying that he would not commune with them even if the whole world did; the clearest witness that neither numbers nor sees make the Church, but the true faith.

11 November

Patristic Calendar

Saint Theodore the Studite

†826

He separated from patriarchs over the adulterous marriage of the emperor and again over the icons, teaching that to wall oneself off from a hierarch who preaches heresy is the duty, not the sin, of the faithful.

18 January

Patristic Calendar · also 2 May

Saint Athanasius the Great

Archbishop of Alexandria, †373

Five times exiled, he stood alone against an Arian world and a compromised episcopate, and the Church followed him.

4 December

Patristic Calendar

Saint John of Damascus

†about 749

Defender of the holy icons against the iconoclast emperors and their councils.

10 October

Patristic Calendar

The Twenty-six Martyrs of Zographou

†1275

Monks of the Holy Mountain burned alive in their tower for refusing the union with Rome imposed by the emperor Michael and the patriarch Bekkos; with them the martyrs of Vatopedi, Iveron and Karyes, drowned and hanged for the same confession.

5 September

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Athanasius of Brest

†1648

Abbot and martyr against the Unia in the Polish lands, shot for refusing to recognize the Latin union; with him Saint Job of Pochaev, 28 October, who held Orthodoxy together under Latin rule.

14 July

Patristic Calendar

Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite

†1809

With Saint Macarius of Corinth, 17 April, and Saint Athanasius of Paros, 24 June, the fathers of the Kollyvades, who compiled the Philokalia and the Rudder and gave the Church the canonical and ascetic vocabulary by which we understand our own struggle.

24 August

Patristic Calendar

Hieromartyr Cosmas of Aetolia

Equal to the Apostles, †1779

The preacher who walked the whole of enslaved Greece and warned the people against the Pope above every other enemy of the faith.

12 March

Patristic Calendar

Saint Symeon the New Theologian

†1022

Who taught that every generation must know the grace of the Holy Spirit consciously, and that no office or succession stands in for it.

Saint Nektarios Orthodox Church, a Patristic Calendar Greek Orthodox parish serving Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, under the omophorion of the Church of the True Greek Orthodox Christians of Greece.