The Feast and Liturgical Cult of St Menas

The liturgical commemoration of St Menas across the calendars of the Christian East: his feast on 11 November in the Byzantine (Greek and Slavic) reckoning and on 15 Hathor (Hatour) — the principal Coptic feast — together with the Coptic commemoration of the consecration (encaenia) of his church and the other Menas-days of the Coptic year. This file gathers the synaxarion notices and hymnography, the saint’s accumulated titles (Great Martyr, Wonderworker, “the Athlete,” “Mina the Miracle-Worker”), his fields of patronage (travellers, the sick, merchants, the recovery of lost and stolen things), and the living observance of his cult today at Abu Mena and at the modern Monastery of St Mina in the Mariout. The feast is the firmest, most continuous element of the Menas tradition, and it is the proper place to see the soldier-martyr of the legendary Passio and the wonderworker of the excavated shrine venerated as a single saint.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

Two Calendars, One Saint

St Menas is one of a relatively small number of saints whose cult bridges the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian communions, venerated in continuity both by the Eastern Orthodox (Byzantine) Churches and by the Coptic Orthodox Church that holds his homeland and his shrine. His commemoration therefore stands in two calendars at once, and the relation between the two dates is itself a small index of the cult’s antiquity and reach.

In the Byzantine reckoning — the calendar of the Greek, Slavic, and other Eastern Orthodox Churches — St Menas is commemorated on 11 November. On that day the menaia and the synaxaria of the Byzantine tradition carry his notice, regularly conjoining him with two other martyrs whose feasts fell on the same date in the Constantinopolitan calendar: Victor and Vincent (and, in the fuller notices, the martyr Stephanida), so that the day became a small cluster-commemoration of martyrs headed by Menas (Greek menaion for 11 November; Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye, under 11 November). The same date governs the Slavic menologia, where Menas appears as a Great Martyr of Egypt; in the Russian reckoning, where the older Julian calendar is retained, 11 November falls on 24 November of the civil (Gregorian) calendar, but the liturgical day is the same.

In the Coptic reckoning the principal feast of the saint falls on 15 Hathor (Hatour) — the third month of the Coptic year — which is the day the Coptic Synaxarium assigns to the martyrdom of Apa Mina (Coptic Synaxarium, under 15 Hathor; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991, s.v. “Menas, Saint”). This, and not 11 November, is the great Menas-day of the Egyptian Church, kept at Abu Mena and at the modern monastery as the saint’s chief festival. The relation of the two dates is not a contradiction but a difference of calendrical systems: the Coptic months run on the old Egyptian solar reckoning, and 15 Hathor corresponds in the Julian calendar to a day in late November — the two traditions commemorating the same martyr within the same season, by their own count of the months. The wider claim that the vita makes — that Menas suffered under Diocletian, c. 309 — is shared across both calendars; what differs is only the date-form by which each Church inscribes the day.

The Coptic Menas-Days: Martyrdom and Encaenia

The Coptic calendar is distinctive in that it commemorates St Menas more than once in the year, attaching to him not only his martyrdom but the great events of his shrine. The Coptic Synaxarium and the liturgical usage of the Coptic Church preserve, in addition to the martyrdom on 15 Hathor, a commemoration of the consecration (encaenia, the dedication) of the church of St Menas — the founding of his sanctuary in the Mariout — kept on its own day (Coptic Synaxarium; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991, s.v. “Menas, Saint”; Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999). The feast of the dedication of the church is, in effect, the liturgical memory of the building of Abu Mena — the very event that the archaeology recovers in stone (see The Great Pilgrimage City). That the Coptic Church should keep a feast not only of the saint’s death but of the raising of his shrine is itself a mark of how central the place was to his cult: the city built around the tomb became, in the calendar, an object of commemoration in its own right.

The plurality of Menas-days in the Coptic year — the martyrdom, the dedication, and the further commemorations of the translation and miracles attached to his name in the local usage — should be reported as what the Coptic liturgical tradition attests, rather than harmonized into a single “biographical” sequence (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The Passio and the Miracles supply the narrative content that these days commemorate; the days themselves are the firm, continuously kept fact (on the texts, see The Passio and The Miracle Collections).

The Synaxarion Notices and the Hymnography

The synaxarion is the calendar-book of short saints’ notices read at the daily office, and the Menas notice is among the more developed of the November entries in the Byzantine books. The Greek synaxarion under 11 November rehearses the substance of the Passio: Menas as a soldier of Egyptian birth serving in the army (the Passio places him in the Rutilian/Rutiliacan unit stationed in Phrygia), his withdrawal from the camp into the desert in a time of persecution, his return to confess Christ openly before the assembled crowd at the public spectacle, his torments, and his beheading under the emperor’s officers (Greek menaion and Synaxarion of Constantinople under 11 November; on the narrative, see The Confession in the Amphitheatre). The Coptic Synaxarium under 15 Hathor gives the parallel Egyptian notice, with the local emphasis on the saint’s burial in the Mariout and the founding of his shrine (Coptic Synaxarium, 15 Hathor; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991).

The hymnography of the Byzantine office for 11 November sets Menas within the established formulary of the martyr-services: an apolytikion (dismissal troparion) and kontakion praising his athletic contest and his boldness in confession, with stichera that name his sufferings and his crown. In the Byzantine martyr-hymnography Menas is addressed in the conventional idiom of the athlophoros, the “prize-bearer” or victorious contestant of the arena of martyrdom — the same athletic imagery that the Greek tradition applies to the great soldier-martyrs generally (Greek menaion for 11 November; on the type, compare the services of St George the Great Martyr and St Demetrios of Thessaloniki). In the Coptic tradition the doxologies, the tarh (the festal commentary-hymn), and the lections proper to 15 Hathor carry the corresponding Egyptian hymnody, where Menas is celebrated as the wonderworking martyr of the Mariout and the protector of those who come to his shrine (Coptic liturgical usage for 15 Hathor; Meinardus 1999).

The honest note to register here is one of source-form rather than substance. The synaxarion notices and the festal hymns transmit the Passio and the Miracles in liturgical compression: they are the praying Church’s reception of the narrative tradition, not independent historical witnesses to the events of c. 309. They are cited here, accordingly, as the hymnographic and calendrical attestation of the cult — honestly, and without fabricated page or PG columns, since the menaion and synaxarion texts circulate in many editions and the claim is to the tradition, not to a single column (METHODOLOGY §2.1, §3.5).

The Titles of the Saint

The accumulated titles of St Menas are themselves a compressed history of his cult, and they are worth setting out because they encode the double character of the saint — the martyr of the Passio and the wonderworker of the shrine.

He is, first and most formally, Great Martyr (Greek megalomartys; Coptic and Arabic usage likewise rank him among the great martyrs). The title marks the highest grade of the martyr-saints, reserved in the Byzantine tradition for those whose witness was especially severe or especially celebrated, and shared by the soldier-martyrs George, Demetrios, Theodore, and Panteleimon, with whom Menas is naturally grouped (Greek menaion; on the grouping, see Martyr and Pilgrimage Saint).

He is, second, Wonderworker (Greek thaumatourgos; Coptic “the Miracle-Worker”). This is the title that the shrine earned for him: it points not to the manner of his death but to the Miracles of St Menas, the collected accounts of healings and rescues wrought at and through his sanctuary, and to the incubation practice by which pilgrims slept at the tomb seeking his intervention (on this, see Incubation and Healing). In the Coptic tradition the epithet is so fixed that he is regularly named “Mina the Wonderworker” or “Mina the Miracle-Worker” (Arabic Mār Mīnā al-ʿAjāʾibī), the miracle-working being treated as nearly part of his name (Meinardus 1999; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991).

He is, third, “the Athlete” (athlētēs) or “prize-bearer” (athlophoros) of the hymnography — the contestant of the martyr’s arena, victorious in the contest of confession. This is the liturgical and rhetorical title of the festal poetry rather than a popular epithet, but it is pervasive in the Byzantine office (Greek menaion for 11 November). To these the Coptic devotional tradition adds the affectionate and protective epithets of the local cult, naming him the soldier-saint and guardian of the Mariout and of those who travel its desert roads.

The Patronage of St Menas

The patronages attached to a saint are a record of what the faithful actually sought from him, and in the Menas tradition they follow directly from the Miracles and from the character of the shrine.

He is, pre-eminently, the patron of the sick and a healer — the natural province of a wonderworking martyr whose sanctuary was a healing centre, with baths fed from the sacred springs and an incubation practice at the tomb (on the healing cult, see Incubation and Healing; on the flasks that carried the healing water and oil away from the shrine, The Menas Flasks). The ampullae themselves, distributed across the Mediterranean, are the material trace of pilgrims seeking and carrying home the saint’s healing power (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910).

He is the patron of travellers and, in the Egyptian tradition especially, of caravans and the desert roads — a patronage rooted both in the founding legend, in which the saint’s relics, carried by camel, halted the beast and so chose the site of the shrine (see The Camel and the Founding Legend), and in the simple fact that Abu Mena lay on a pilgrimage route that travellers crossed to reach it. The camels of his iconography — the saint standing in prayer between two crouching camels — fixed this association in the visual tradition (on the image, see The Saint Between Two Camels).

He is the patron of merchants and traders, a patronage that overlaps with that of travellers and that reflects the commercial traffic of pilgrimage and the marketplace that grew up around the shrine-city (Frankfurter, ed., Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, 1998; Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Égypte, 2001).

And he is, distinctively and to this day, invoked for the recovery of lost and stolen things — for finding what has gone missing and for the restitution of what has been taken. This is among the best-attested of the Menas patronages in the Miracles, where stories of theft detected and goods restored through the saint’s intervention recur, and it remains a living feature of his cult, in which the faithful pray to St Menas to recover lost objects much as the Latin West invokes St Anthony of Padua (the Miracles of St Menas, ed. and trans. Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Meinardus 1999). These patronages are reported here as the consistent witness of the Miracles and of continuing devotion — what the tradition attests the saint is sought for — and not as adjudicated history (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

A Note on the Disputed Identity

The liturgical cult inherits, and largely smooths over, a question that the source-critical sections treat at length: the relation between the Egyptian soldier-martyr of Abu Mena and a parallel “Phrygian” Menas, sometimes distinguished as Menas Kallikelados, and the associated question of whether the saint’s origin was Egyptian or Phrygian [Disputed: the Greek *Passio* places Menas's military service in Phrygia and his burial in Egypt, and a separate cult of a Phrygian Menas is attested, leading some scholars to posit a conflation of two figures or an originally Phrygian saint Egyptianized at Abu Mena (so the discussion in Atiya, ed., *Coptic Encyclopedia*, 1991, s.v. "Menas, Saint"); others hold the Egyptian martyr of the Mariout to be the primary and historically anchored figure, the Phrygian elements belonging to the legendary *Passio* (so the weight of the archaeological case, Grossmann, *Abû Mînâ I*, 1989, and Kaufmann, *Die Menasstadt*, 1910)]. The detail of this question — and of the equally disputed date of the legendary Passio — is owned by Section 02 and Section 05 (see The Passio and Archaeology Versus Passio); it is registered here only because the calendar venerates as one saint a figure whose textual identity is contested. The feast is firm; the vita behind it is soft.

The Living Observance: Abu Mena and the Modern Monastery

The Menas feast is not an antiquarian memory but a living observance, kept above all in Egypt. The ancient pilgrimage-city of Abu Mena (Karm Abū Mīna), southwest of Alexandria — the tomb-church, the Great Basilica, the baptistery and baths, and the hostels of the pilgrims — is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1979, and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2001 owing to the rise of the local water table that threatens the standing remains (UNESCO World Heritage inscription, Abu Mena, 1979; Danger-list 2001; on the site, see The Great Pilgrimage City). The ancient site is thus today both a monument and a place under threat — the firm ground of the cult, materially endangered.

Adjacent to the ancient ruins stands the modern Monastery of St Mina in the Mariout (Maryūṭ), founded in 1959 under Pope Cyril VI (Kyrillos VI) of Alexandria, who held a particular devotion to the saint and whose patriarchate (1959–1971) was marked by the revival of the Menas cult and the re-establishment of monastic life at the site (Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, 1999; Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). The modern monastery has become one of the principal centres of Coptic monasticism and pilgrimage, drawing great numbers of the faithful — above all on the feast of the saint — and it is the present-day liturgical heir of the late-antique pilgrimage that the archaeology recovers (Meinardus 1999; on the modern revival, see Menas in Coptic Christianity). Pope Cyril VI was himself buried at the monastery he founded, and his own veneration has become bound up with that of the saint whose shrine he revived.

So the feast of St Menas is kept today on a double ground: the ancient city, endangered but standing, where the cult first rose around the tomb; and the modern monastery beside it, where the same saint is venerated by a living monastic community and by the pilgrims who come to him on his day. Across the Byzantine and Coptic calendars, on 11 November and on 15 Hathor, the soldier-martyr of the Passio and the wonderworker of the Miracles are commemorated as one — and that continuity of commemoration, more than any text, is the surest thing the historian can say about him.

References

The Coptic Synaxarium, under 15 Hathor (Hatour). (The Egyptian calendar-notice of the martyrdom of Apa Mina; the principal Coptic feast. Cited to the synaxarion tradition, without a fabricated edition column.)
The Greek Menaion for 11 November, and the Synaxarion of Constantinople (Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae), ed. Hippolyte Delehaye (Brussels, 1902), under 11 November. (The Byzantine notice and the conjoined commemoration of Menas with Victor, Vincent, and Stephanida; the festal hymnography of the day. Cited to the synaxarion and menaion tradition.)
Drescher, James, ed. and trans. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (The Coptic Miracles of St Menas, the source of the healing and lost-property miracles underlying his patronages.)
Atiya, Aziz S., ed. The Coptic Encyclopedia. New York: Macmillan, 1991, s.v. “Menas, Saint” and “Abu Mina.” (The Coptic feast, the encaenia of the church, the titles, and the disputed Egyptian/Phrygian identity.)
Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910. (The excavation of Abu Mena and the ampullae underlying the healing cult.)
Grossmann, Peter. Abû Mînâ I: Die Gruftkirche und die Gruft. Mainz: von Zabern, 1989. (The modern archaeology of the tomb-church and shrine.)
Frankfurter, David, ed. Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The pilgrimage and commercial context of the shrine.)
Papaconstantinou, Arietta. Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. Paris: CNRS, 2001. (The documented liturgical cult of Menas among Egyptian saints.)
Meinardus, Otto F. A. Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999. (The modern Monastery of St Mina, its foundation in 1959 under Pope Cyril VI, and the living observance of the cult.)
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Abu Mena, inscribed 1979; placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, 2001. (The status of the ancient site.)