The First Saturday of Great Lent

On the Saturday that closes the first week of the Great Fast the Orthodox Church keeps the commemoration of St. Theodore Tyro and the miracle of the kollyva, blessing and distributing boiled wheat in his honor — one of the most beloved observances of the Lenten season. This file describes the rite as it is actually served: the Canon to St. Theodore sung at the Presanctified Liturgy of the Friday evening before, the blessing of the kollyva, the synaxarion read on the Saturday, and the place of the commemoration in the architecture of the Lenten cycle.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; warrior-saint)

A Movable Commemoration Within the Fixed Fast

St. Theodore Tyro has two commemorations in the Orthodox calendar, and the distinction between them is liturgically important. His fixed feast falls on 17 February (2 March on the civil calendar for those keeping the older reckoning), the day on which the menaion commemorates “the holy Great Martyr Theodore the Recruit” (Theodoros ho Teron) with his proper hymns. But the commemoration for which he is most widely known is movable: it is kept on the Saturday of the First Week of Great Lent (Greek to Sabbaton tes A’ hebdomados ton Nesteion), the day that closes the opening week of the Fast, and it is governed not by the menaion but by the Triodion, the book of the movable Lenten and Paschal cycle (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, 1978; on the cycle, see Great Lent and The Church Calendar).

Because Great Lent always opens on a Monday — Clean Monday, Kathara Deutera — the First Saturday is the sixth day of the Fast, and it is the first Saturday on which the full Divine Liturgy (of St. John Chrysostom) is celebrated, the weekday Lenten services having no full Eucharist. The commemoration of St. Theodore is therefore the Church’s first festal landmark within Lent, falling just before the First Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy — so that the opening week of the Fast is sealed by the soldier-martyr’s Saturday and crowned the next day by the feast of the restoration of the holy icons (on which see The Warrior-Saint in Icons and Icons and Iconoclasm). The commemoration’s origin, in the tradition’s own telling, is the kollyva miracle of Julian’s reign, recounted in Julian and the Defiled Market.

The Friday Evening: the Presanctified Liturgy and the Canon

The commemoration does not begin on the Saturday but on the Friday evening that precedes it, for the Orthodox liturgical day begins at sunset and the festal services of St. Theodore’s Saturday open with that evening’s worship. On the weekdays of Great Lent the Eucharist is not celebrated in the ordinary way; in its place, on Wednesdays and Fridays (and certain other days), the Church serves the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts — a solemn vesperal communion from the Holy Gifts consecrated the previous Sunday, the proper Lenten service of communion when the joy of a full Eucharist is set aside (The Lenten Triodion, 1978; see Great Lent).

It is at the Presanctified Liturgy of the Friday of the first week that the commemoration of St. Theodore is solemnly kept and the kollyva blessed. The Canon to St. Theodore the Recruit, sung in the course of these services, is by tradition ascribed to St. John of Damascus, the eighth-century hymnographer and defender of the holy images; the ascription is the received liturgical tradition rather than a documented fact, and is best stated as such. [Disputed: the Canon to St. Theodore for the First Saturday is traditionally attributed to St. John of Damascus in the service books; the attribution is a liturgical-tradition ascription, not an independently documented one, as is common with the hymnography of the Triodion]. At the end of the Presanctified Liturgy the priest blesses the kollyva — a dish of boiled wheat, prepared and brought to the church, sweetened and adorned — reading a prayer of blessing over it in memory of the Great Martyr, after which the boiled wheat is distributed to the faithful. This blessing and distribution of the kollyva at the Friday Presanctified, in commemoration of St. Theodore, is the heart of the observance and the act that the synaxarion-story exists to explain.

The Saturday: the Synaxarion and the Liturgy

On the Saturday itself the Church celebrates the Divine Liturgy and reads, at Matins, the appointed synaxarion for the day — the short lection that recounts the miracle of the kollyva: how the apostate Julian secretly defiled the market-food of Constantinople in the first week of the Fast, how St. Theodore appeared to the archbishop and bade the people eat boiled wheat, and how in thanksgiving the Church appointed this commemoration (The Lenten Triodion, Synaxarion of the First Saturday; the narrative is set out in full in Julian and the Defiled Market). The proper hymns of the day — the kontakion and troparion of St. Theodore, the canon, and the festal stichera — celebrate the soldier-martyr both as the conqueror who was burned for Christ and as the protector who delivered the fasting people, knitting his fourth-century martyrdom and the kollyva-deliverance into a single liturgical portrait.

The Saturday belongs, too, to the general character of Saturdays in the Orthodox week as days of the departed and of all the saints — and the kollyva of St. Theodore’s Saturday is of a piece with the boiled wheat offered at every memorial of the dead, for the wheat-grain that dies to bear fruit (John 12:24) is the Church’s standing sign of the resurrection (the theology is developed in The Kollyva as Living Tradition). Thus the First Saturday gathers up several threads at once: the martyr’s victory, the people’s deliverance, the discipline of the fast, and the hope of the resurrection that the boiled wheat proclaims.

The Place of the Commemoration in the Lenten Architecture

The position of St. Theodore’s commemoration in the Lenten calendar is not accidental, and seeing it whole helps explain why the observance is so beloved. Great Lent is built as a graduated ascent toward Pascha, its Sundays marked by great themes — the Triumph of Orthodoxy, St. Gregory Palamas, the Veneration of the Cross, St. John Climacus, St. Mary of Egypt — and its Saturdays by commemorations of the saints and the departed (The Lenten Triodion, 1978; see Great Lent). The very first of these landmarks, reached after the austere opening week with its Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete and its strict fasting, is the Saturday of St. Theodore — a day of mild festal relief, of the first full Saturday Liturgy of the Fast, and of the sweet blessed wheat distributed to a people who have just kept the strictest days of the year.

That the soldier-martyr’s Saturday should stand on the threshold of the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy gives the placement a further fittingness that the tradition has not failed to notice: the Canon of the day is ascribed to St. John of Damascus, the great champion of the holy images, and the First Sunday celebrates the very restoration of the images for which he contended — so that the warrior-martyr, his Damascene hymnographer, and the victory of Orthodoxy over iconoclasm are gathered into one weekend at the opening of the Fast. The commemoration is thus both a pastoral mercy — a festal pause and a sweet food after a hard week — and a theological statement, joining the martyr’s witness, the resurrection-sign of the wheat, and the Church’s confession of the holy icons.

What Is Securely Liturgical and What Is Narrative

In keeping with the discipline of this collection, it is worth distinguishing plainly what is liturgically secure from what is narrative. Securely attested — because it is the present and documented practice of the Church and is set out in the Triodion — is the observance itself: the commemoration of St. Theodore Tyro on the Saturday of the first week, the blessing and distribution of kollyva at the Friday Presanctified, the Canon sung in his honor, and the synaxarion read on the Saturday. Narrative, and late, is the explanatory miracle-story of Julian and the defiled market, which accounts for the rite but is not attested before the Byzantine synaxarion tradition and is absent from the fourth-century witness of Gregory of Nyssa (per METHODOLOGY §3.5; the source-critical handling is in The Encomia and the Passio and the historicity discussion in Julian and the Defiled Market). The Orthodox worshipper keeps the Saturday not as the anniversary of a forensically certified event but as a living thanksgiving in which the martyr’s protection and the resurrection-hope of the wheat are received and proclaimed — and it is as such a living rite, far more than as a contested point of fourth-century history, that the First Saturday of Great Lent holds its place at the heart of Orthodox Lenten practice (see The Kollyva as Living Tradition).

References

The Lenten Triodion. Translated by Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978; repr. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002. (The services and the Synaxarion of the Saturday of the First Week of Great Lent; the Canon to St. Theodore; the structure of the Lenten Sundays and Saturdays; the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts.)
Gregory of Nyssa. On St. Theodore (De Sancto Theodoro). PG 46:736–748. (The fourth-century witness to the cult, silent on the kollyva miracle.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Edited by Alexander P. Kazhdan et al. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.v. “Kollyba”; “Theodore Teron”; “Triodion.”)
Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent: Journey to Pascha. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969. (The theology and structure of the Lenten services, including the Presanctified Liturgy.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Paris: Picard, 1909. (The development of the Theodore legend.)
Scripture cited by book chapter:verse (John 12:24).