Feast and the First Saturday

St. Theodore Tyro is kept on two calendars. His fixed feast falls on 17 February in the menaion, where he is commemorated as Theodore Tyro the Great Martyr; but the commemoration that is liturgically central — and that has made him one of the most beloved of all the saints kept in Great Lent — is movable: the First Saturday of Great Lent, the Saturday of the First Week (Sabbaton tes A’ hebdomados), on which the Church recalls the kollyva miracle. This file describes the actual observance with liturgical precision: the Canon to St. Theodore sung at the Friday-evening Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts in the first week, the blessing and distribution of the boiled wheat, the reading of the synaxarion of the miracle, and the place of this commemoration in the Lenten cycle on the very threshold of the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

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

Two Commemorations: Fixed and Movable

The veneration of St. Theodore the Recruit runs on the two great wheels of the Orthodox liturgical year at once — the fixed cycle of the menaion, governed by the civil date, and the movable cycle of the Triodion, governed by the date of Pascha (on the two cycles, see The Church Calendar). Most saints belong to the fixed cycle alone, commemorated each year on the same calendar day. Theodore is unusual in being held by both: he has his own day on the menaion, and he is also given a place in the movable Lenten cycle of unique prominence. It is the movable commemoration, not the fixed feast, that carries the weight of his veneration in the lived experience of the Church.

His fixed feast is 17 February, on which the menaion commemorates ho hagios megalomartys Theodoros ho Tyron — the holy Great Martyr Theodore Tyro, “the Recruit.” This is his proper day on the calendar of saints, kept like any other fixed commemoration with the hymnography appointed for the date. (The second Theodore of the tradition, Theodore Stratelates, “the General,” is kept separately on 8 February and 8 June; the distinction of the two Theodores belongs to the source-critical anatomy of the cult — see The Two Theodores and Disentangling the Two Theodores.) Were 17 February the whole of Theodore’s place in the calendar, he would be one warrior-martyr among many. He is far more than that, because of the movable commemoration kept a few weeks later, in the first days of the Great Fast.

The First Saturday of Great Lent

The commemoration that is liturgically central is the Saturday of the First Week of Great Lent — in Greek to Sabbaton tes A’ hebdomados ton Nesteion, the First Saturday — on which the Church commemorates the miracle of the kollyva, the boiled wheat by which (the tradition holds) St. Theodore preserved the Christians of Constantinople from defilement during the reign of Julian the Apostate (the miracle itself is recounted in Julian and the Defiled Market and The First Saturday of Great Lent). This commemoration falls within Great Lent’s opening week — the first full week of the Fast, the most rigorously kept of all (on the structure and discipline of the Fast, see Great Lent) — and it crowns that first week as its appointed memorial. The services and hymns for the day are appointed in the Lenten Triodion (the Lenten Triodion, Saturday of the First Week of Great Lent; trans. Mother Mary and Ware 1978).

The reason the memorial of the kollyva miracle is fixed to this particular Saturday is itself part of the tradition the day commemorates. The miracle, as the synaxarion recounts it, took place in the first week of Lent: Julian, to defile the fasting Christians, ordered that all the food in the markets of Constantinople be secretly sprinkled with the blood of pagan sacrifices, whereupon St. Theodore appeared in a vision to the archbishop Eudoxius (Eudoxios) and directed that the faithful eat not from the market but boiled wheat — kollyva — for that week. The Church keeps the memory of the deliverance on the Saturday that closes the week in which it is said to have occurred (the Lenten Triodion, Saturday of the First Week; trans. Mother Mary and Ware 1978; cf. Julian and the Defiled Market).

The Friday-Evening Presanctified and the Canon to St. Theodore

The heart of the observance is not the Saturday morning alone but the service that opens into it the evening before. In the Orthodox liturgical day, which begins at sunset, the commemoration of the First Saturday is anticipated at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts on the Friday evening of the first week — the Presanctified being the proper Lenten weekday Eucharist, at which the faithful are communed from the Gifts consecrated on the preceding Sunday (on the Presanctified within the Lenten cycle, see Great Lent). It is at this Presanctified Liturgy, and at the offices joined to it, that the special commemoration of St. Theodore is made and the kollyva is blessed.

At this service the Canon to St. Theodore is sung. The Canon — the extended hymnographic poem proper to the commemoration — is by long tradition the work of St. John of Damascus, the great eighth-century hymnographer of the Church, and it is under his name that it has been transmitted and is printed in the Triodion [Disputed: the Canon for the commemoration of St. Theodore Tyro on the First Saturday is by long liturgical tradition attributed to St. John of Damascus (so the Triodion's ascription and the common usage), but as with much Byzantine hymnography the attribution rests on liturgical tradition rather than on independent documentary proof of authorship, and is best stated as a traditional ascription rather than an established fact]. The Canon recounts and praises the martyr and the miracle, and its singing is the verbal core of the commemoration, the means by which the assembly enters the memory of the deliverance (the Lenten Triodion, Saturday of the First Week; trans. Mother Mary and Ware 1978).

Joined to the singing of the Canon is the blessing of the kollyva — the dish of boiled wheat, the same food by which (the tradition holds) the saint preserved the faithful — which is brought into the church, set before the icon or the appointed place, and blessed by the priest with the prayer appointed for it. The synaxarion of the miracle is read, recounting the story of Julian, the defiled market, the vision of St. Theodore, and the deliverance of the people by the boiled wheat, so that the assembly hears, on the day it keeps, the account of what it keeps. And the blessed kollyva is then distributed to the faithful — eaten as a participation in the memorial, the boiled wheat that is at once the food of the miracle and, by its own ancient symbolism, the figure of the resurrection (on the symbolism of the wheat, see The Kollyva as Living Tradition; the Lenten Triodion, Saturday of the First Week; trans. Mother Mary and Ware 1978).

The shape of the observance is therefore precise and worth stating without blur: at the Friday-evening Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts of the first week of Great Lent, the Church sings the Canon to St. Theodore (traditionally attributed to St. John of Damascus), reads the synaxarion of the kollyva miracle, blesses the boiled wheat, and distributes it — and the commemoration so begun is kept into the Saturday itself, the First Saturday of the Fast. It is a memorial enacted, not merely recited: the food of the miracle is itself blessed and eaten.

The Place in the Lenten Cycle

The commemoration’s force comes in part from its position in the Lenten cycle. It falls at the close of the first week of the Great Fast — the week of the strictest fasting, opened by Forgiveness Sunday and Clean Monday, in which the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete is read across the first four evenings (on the architecture of the Fast, see Great Lent). To keep, at the end of that austere first week, the memory of a saint who taught the faithful how to fast in purity — who preserved them from defiled food precisely during a Lenten fast — is liturgically apt: the First Saturday sets at the threshold of the long Fast a martyr who is its guardian, and a rite of blessed food that consoles and instructs the faithful as they enter the discipline (the Lenten Triodion, Saturday of the First Week; trans. Mother Mary and Ware 1978).

The commemoration is also poised on the eve of one of the great turning-points of the Lenten year. The day after the First Saturday is the First Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which celebrates the final restoration of the holy icons and the defeat of iconoclasm in 843 (on the events and their theology, see Icons and Iconoclasm). The proximity is not accidental in the experience of the worshipper: the memorial of the soldier-martyr and his deliverance of the people from the apostate’s defilement opens directly into the great festal commemoration of the Church’s triumph over heresy. The First Saturday and the Sunday of Orthodoxy together form the festal close of the first week of the Fast — a martyr’s memorial and a confessional triumph standing back to back, the one consoling the fasting faithful with blessed wheat, the other proclaiming the victory of the true faith they keep.

For all these reasons the commemoration of St. Theodore on the First Saturday, with the blessing of the kollyva, is among the most beloved of the Lenten observances — kept across the whole Orthodox world, in every jurisdiction and language, as a fixed point of the first week’s rhythm. It is one of the relatively few saintly commemorations that the movable Lenten cycle gives a place of its own, and it is kept not as an antiquarian recollection but as a living rite: the wheat is really boiled, really blessed, really shared. In this the cult of Theodore is unusual among the early martyrs — its devotional center of gravity lies not in a fixed feast-day or a relic-shrine but in an annual liturgical act that the whole Church performs together (cf. The Kollyva as Living Tradition).

Theodore Among the Lenten Saints

It is worth marking how singular this is. The other early warrior-martyrs — George, Demetrios, Procopius, Mercurius — are kept on their fixed feast-days and at their shrines, with great honor, but none of them is built into the movable architecture of the Great Fast (on the company, see Theodore Among the Military Martyrs). Theodore alone, among the soldier-saints, has a commemoration that every Orthodox Christian who keeps Lent necessarily encounters, year by year, in the first week — because it is appointed in the Triodion itself, the book of the movable Lenten services, and not merely in the menaion of the day. The Lenten Triodion in its standard English form (trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, 1978) prints the propers for the Saturday of the First Week, and it is from that book that the commemoration is kept in the English-speaking Orthodox churches today (the Lenten Triodion, Saturday of the First Week; trans. Mother Mary and Ware 1978).

The effect is that Theodore Tyro is, for most Orthodox Christians, primarily a Lenten saint — known less from his 17 February menaion-feast than from the First Saturday and its blessed wheat. The miracle and the rite have carried his name where the Passio and the shrine could not: into the annual experience of the Fast, kept by the whole Church. The historical and source-critical questions about the martyr — the firmness of the early cult, the lateness of the developed Passio, the doubling of the two Theodores — are taken up in their own sections; here the point is the liturgical fact, stated plainly: the commemoration of St. Theodore and the blessing of the kollyva fall on the First Saturday of Great Lent, kept at the Friday-evening Presanctified Liturgy of the first week, and it is among the most beloved observances of the whole Lenten season (the Lenten Triodion, Saturday of the First Week; trans. Mother Mary and Ware 1978).

See Also

References

  • Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Lenten Triodion. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. (The standard English Triodion; the propers, Canon, and synaxarion for the Saturday of the First Week of Great Lent, the commemoration of St. Theodore Tyro and the kollyva miracle; the structure of the first week, the Presanctified Liturgy, and the Sunday of Orthodoxy following.)
  • Gregory of Nyssa. On St. Theodore (De Sancto Theodoro). In Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 46, cols. 736–748. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1858. (The fourth-century witness to the soldier-martyr and his cult at Euchaita, behind the later commemoration.)
  • Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Paris: Picard, 1909. (The source-critical study of the military-saint legends, including the kollyva narrative and the two Theodores.)
  • Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (The cult of Theodore Tyro within the Byzantine veneration of the warrior-saints.)