favorite lesser-known saints (Orthodox version)

[archer75]

Who's your favorite lesser-known saint, and why?

 

[All4Christ]

St Laura of Córdoba (my avatar is a photo of her icon)

 

[archer75]

St Laura of Córdoba (my avatar is a photo of her icon)

Thanks! What do you like about her?

 

[Chesterton]

Saint Frithuswith, Old English: Friðuswīþ; also known as Frideswide, Frideswith, Fritheswithe, Frevisse, Fritha or Fris. She's the saint of someone I care about very much, and I named my new puppy Fritha.

 

[All4Christ]

Thanks! What do you like about her?

Honestly, it started with me finding a Saint with my name

I love that she is a Western saint who is Orthodox, and I also like knowing that there are many saints that aren’t as well known. She was an abbess who was martyred with the Moorish invasion. She intercedes for me - and i am thankful for that I do wish that we knew more about her life though!

 

[gzt]

St Gorazd of Prague is pretty cool.

http://byztex.blogspot.com/2014/09/not-often-you-see-nazi-serpent-in-icon.html

 

[ArmyMatt]

St Ahmed the calligrapher

 

[~Anastasia~]

It seems like every time I stumble across one unknown to me and develop a great admiration for them, I later find out they are well known to some Orthodox group somewhere. If I remember any that are not, I'll post again.

 

[FenderTL5]

Maybe I could name some of the lesser known saints, if they were a little more well-known.

 

[FenderTL5]

It seems like every time I stumble across one unknown to me and develop a great admiration for them, I later find out they are well known to some Orthodox group somewhere. If I remember any that are not, I'll post again.

I have this bookmark sized icon, that was given to me during Clergy-Laity in Nashville a couple years ago . I tucked it in the edge of a picture frame sitting on the table. After a while, I flipped it over to see who it was that had been praying with me for the last year or so. It turned out to be Saint Herman of Alaska.

 

[~Anastasia~]

I have this bookmark sized icon, that was given to me during Clergy-Laity in Nashville a couple years ago . I tucked it in the edge of a picture frame sitting on the table. After a while, I flipped it over to see who it was that had been praying with me for the last year or so. It turned out to be Saint Herman of Alaska.

Maybe my criteria of "lesser known" is wrong. I've asked before about this one or that one and no one knew who they were. But I've found there seems to be pockets of particular devotion, and I always (eventually) seem to find pockets devoted to any particular Saint. Or maybe I just don't dig deeply enough to develop a real affinity to anyone unknown.

But I think mostly I just encountered them randomly and then later discovered that if I had been more widely read, I'd have known them. Like St. Nikolai Velimirovich or St. Irene Chrystovalou. Even much lesser well-known ones than that seem to be widely honored.

 

[All4Christ]

I think a lot of Western saints are not as well known, especially the massive amount of martyrs from some of the invasions and persecutions. The big ones are known - and there are lists of western saints, but often the information about them is rather lacking.

 

[ArmyMatt]

recently glorified St Sebastian Dabovitch is awesome too.

 

[FenderTL5]

Maybe my criteria of "lesser known" is wrong..

You probably have it right.
I likely misled, I wasn't implying that Saint Herman is lesser known, just that your comment reminded me of how I 'discovered' him.

 

[archer75]

Well, for example, St. John Chrysostom would be reasonably well-known...

 

[Barney2.0]

St John of Damascus, whose in my profile and whose name I think I might adopt.

 

[All4Christ]

St John of Damascus, whose in my profile and whose name I think I might adopt.

One of the great theologians of the Church

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

One of my favorites is St. Euphemia the All-Praised. Amazing.

 

[archer75]

Cool responses, all.

@~Anastasia~ , I'm afraid I haven't been around enough to learn of pockets of devotion to anyone! That is an interesting phenomenon....

 

[dzheremi]

Honestly, it started with me finding a Saint with my name

I love that she is a Western saint who is Orthodox, and I also like knowing that there are many saints that aren’t as well known. She was an abbess who was martyred with the Moorish invasion. She intercedes for me - and i am thankful for that I do wish that we knew more about her life though!

Can you understand Spanish? There is a little bit more about her life in Spanish, I think. This video, which seems to just be a monsignor reading from some form of synaxarium (since it's the exact same words you can find in several different books and websites), mentions that the man she was married to was an official in the independent Cordoban emirate (not sure what that means, really...was he a Muslim? A covert Christian? I don't know what the religious qualifications were to work in the government at that time), and also that she continued to sing prayers and praises from her monastic life even as she was in agony from the boiling lead.

I have read about her because of particular interest in the martyrs of the Iberian Peninsula, since that's where my dad's family ultimately came from (Portugal, though, not Spain), so when I was still Roman Catholic I read a lot about those saints. I still hold them all in very high esteem. The resistance to the Muslims was so great that there was a certain fashion at one time that the Christians would go into the public square or even sometimes to the court and begin speaking 'blasphemies' against Muhammad's person and religion, because it was known that this would bring a death sentence. The academic debate is whether or not this really counts as martyrdom, but that's beside the point to me. It is like the Zaporozhian Cossacks' reply to the Turkish Sultan, you know? Take your religion and go home. Nobody wants it here. Sure, it's crude, but then so is the Shari'a and everything else in Mohammadanism, so at least it speaks to them at their level.