The Holy Martyrs Tigrius and Eutropius.

Commemorated June 16 in the Orthodox Christian Menaion

From the Prologue

They were both priests with St John Chrysostom. When evil men drove St John from Constantinople, the cathedral was set on fire, the flames from it rising high and failing upon the houses of those who were persecuting this light of the Church. The people saw the finger of God at work in this event, but St John's enemies blamed his followers for the fire. Many of them suffered because of this, including the priest Tigrius and the reader Eutroplus. The civil governor, an unbaptised Greek called Optatius, started a particularly venomous hunt for the followers of St John. Tigrius had been the slave of a rich man in his youth, and had been castrated. Set free from slavery, he had devoted himself entirely to the service of the Church and shone in that service like a ray of light. Optatius gave this 'meek, humble, merciful and hospitable' man over to vicious torture and then sent him into exile, to Mesopotamia, where he died while still in captivity. Eutropius, chaste and pure from his earliest youth, without vice or guile, was flogged with bull-whips and staves and finally hanged. When Christians took his body for burial, a melodious angelic chanting was heard in the sky above them.

From The Prologue From Ochrid by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich
©1985 Lazarica Press, Birmingham UK