Danax of Illyria

Saint Danax the Martyr was a reader in the church of Aulon in Illyria (today Vlorë, in Albania) and died at the hands of pagans for his faith. The Church remembers him on 16 January.

Short lives of him are preserved in the Synaxarion of the Church of Constantinople, from the end of the tenth century, and in the Menologion of Emperor Basil II. According to these sources Danax served as a reader in one of the churches of the city of Aulon. During a persecution of the Christians, wishing to keep the church vessels from desecration, he hid in a place hard to find, five miles from the city toward the sea.

The pagans discovered the place and tried to force him to sacrifice to Dionysus, the god of wine. Danax refused, and was killed with the sword, and his body was thrown into the sea. The early synaxaria do not say when he suffered, but Dimitry of Rostov, in his Lives of the Saints, places it in the second century.

The Catholic tradition remembers him under the same name, with a similar story, but in the ninth century. According to it, he was likewise a native of Aulon and served as deacon at the shrine of Santa Maria di Leuca in Apulia, in southern Italy. During a Saracen attack on the shrine he took the pyx with the Holy Eucharist and tried to find shelter, but was killed on the way, five miles from the place, in the district of La Mora. Before his death he is said to have managed to destroy the church vessels so that they would not be profaned. At the place of his supposed death, some two hundred metres from the village that bears his name, Montesardo, stands a marble stele.