Euprepius of Verona

Saint Euprepius (Euprepus, Puprepis) is venerated as the first bishop of Verona. Little is known of his life apart from the Greek name (from the Greek words eu, "well", and prepein, "suited"), which is considered evidence of the antiquity of the see of Verona. He is remembered on 21 August. Our sources show no Orthodox veneration, but a local one, in the Catholic Church at Verona, and do not agree on his time: from the first century to the third.

His time

According to the local tradition of Verona, he was one of the seventy disciples mentioned in the Gospel of Luke, but this opinion is "entirely unsubstantiated", and his name is not among the seventy in the second-⁠century list compiled by Hippolytus of Rome. Local tradition says he was bishop of Verona between 60 and 72 AD, and that his death took place at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second. A Russian source puts him as bishop between 236 and 250 and says he was of eastern origin. The Catholic Encyclopedia considers that his time, and so the founding of the see, cannot be placed before the peace given to the Church under Gallienus (260), but rather in the first period of the reign of Diocletian, when the Church enjoyed peace.

The sources

The poem "Versus de Verona" of Anno, bishop of Verona, of the ninth century, which speaks of the time in which Verona passed from paganism to Christianity, shows Euprepius as the first preacher in the pagan milieu. The poem also gives the list of the first eight bishops: Euprepius, Dimidrian (Demetrian), Simplicius, Proculus, Saturninus, Lucilius and Zeno, among others. He is known from two documents: this poem and the "Velo di Classe", an altar cloth from San Firmo e Rustico in Verona, of the end of the eighth century or the beginning of the ninth, which places him at the head of the list of the bishops of Verona. These two sources rest on older documents, lost. His commemoration in the calendar of Verona is on 21 August.

Veneration

His veneration did not become widespread until the fourteenth century. In 1492 his relics, with those of other bishop saints of Verona, were found again in the church of San Procolo. In 1806 they were moved to the ancient basilica of San Zeno, where an inscription on the altar shows them. In the sixteenth century Domenico Riccio (Brusasorci) painted a series of portraits of the bishops of Verona, from Euprepius to Cardinal Agostino Valerio, for the episcopal palace of Verona. Francis Turner Palgrave said in the nineteenth century that most of them are, of course, imaginary. In 1961 the Sacred Congregation of Rites, on the proposal of the bishop of Verona, Giuseppe Carraro, joined the bishop saints of Verona under a single day of commemoration (30 October), but the separate commemoration of Euprepius (21 August) was kept, because he was the first bishop of the city.