Hermolaus of Nicomedia

Saint Hermolaus, hieromartyr, was a priest in Nicomedia and received the crown of martyrdom, with Hermippus and Hermocrates, in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian, in the year 305 (according to some accounts the persecution began in 304). He is known from the Life of Saint Panteleimon, whose teacher he was. He is commemorated on 26 July (8 August New Style) in the Orthodox Church, and on 27 July in the Roman Catholic Church.

Life

According to the Life of Saint Panteleimon, Hermolaus was a priest, while Hermippus and Hermocrates were clerics (in a later version, also priests) in Nicomedia. According to the Romanian account, the church of Nicomedia was burned by the pagan persecutors on the eve of Christmas of the year 304, and the roughly twenty thousand Christians of the city were killed; the Russian source gives only the persecution of 305. The priest Hermolaus, with Hermippus and Hermocrates, hid in a private house and continued to preach the Gospel to the pagans. Among those converted was the physician Pantoleon, the future Great Martyr Panteleimon.

Panteleimon was denounced by pagan physicians and arrested; he confessed that he was a Christian and, unable to lie, gave the name of the priest who had baptized him and the place where he was hiding. The aged Hermolaus was arrested, and he and his two assistants confessed that they were Christians and refused to worship the idols of the emperor Maximian, after which they were beheaded.

Depiction and relics

The Life says that Hermolaus taught Panteleimon the art of healing through faith. For this reason Hermolaus is often painted on icons with a physician's instruments in his hands and placed among the unmercenary physician martyrs, together with his disciple Panteleimon, Cosmas and Damian, and Cyrus and John. He is usually shown as a grey-⁠haired old man with a short beard, in priestly vestments or only in tunic and cloak, in churches of Cappadocia (among them Göreme), of Kastoria, of Sicily (the Martorana, the Palatine Chapel in Palermo, the cathedral of Monreale) and in the church of Saint Nicholas Orphanos in Thessalonica. His earliest depictions in Russia are the frescoes of Saint Sophia cathedral in Kyiv and of the Transfiguration church of the Euphrosyne monastery in Polotsk. Part of his relics is in the church of Saint Simeon in Venice, another part in the cathedral of Benevento.