Thalelaeus

Saint Thalelaeus the Martyr was a physician and a martyr of the Church, who suffered for Christ in the time of the emperor Numerian, in the third century. He was from Aegae, in Cilicia. The Church commemorates him on 20 May by the old calendar (2 June on the new style).

His father was named Verucius and his mother Romilia. He suffered for Christ in his eighteenth year. When he confessed his faith in Christ before the tormentor judge, the judge ordered two executioners, Alexander and Asterius, to bore through his knees with a drill, to pass a rope through the pierced bones and to hang him from a tree. Christian tradition tells that an invisible power of God took away the sight of the executioners, so that instead of Thalelaeus they pierced a plank and hung it from the tree. When the tormentor learned of it, he thought they had done this on purpose and ordered them to be beaten. Then Alexander and Asterius cried out: “As the Lord lives, from now on we too become Christians, we believe in Christ and suffer for Him.” Hearing this, the tormentor ordered them to be cut down with the sword.

The tradition goes on to say that the tormentor himself took the drill to pierce Thalelaeus's knees, but his hands withered and he had to beg Thalelaeus to save him, which the saint did. It is also told that he was thrown into the water but appeared alive before the tormentor, and when he was thrown to wild beasts, the beasts licked his feet and fawned around him. In the end he was cut down with the sword, in the year 284.