LIVES OF THE SAINTS

a true warrior of God

Kontakion of St. Phanourios

St. Phanourios

Saint Phanourios is a saint the Church knows almost entirely from a painting, and that is the wonder of him. Around the year 1500, while the island of Rhodes lay under Muslim rule, workers clearing the ruins of an old church uncovered an icon in remarkably good condition. It showed a young soldier holding a lit candle, and ringed around him were small scenes of a man being seized, tortured, and put to death for his faith. No one knew who he was. But the icon carried his name, and the scenes told his passion, and so the Church received in a single moment both a martyr and the story of his martyrdom, recovered whole from the ground after centuries of being lost. They named him Phanourios, from the Greek for to reveal, and called him the Newly Revealed.

What happened next is one of the gentlest customs in the Orthodox year. Because Phanourios had himself been lost and then found, people began to ask his prayers when they had lost something of their own, and he answered so readily that a tradition grew up around the asking. When you pray to Saint Phanourios for what is lost, you promise, if you find it, to bake a Fanouropita, a simple sweet cake, and give it away, and to ask in return that God have mercy on the soul of the saint's mother, whom tradition remembers as a hard woman in need of prayers. So the whole practice turns outward: you lose your keys, you ask a saint, you find them, and your thanksgiving is a cake shared with neighbors and a prayer said for someone else.

It would be easy to make him only the patron of misplaced keys, but the scenes on his icon will not allow it. They show a young man enduring real torment and dying for Christ, and the hymns of his feast keep that suffering in full view, picturing heaven and earth keeping the festival together, the angels praising his struggles while the Church below praises the glory he won by them. He is a Great Martyr, and the lightness of the cake rests on something serious.

What endures in his story is what it says about the memory of God. A man can be wholly forgotten by history, his name and his deeds erased, and still be fully known to heaven, and given back to the Church when God chooses, at the moment it most needs the encouragement. His feast, at the very end of August, is a good day to look for what has gone missing, in the drawer or in the soul, and to trust that the looking is not wasted.