Feast Day: March 29 Canonized: Pre-Congregation — venerated from early centuries; feast in the Roman Martyrology Order / Vocation: Lay martyrs — Christians of Nicomedia Patron of: Those martyred in pairs · The Church of Nicomedia · Christians under Roman persecution
Nicomedia and the Blood It Drank
Nicomedia — modern Δ°zmit in northwestern Turkey, on the eastern shore of the Sea of Marmara — was, in the third and fourth centuries, one of the most significant cities in the Roman Empire. Diocletian had made it the administrative capital of the Eastern empire, and the palace he built there was the center of Roman imperial power in the East for a generation. It was also the city where the Great Persecution began: on February 23, 303, the Great Church of Nicomedia was demolished by imperial troops on Diocletian's order, the opening act of the most systematic anti-Christian campaign in Roman history.
The martyrological record of Nicomedia in the period of the persecutions is enormous. The Roman Martyrology lists dozens of martyrs from that city across the years of persecution, representing every rank of the Christian community: clergy, laity, men, women, the elderly, the young. Pastor and Victorinus are two of them. Their names alone survive. No details of their arrests, their trials, the charges against them, or the manner of their deaths are preserved in the sources. What is preserved is their place and their faith and the fact of their dying for it.
They are for the vast company of the Church's anonymous martyrs — anonymous in the sense that history has kept only their names, not their stories. Two people died in Nicomedia for being Christian. The Church has kept their feast for sixteen centuries. God has kept everything else.
Prayer to Saints Pastor and Victorinus
O God, who received Saints Pastor and Victorinus into Your presence in the city that was the capital of the empire that was trying to destroy Your Church, and whose names You have kept in the calendar for sixteen centuries while their stories were lost, grant through their intercession that we may be faithful as they were faithful, and that the brevity of what history remembers about a life may never be confused with the brevity of what You remember. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saints Pastor and Victorinus of Nicomedia, pray for us.
| Born | Unknown — Nicomedia, Bithynia (present-day Δ°zmit, Turkey) |
| Died | Unknown — Nicomedia — martyrdom |
| Feast Day | March 29 |
| Order / Vocation | Lay martyrs — Christians of Nicomedia |
| Canonized | Pre-Congregation — Roman Martyrology |
| Patron of | Those martyred in pairs · The Church of Nicomedia |
| Known as | Martyrs of Nicomedia (Pastor and Victorinus) |
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