St. Menas the Great Martyr (d. c. 304)

An Egyptian, born to pagan parents in the middle of the third century and a Christian from his youth, who served with distinction in the Roman cavalry. When Diocletian and Maximian ordered the persecution he laid down his command and withdrew to live as an ascetic; at about fifty he came down into the city on a pagan feast day, confessed Christ before the crowd, and was imprisoned, tortured and beheaded, about 304, at Cotyaeum in Phrygia by the Greek synaxarion. His body was carried home to Egypt, and his shrine at Abu Mena, west of Alexandria, became one of the great pilgrimages of the ancient world, its little clay flasks of oil taken home all round the Mediterranean. The Patriarchate of Alexandria keeps him as its own, and Heraklion in Crete as its patron since the Easter of 1826, when the city’s Christians believed he saved them. Feast: November 11.