Today is the feast of the Holy Priest-Martyr Clement, Bishop of Ankyr
Born in 258 in the city of Ankira, to a pagan father and a Christian mother. His pious mother Euphrosyne prophesied the martyrdom of her son and left this world when Clement was twelve years old. Her friend Sophia took Clement to her house as her own son and helped raise him in the Christian spirit. Clement was so famous for his virtuous life that he was elected Bishop of Ankara in his twenties. In his youth he acquired old age wisdom and with great restraint tamed and defeated his body. He ate only bread and cabbage and did not eat anything slaughtered or bloodied. In the time of Diocletian he was tortured so terribly "as no one has ever been since the beginning of the world." Twenty-eight years have passed in torment and imprisonment. He was harassed and tortured by eleven different torturers. Once they hit him in the face, spat on him and broke his teeth, he shouted to the tormentor Dometian: "You and I deserve it." When he was brought before the emperor Diocletian in Rome, the emperor placed on one side various instruments of torture, and on the other gifts, decorations, clothes, money - everything that an emperor could give, so he told Clement to choose. The martyr of Christ looked at the emperor's gifts with contempt and chose the means of torture. He was unspeakably tortured: piece by piece of meat was torn from his body, so that his bones could be seen under the meat. He was eventually killed by soldiers with a sword in 312 at a church in Ankira while serving as a hierarch in a liturgy. The miracles performed by St. Clement are innumerable.