About our Monastery
You can learn more about our monastery at our website www.thehtm.org, and see our handicrafts by which we support ourselves at www.bostonmonks.com, and you can learn about a few of our publications at www.htmp.org.
About this Website
This website was conceived to meet a number of needs.
First, after printing many short lives of Saints in our Great Horologion, then printing the Commemoration Cards that list the Feasts and Saints celebrated on each day of the Synaxarion of our Menaion, and finally printing a complete Index of all the Feasts and Saints that are included in the Synaxarion of our Menaion (the Index is at the end of the August volume, and includes over 250 more Saints or groups of Saints than the Index at the back of the Great Horologion) a website dedicated to the Feasts and Saints of the liturgical year seemed to be the perfect place to bring together the lives of the Saints, the listings of the Saints commemorated each day, and a complete index of them all, as a help in daily commemorating the Saints and learning more about them.
Furthermore, over the years many of the faithful who buy our icons have asked us if we could include short lives of the Saints on the icons, either by printing them on laser-labels to be stuck on the backs of the icons, or as accompanying pamphlets or a whole book with all the lives. As appealing as this might be, it has never been a practical possibility. But it occurred to us that if we set up a website that provides a short account or life for each Saint for whom an icon is offered at www.bostonmonks.com, this long-standing request from so many people would become easy to fulfill. It is our goal eventually to have an account on this website to explain every icon on www.bostonmonks.com, with a link from there to this website for those wishing to know more about each icon.
Perhaps most important of all, in the course of researching the lives of the Saints for the Index of the Great Horologion, we were compelled to consult a wide array of hagiographical sources. In doing so we came to know much more about many Saints not already in our Synaxarion, which resulted in adding the 250 Saints mentioned above to our Menaion. One work that has given us a great deal of pleasure is Holweck’s Biographical Dictionary of the Saints, and it has only been with reluctance and regret that we have admitted to ourselves that we will never have the time to compile such a dictionary, or a single comprehensive one-volume reference, for Orthodox Christians to be able to learn more about all the Saints that we know of, or at least that are commemorated in our Synaxarion. But if it is beyond our means to produce such a work as a printed book, the flexibility of a website gives us the opportunity to start somewhere and to continue adding to it as time allows. Therefore we have begun by including here all the accounts that were given in the Great Horologion, and have already supplemented some of those acccounts with more information, and have also begun adding to them the accounts of many of the Saints whose icons we have at www.bostonmonks.com, and also of Saints of whom we have no icon. We hope, as we said above, to continue adding lives until we have covered all the Saints on our webstore; then, all that will be left to do, with the Lord’s help, is to add the lives of all the others.
Copyright © 2016, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Brookline, MA, all rights reserved.
All reproduction of texts or icons on this website in any form
without prior written permission is forbidden.