Patrick, Bishop of Prusa

Patrick was bishop of Prusa in Bithynia in Asia Minor in the late second or early third century — a region whose hot mineral springs were sacred to the cult of Asklepios and which drew bathers from across the eastern empire. The synaxarion records that the proconsul of the province, a man named Julian, made a habit of summoning Patrick to the springs on his visits and demanding that the bishop offer sacrifice to the deities of the waters. Patrick refused, and instead — when Julian demanded an explanation for the hot springs themselves — gave the proconsul a long discourse on the works of providence, the creation of all things by the Word of God, and the reservation of the fire of judgment in the deep places of the earth.

Julian ordered Patrick cast into the hot springs themselves to see whether his God would deliver him; the synaxarion records that the bishop emerged unscalded. After this and other torments — including the killing of three of his presbyters, Acacius, Menander, and Polyaenus, alongside him — Patrick was beheaded outside the city around the year 200.

The Orthodox Church keeps his feast, together with that of his three presbyters, on May 19. The hot springs of Prusa, today Bursa in Turkey, were a place of Christian pilgrimage for many centuries afterward.