Hieromartyr Athenogoras, Bishop of Heracleopolis, and his 10 Disciples

Athenogenes was a bishop who lived with ten disciples in a small monastery near the village of Pedachthoe, not far from Sebasteia in Armenia. During the persecution under Diocletian the governor Philomarchus had the disciples arrested while the bishop was away. Athenogenes returned and went to the city to join them, and, according to the Passion, comforted them in prison the night before.

The ten were tied to an oak, beaten, and beheaded. Athenogenes was hung from a tree and beaten, and then he too was beheaded. The Passion says that before his death he prayed for the people. The Church remembers them c. 311.