Holy Apostle Andrew

Andrew was born at Bethsaida of Galilee, the son of Jonas and the elder brother of Simon Peter, and worked with his brother as a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee. He was a disciple of John the Baptist when, on the day after John pointed out the Lord as the Lamb of God, Andrew and another disciple turned and followed Jesus. He was the first of the Twelve to confess him, and the first thing he did afterwards was to find his brother and bring him.

He travelled with the Lord through the years of the Galilean ministry and was numbered among the Twelve. After Pentecost the tradition sends him on the longest northern missionary route of any of the apostles: along the coasts of Asia Minor, into Scythia and the lands beyond the Black Sea, into Thrace and Macedonia, and most famously to Byzantium, where he ordained Stachys as the first bishop of the see that became the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

He ended his preaching at Patras in Achaia, in southern Greece, where he had converted a great multitude including the wife and brother of the proconsul Aegeates. The proconsul condemned him to crucifixion, and the oldest accounts relate that he was bound, not nailed, to a cross of the saltire form so that his suffering would be longer. He hung on it for two days, preaching to the people from the cross, and reposed on the thirtieth of November around the year sixty.

His relics were translated to Constantinople in 357 by the emperor Constantius II and laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles. Portions were taken west to Amalfi in Italy, and the skull was returned by Pope Paul VI to Patras in 1964. He is honored as the patron of Russia, of Romania, of Scotland, and of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which keeps his feast as its great feast of thanksgiving.