Saints of Greece
The saints are an important part of the Greek Orthodox church and faith. All baptised Greeks are named after a saint, and so the name day is celebrated rather than the birthday.
The saints are divided into six main categories: 1) The Apostles 2) The Prophets 3) The Martyrs 4) The Fathers & Hierarchs 5) The Monastics 6) The Just. In Iconography they are usually dressed accordingly.
Hagiology (the study of saints) is the branch of the Orthodox Greek theology that studies the lives of saints. The study in addition to being a kind of catechism of Christians, is also offered for research on topics related to theology, history, politics and society and culture of the time that lived the saints under study.
Such texts were one of the most important and popular types of Byzantine literature as it was at the forefront of the preferences of the public of all classes and social strata. The most important are written in the 4th-5th and 14th century, while many hagiological texts are observed from the 9th to the 11th century.
The importance of hagiology as a science lies in the fact that it offers an inexhaustible wealth of historical information about the public and private life of their time. Modern science, however, now evaluates the hagiological literature on multiple levels beyond that of the historical source.
Below is a list of saints that are venerated in the Greek Orthodox religion, and you can read about who they were. Perhaps you are named after one of them…To find out what their names are in Greek, please look at the page Greek Name days.
