Bishop Sadok (Shadust), Bishop of Persia

The Hieromartyr Sadok (Shadust) succeeded Hieromartyr Simeon bar Sabbae in the see of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. According to tradition, he received a vision of St. Simeon summoning him to martyrdom: "Ascend to me, Sadok... I ascended yesterday, and you ascend today."

During the persecution of the Persian King Shapur II around 342, he was seized together with 128 fellow sufferers (among them nine virgins). He spent five months in a dark, foul-smelling dungeon, subjected to whipping and having his bones broken to force him to renounce Christ and worship the sun and fire; the saint invariably answered, "We are Christians and worship the One God." He was brought to the city of Beth Lapat and beheaded.

IMPORTANT CORRECTION ON THE COMMEMORATION DATE: the original stub gave a date of "April 20 (May 3)," which finds no confirmation in any source checked. Independent sources (drevo-info.ru, days.pravoslavie.ru, obitel-minsk.ru) uniformly give the commemoration as February 20/March 5 and October 19/November 1 — these two dates have been established as correct.

IMPORTANT IMAGE WARNING: the existing black-and-white photograph of a young priest with a pectoral cross and prayer rope is anachronistic and stylistically entirely inconsistent with a 4th-century Persian bishop (many centuries before the invention of photography) — it is almost certainly a mismatched portrait of an unidentified 19th-20th century Russian clergyman, unrelated to Hieromartyr Sadok.