Saint Eulogius the Hospitable of Constantinople

Eulogius the Hospitable was a poor stonecutter of the Thebaid in Egypt, remembered for the hospitality he showed to strangers and pilgrims. By tradition he labored at quarrying from his youth, earning only a small daily wage, yet he was called the receiver of strangers because his chief concern each evening, once his work was done, was to seek out travelers who had nowhere to stay and bring them into his home for food and shelter. The synaxarion relates that in winter he would go through the marketplace carrying a lantern, searching for any newcomer left without lodging.

His life is preserved chiefly through the desert tradition associated with Abba Daniel of Scetis, who was moved by Eulogius's hospitality and, the account relates, took the stonecutter's welfare upon himself, fasting and praying that he might be granted greater means to help still more people. According to this tradition Eulogius then uncovered a hidden hoard of money while cutting stone and carried it secretly to Constantinople, where he rose to a position of rank and wealth. The sudden prosperity tested and nearly overcame the hospitality that had defined him, for absorbed in his new station he forgot the strangers he had once served.

The same tradition relates that his fortunes turned: implicated in political troubles at the capital, he lost his standing and returned to his village and to his stonecutting, recovering by degrees the simple and charitable way of life he had abandoned. He is said to have lived more than a hundred years before reposing in peace. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on April 27. His dating is uncertain; the desert sources that preserve his memory place his later life in the reigns of the emperors Justin and Justinian in the sixth century.