From the Prologue of Ochrid
They were Christians from Persia; they suffered in the time of King Sapor (Shapur) in the year 355. The first three were servants at the court of that same king, but secretly they served Christ their Lord. When they were accused and brought to trial before the king, the king asked them, whence were they? To this they replied: "Our homeland and our life is the Most Holy Trinity, consubstantial and undivided, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, one God." The king subjected them to great torments, but they endured all heroically with psalmody and prayer on their lips. During their torture and imprisonment, the angels of God appeared to them many times, and once the Lord Christ Himself appeared as a man "with a face bright as the sun." When one of the torturers, Aphthonius, saw the miracle of how boiling lead did not harm the martyrs, he believed in Christ and cried out: "Great is the God of the Christians!" For this he was immediately beheaded. And many others saw and believed. Then the king commanded that Acindynus, Pegasius, and Anempodistus be sewn into leather sacks and cast into the sea. But Saint Aphthonius appeared from the other world with three bright angels, brought the holy martyrs to dry land, and freed them. Elpidephorus was a nobleman of the king. When he declared that he was a Christian and reproached the king for killing innocent Christians, the king condemned him to death. And Elpidephorus was beheaded along with about seven thousand other Christians with him. And those first three martyrs were finally cast into a fiery furnace with twenty-eight soldiers and with the king's mother, after these also believed in Christ; and thus in the flames they committed their righteous souls into the hands of their Lord.
