The Anargyroi ("without silver") — the physician- and healer-saints who took no payment for their care, headed by Cosmas and Damian and the Great Martyr Panteleimon. An open synaxis: each is commemorated on his own day, and all are honored together on October 17 in Greek practice and on the Sunday after November 1 in Slavic practice.
The Holy Unmercenaries — in Greek the Anargyroi, "those without silver" — are the saints who healed and served the suffering without accepting payment for it. Their charity was not merely free of charge but deliberately free of profit: they asked nothing of those they treated except faith in Christ, by whose grace they understood every cure to come. The Church honors them together as a company of mercy, and traditionally numbers them at twenty, or twenty-one when Saint Photios is counted among them.
Foremost among them are the three pairs of brothers named Cosmas and Damian — of Asia, of Rome, and of Arabia — together with Cyrus and John, and the Great Martyr Panteleimon, the court physician of Nicomedia who gave away his inheritance and treated the poor and imprisoned for nothing. With them are numbered Sampson the Hospitable, who turned his house into a hospital; Thallelaios, martyred at Aegae while still a young physician; Diomedes, Julian of Emesa, Tryphon, Mokios, Anicetus and Photius, and Hermolaus, the priest who taught Panteleimon that the greater medicine is Christ.
Each keeps his own day, and all are honored together — on October 17 in Greek practice, and on the Sunday after November 1 in Slavic practice. This is an open synaxis: the Church has never closed the roll of those who heal without price, and later traditions number their own among the Unmercenaries.
The Greek anargyros joins the negative an- to argyros, silver — a saint "without silver." The name marks not poverty but refusal: these saints could have been paid and would not be. The synaxarion tradition remembers Tryphon asking of those he healed one thing only, faith in Jesus Christ, and Panteleimon freeing his household's slaves and spending his inherited fortune on the poor, the sick, and Christians in prison. Payment refused is the thread that gathers them.
The company is defined liturgically rather than biographically. Its members are those invoked together with the Unmercenaries in the prayers of the Mystery of Holy Unction and the Great Sanctification of the Waters — and several of them never practiced medicine at all. Anicetus was a military official of Nicomedia and Photius his nephew; Mokios was a presbyter of Amphipolis who preached against idolatry; Hermolaus was the priest who baptized Panteleimon and taught him to heal in the name of Christ rather than by the art alone. They are Unmercenaries because the Church prays to them as such, asking healing through them freely given.
This is worth stating plainly, because a reader who expects every Unmercenary to have been a doctor will find several of them puzzling. The category is about mercy without price, not about a profession.
The Greek enumeration of twenty (twenty-one with Photios) is the one kept at the October 17 synaxis. Other traditions honor their own unmercenaries alongside it — the Slavic churches number among them Agapitus of the Kiev Caves, the physician-monk who took nothing for his cures, and later figures still. The lists differ; the pattern does not.