Anastasia the Patrician
Our Venerable Mother Anastasia the Patrician of Alexandria
Venerable · b. c. 510, at Constantinople — d. c. 567–576, at Scetis in Egypt
Commemorated 10 March — Repose at Scetis
Anastasia the Patrician (c. 510 – c. 567) was a noblewoman of Constantinople, of patrician rank and great beauty, esteemed at the court of the emperor Justinian. When the emperor's marked favour toward her stirred the jealousy of the empress Theodora, Anastasia — desiring neither the court nor its perils to her soul — secretly left the capital, sailed to Alexandria, and founded a monastery outside the city, where she lived in ascesis. After Theodora's death, learning that Justinian was again seeking her, she fled to the desert of Scetis and cast herself on the great elder Abba Daniel, who clothed her in a monk's habit, gave her the name Anastasius the eunuch, and enclosed her in a distant cave. There, unknown to all as a woman, she lived twenty-eight years in silence and prayer, a disciple leaving water at her door once a week, until her death revealed her secret to none but Daniel. She is commemorated on March 10.
The lady of the imperial city
Anastasia belonged to the patrician order of Constantinople — the highest rank of the Byzantine aristocracy — and the tradition remembers her as a woman of noble birth, wealth, and beauty, and, above these, of piety and chastity of life. In the reign of the emperor Justinian (527–565) she stood high in the esteem of the court. The account of her life, preserved in the cycle of stories attached to the name of Abba Daniel of Scetis, holds that the emperor conceived a particular regard for her — whether a wish to honour her or something the empress took for more — and that this favour roused the jealousy and displeasure of the empress Theodora. Anastasia, seeing herself become, through no fault of her own, a cause of trouble in the palace and a danger to her own soul, resolved to escape both the emperor's attentions and the empress's enmity by removing herself altogether from the world.
Flight to Alexandria
Secretly, then, and telling no one, Anastasia left Constantinople and took ship for Alexandria. A little way outside the city she built for herself a small monastery — the tradition later knew it as "the convent of the Patrician," at the Fifth Milestone (Pempton) from Alexandria — and there she settled to a hidden life of prayer and asceticism, having laid down her rank and her wealth. For some years she lived so, unmolested and unknown.
But the world she had fled had not forgotten her. After the death of the empress Theodora (548), the emperor Justinian — the account says — sought again to find Anastasia and to bring her back, and sent men to look for her. Word of the search reached her at Alexandria, and she understood that even in her monastery she was not hidden enough. Rather than be found and drawn back to the court, she determined on a more total disappearance: she would go where no one would think to seek a patrician lady, into the desert itself.
Abba Daniel and the cave
Anastasia fled by night to Scetis, the great monastic wilderness south-west of the Delta, and cast herself upon Abba Daniel, the renowned elder and priest of that desert, telling him her whole story and begging his protection. Daniel, a man of discernment, saw both her danger and her resolve. He clothed her in the habit of a monk, gave her a man's name — she was to be known only as "Anastasius the eunuch," a beardless brother whose smoothness of face would raise no question — and led her to a cave at a distance from the lavra (the tradition says some eighteen miles off), where he enclosed her as a recluse.
The arrangement Daniel made kept her secret perfectly. Once a week he sent a disciple with a small jar of water, which the brother was to set down at the mouth of the cave, knock, take away the empty vessel, and depart without seeing or speaking with the recluse; Anastasia for her part never opened to him, but left her answer, when one was needed, written on a potsherd at the door. So she lived — in unbroken silence, fasting, weeping, and prayer, seeing no human face — and so she remained undiscovered, as a woman, for twenty-eight years.
Repose and the revealing of her secret
When at last her end drew near, Anastasia wrote upon a potsherd a few words to Abba Daniel, asking him to come to her before she died. God revealed her passing to the elder; taking the disciple and the vessels for the Liturgy, Daniel went to the cave, gave her the Holy Mysteries of the Body and Blood of Christ, received her last words, and she reposed in peace. It was only then, as the two monks prepared the body for burial, that the disciple discovered that "Anastasius the eunuch" was a woman — and Daniel, to quiet the young monk's amazement, told him who she had been: the patrician of Constantinople whom the emperor had sought, who for twenty-eight years had been hidden in the desert under a man's name and habit. They buried her in the cave where she had struggled. Her death is placed about the year 567 (some reckonings 576).
Feast and commemoration
Anastasia the Patrician is kept on March 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil March 23), styled in the Greek Menaion "our venerable Mother Anastasia the Patrician" (Ὁσία Μήτηρ ἡμῶν Ἀναστασία ἡ Πατρικία). Because the church date falls, in most years, within Great Lent, no proper Epistle and Gospel are appointed, and her commemoration is kept at the Lenten services. She belongs to the small and much-loved company of holy women who concealed themselves as men in the monasteries — with Theodora of Alexandria, Euphrosyne of Alexandria, Matrona of Constantinople, Mary called Marinos, and others — whose lives the Church reads as parables of the ascetic struggle carried to its furthest hiddenness.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O Mother, was the image faithfully preserved; for taking up thy cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Therefore doth thy spirit, O venerable Anastasia, rejoice together with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Anastasia the Patrician is depicted as a woman ascetic in the dark monastic schema — thin and worn with fasting, the face aged, the hands raised in prayer or holding a scroll — in the manner of the desert mothers. Because her secret was that she lived and died as the monk "Anastasius," the iconographic tradition is slender and her image is not among the common types; where she is shown, it is as a venerable nun, sometimes at the mouth of her cave, or receiving the Holy Mysteries from Abba Daniel at her death. No pre-modern image of Anastasia the Patrician suitable for storage has been identified; the entry carries a written description in place of a stored icon.
Disputed questions
- Two dates for her repose. The witnesses give her death about 567 and about 576; the difference turns on the chronology of the Daniel of Scetis cycle and cannot be resolved, so the year is given as "c. 567–576."
- The historical kernel. Anastasia's life belongs to the hagiographic cycle of Abba Daniel of Scetis, a collection of desert stories of high spiritual value whose historical detail — the emperor's regard, the empress's jealousy — is transmitted as edifying narrative rather than as court record. The reference keeps the tradition as the Church has received it, without pressing its particulars as documented history.
- Not to be confused with two other saints of the name kept elsewhere in the calendar: Anastasia the Deliverer-from-Bonds (the great-martyr Pharmakolytria of Sirmium, †c. 304, kept December 22), and Anastasia the Roman (the virgin and venerable-martyr, †c. 256, kept October 29) — both of them martyrs of the early persecutions, whereas Anastasia the Patrician is a venerable ascetic of the sixth century who died in peace.