Anna and John of Constantinople

The deacon's daughter of the Blachernae

Anna was born at Constantinople in the later eighth or very early ninth century, the daughter of a deacon serving at the church of the Most Holy Theotokos at the Blachernae — the great Marian shrine at the north-western corner of the city, by the walls and the Golden Horn, where the robe of the Mother of God was kept and where the Akathist had been sung in thanksgiving for the deliverance of the city. To be the child of a clergyman of the Blachernae was to be raised at the devotional centre of Byzantine Constantinople, and the accounts assume without saying it that her formation was there.

She was married, and bore a son, John. Of her husband nothing is transmitted but his death: she was left a widow, and young enough that the ordinary Byzantine expectation would have been a second marriage. Instead she chose the monastic life; and because she had a young son to keep with her, and because a woman travelling alone through the provinces was neither safe nor unremarkable, she chose it in the manner that a handful of Byzantine holy women before her had chosen it.

Euthymianus

She cut her hair, dressed as a man, and called herself Euthymianus; and in that name and habit she and her son crossed the Propontis into Bithynia, to the monasteries of Mount Olympus — the wooded massif inland from Prusa (Bursa) that was in the ninth century the foremost monastic mountain of the Byzantine world, the Athos of its age, and the home of Joannicius the Great and Peter of Atroa. There the two were received into one of the houses of the mountain and lived, the sources say simply, in asceticism — the mother as a monk among monks, the boy as her son.

The narrative that has come down is bare of incident: no miracle, no confessorship, no recorded conflict. What the tradition preserves is the fact of the concealment and the fact of the perseverance. Whether the disguise was discovered in her lifetime is not transmitted; in the parallel lives it usually is, at or after death, and that discovery is the point at which those stories turn. Here the calendars record only that mother and son lived out their asceticism together.

The company of the hidden women

Anna's life takes its meaning from a recognisable Byzantine pattern, and the calendars place her in it deliberately. The same tradition includes Matrona of Constantinople, who fled a violent husband into the monastery of Bassianus as the eunuch "Babylas"; Euphrosyne of Alexandria, who lived thirty-eight years as the monk "Smaragdus"; Theodora of Alexandria, who bore a false accusation as the monk "Theodore"; and Pelagia the Penitent, the actress who died as the "beardless monk Pelagius" in a cell on the Mount of Olives. What distinguishes Anna from all of them is the child: the others fled marriage, or the world, or a past; Anna took her son with her, and the two are commemorated as a pair. The Church's willingness to keep such a memory — a woman in a man's habit in a man's monastery, with her boy — is itself part of what the commemoration says.

Return and repose

At some point, after her years on Olympus, Anna came back to Constantinople, and it was there that she died, in the year 826. The year sets her repose in the reign of Michael II and in the second period of iconoclasm, when the monasteries of Olympus were centres of resistance to the imperial policy on the holy images; the sources make no claim that Anna suffered for the icons, and none is made here. Her son John's year of repose is not transmitted, nor the place; the calendars name him only as her son and commemorate him with her.