Christina of Tyre
The Holy Great Martyr Christina of Tyre
Great Martyr · Virgin · d. c. 300
Commemorated 24 July — Martyrdom under three successive governors at Tyre
Christina was, the Greek passion says, the daughter of Urban, the Roman governor of Tyre in Phoenicia, and was shut up by him at the age of eleven in a tower full of gold and silver idols so that she might be reared as a pagan priestess. Alone among the images, looking out at the stars, she reasoned her way to the one Creator who had made them; an angel came to her, taught her the faith and named her a bride of Christ, and she broke every idol in the tower and threw the pieces from the window. Her father tortured her and died in the night; two more governors, Dion and Julian, took up the case and used the wheel, the sea, the furnace, the serpents and the sword, and were defeated in turn — some three hundred of the onlookers are said to have believed. She was killed at last by the sword about the year 300, still a girl. The Greek Church honours her as a Great Martyr; the Latin West keeps the same day for Christina of Bolsena, and whether these are one saint or two is the oldest question in her dossier.
The tower of idols
Every version of the passion opens the same way. Urban, governor of the great Phoenician port of Tyre, had a daughter of extraordinary beauty, and by the age of eleven she was already being sought in marriage by the first men of the province. Her father intended something else for her. He would not give her to a husband; he would give her to the gods. He built or set apart a tower, furnished it with images of gold and silver, appointed serving-maids to attend her, and shut her in it to be trained as a priestess of the idols, coming himself to require of her the daily incense.
She did not burn it. The account is careful to make her conversion an act of reasoning before it is an act of grace: from the window of her tower the girl watched the sun, the moon and the stars in their courses, and asked herself who had made them and who kept them; and she concluded that whatever had made so great and orderly a world could not be the thing she was being told to worship, since her father's gods were the work of craftsmen's hands, could not move, could not speak, and had to be dusted. So she prayed to the God she did not yet know, and wept, and asked to be taught.
An angel came to her — the passions vary between an angel and the Lord Himself — and instructed her in the faith of Christ, called her the bride of Christ, signed her with the sign of the cross, and told her what it would cost. She rose from that visitation and went through the tower breaking the images one after another, and threw the gold and silver fragments out of the window into the street below, where the poor of Tyre gathered them up.
Before her father
When Urban came and found the tower bare, he demanded to know who had done it. The serving-women told him it was his daughter; and the girl, questioned, answered him that she had smashed dead things and that she now worshipped the living God. He had the serving-women beheaded for their part in it, and had his daughter beaten with rods and thrown into prison. Her mother came to the prison in mourning, threw herself down before her and begged her to have pity on her parents; Christina answered — the line is preserved in all the recensions and is the hinge of the whole passion — that she had no father and no mother but Christ, and that a woman who bore her should be glad to have borne a Christian.
Brought out again, she was scraped with iron, and, the account says, took up the strips of her own flesh and threw them at her father's feet, telling him to eat the meat he had begotten. He had her bound to an iron wheel with a fire kindled beneath it, so that the wheel turned her over the flames; and in the night, when she had been carried back half-dead to the prison, an angel came and healed the burns, so that in the morning she was whole. Urban then ordered a millstone tied about her neck and had her thrown into the sea. She did not drown: the tradition holds that she was upheld in the water, and that her immersion in the sea, with the sign of the cross made over her, was received by the Church as her baptism, since she had never been baptised by a priest. That same night Urban died — suddenly, and without illness, say the notices, which read the death as a judgement.
Dion and Julian
Tyre was not left without a governor. Dion succeeded, reopened the case, and continued the tortures; the Greek accounts say that he too died abruptly in the midst of them, in some recensions struck down in the very act of pronouncing sentence. Whatever the truth of these two deaths — the pattern of judges destroyed in the course of the trial is a common one in the passions — the third judge, Julian, is the one to whom the worst of the account belongs.
Julian had her thrown into a furnace heated white and sealed up; she was taken out alive at the end of five days, and the passion says that the sight of it converted a great number of the watching crowd. He then had asps and vipers loosed upon her, which coiled about her feet and did her no harm, and when the charmer who had brought them was himself bitten and died, Christina prayed and he was raised. Her breasts were cut off, and the passion says that milk flowed instead of blood. Her tongue was cut out, so that she should stop preaching; she picked up the severed tongue and threw it in the governor's face, and he was blinded by it — and even without a tongue, the account insists, she went on speaking, which the hymnographers take as the sign of the martyr's word that no power can silence.
At the end Julian ordered her run through with swords, or in some texts with two spears, in the side and the heart, and so she died. The number of those converted through her sufferings is given in the accounts as about three hundred. The year is not transmitted; the notices place her in the persecution of Diocletian, and the usual estimate is about 300, when she was some twelve or thirteen years old — for which reason she is occasionally reckoned among the child-martyrs, though the Church has never classed her so.
Relics and cult
At Tyre her body was taken up by the Christians of the city and buried, and her tomb was venerated there; Tyre was the metropolis of Phoenicia Prima and, from the fourth century, a great see of the patriarchate of Antioch, so that in the Antiochian reckoning she is one of the home martyrs of the patriarchate, of the same coast and the same generation as the martyrs of Sidon, Berytus and Caesarea. The passion was current in Greek early enough to be abridged in the Synaxarion of Constantinople, and her memory passed from there into every Byzantine calendar.
In the West the same day, 24 July, carries the memory of Christina of Bolsena, whose cult is attested at Volsinii (Bolsena) on the lake of that name in Tuscany from the fourth century — there is an early Christian cemetery and a sarcophagus there under her name — and whose Latin passion tells substantially the same story, with the lake in place of the sea and the millstone floating on the water. The stone is still shown at Bolsena with the impress of a child's feet in it, and the basilica raised over the site is where the eucharistic miracle of 1263 occurred that gave rise to the western feast of Corpus Christi. The Greek and Latin traditions have gone on side by side ever since, each with its own city.
Feast and commemoration
July 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 6), her only feast. In the printed Greek Menaion the day is hers: she heads it, with a proper canon and proper stichera, and the other commemorations of the date — the martyrs Capito and Hymenaeus, the martyr Hermogenes, and Athenagoras of Athens — are carried as brief notices beneath her. In the Slavonic books she shares the day with Boris and Gleb, whose festal service with polyeleos takes the office in Russian and Ukrainian usage, so that July 24 shows the same Greek/Slavonic difference of weighting as July 15, where Cyricus and Julitta yield to Vladimir. The Antiochian usage keeps her as Great Martyr, and has a particular claim upon her: Tyre is a see of the patriarchate of Antioch. The Latin West keeps July 24 for Christina of Bolsena, and the Roman calendar retained her until the revision of 1969, since when she has been a local commemoration of the diocese of Orvieto-Bolsena.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a virgin-martyr)
Thine ewe-lamb, O Jesus, crieth aloud with a great voice: I love Thee, O my Bridegroom, and in seeking Thee I contend, and I am crucified and buried with Thee in Thy baptism; I suffer for Thy sake, that I may reign with Thee; I die for Thee, that I may live in Thee. Receive as a spotless sacrifice her who was slain for love of Thee. By her intercessions, since Thou art merciful, save our souls.
Kontakion — Tone 4
Shut up among the idols of gold, thou didst look out upon the works of God and find their Maker; and being taught by an angel, thou didst break the images in pieces and cast them down, O all-praised Christina. Wherefore, having passed unhurt through the wheel and the sea and the fire, and having given thy tongue and thy blood for the Word, thou dost speak still, and dost intercede for them that keep thy memory.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Christina is painted as a young woman, almost a girl, full-face and haloed, in a red or crimson maphorion over a green or blue undergarment, holding the martyr's cross in her right hand — the ordinary type of the virgin-martyr, from which she is distinguished chiefly by her youth and, in the Greek tradition, by the crown or diadem that the Great Martyrs wear. Her free hand is often open before her breast in the gesture of prayer, and she may hold a scroll.
Her narrative attributes are unusually rich, and the marginal scenes of a full icon of her passion draw on them: the tower with the broken idols and the fragments falling from the window; the millstone about her neck, which in the western tradition became her principal emblem and is shown at her feet or in her hands; the iron wheel over the fire; the furnace; the serpents coiled harmlessly about her; and, in the more literal cycles, the pincers or the severed tongue. The western painting of the saint — Cranach, Carlo Dolci, Alessandro Rosi and the Italian masters of the Bolsena cult — makes her a court lady with the millstone at her side and, in the Renaissance manner, the arrows that belong properly to a different legend; these are pictures of Christina of Bolsena and belong to the western half of the dossier.
No pre-1900 Orthodox image of her has been located for this collection. The one candidate returned by the Commons search under her name is a modern (2016) upload described as a fresco and licensed CC BY-SA by an uploader claiming "own work," with the underlying painting undated and its author unidentified: an uploader's licence cannot dispose of an iconographer's rights, and the candidate was therefore rejected. The remaining material is Italian devotional painting of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, which is out of copyright but depicts the western saint under her western name and would silently settle the identity question discussed above. She is accordingly listed among the wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- Tyre or Bolsena — one saint or two? This is the central problem of her dossier. The archaeological evidence for a cult is early and firm at Bolsena and absent at Tyre; the Latin Martyrologium Hieronymianum enters her under 24 July at Volsinii in Tuscia. The Bollandist criticism associated with Hippolyte Delehaye and the modern study of the passions épiques therefore treats the Italian localisation as the older one, and the Greek passion — which keeps the whole plot, the millstone, the idols, the three judges — as the same legend re-set on the Phoenician coast, perhaps through a misreading or a deliberate transposition of the place-name. Others have argued the reverse, or for two genuinely distinct martyrs of the same name whose acts contaminated each other early. Nothing in the surviving evidence closes the question. The Orthodox books, without exception, keep her as Christina of Tyre, and this entry follows them while recording that Wikidata and the western reference literature file her under Bolsena, and that the two names denote a single dossier.
- Rank. The Greek Menaion and the Greek usage generally style her Μεγαλομάρτυς, Great Martyr, and the Greek service books and the Greek Wikipedia title her so; the Slavonic books and the OCA calendar print her simply as Martyr Christina. The difference is one of jurisdictional usage, not of substance, and both are current. This entry classes her great-martyr with the Greek, which is also the Antiochian usage.
- Her century. The OCA life opens by placing her "during the third century"; the Greek and western notices give c. 300 and set her under Diocletian, whose edicts fall in 303–305. This entry indexes her under the fourth century with the usual reckoning of c. 300 in this collection, and the third-century dating should be understood as the same tradition rounded the other way.
- Her age. Eleven at her enclosure in the tower is the figure in the Greek passion; twelve and thirteen appear in the recensions, and the western accounts sometimes make her older. She is in any case a child or a girl barely out of childhood in every version.
- The three governors. Urban, Dion and Julian are named consistently in the Greek; the Latin has Urbanus, Dion and Julianus likewise. The successive-judges structure, and the sudden deaths of the first two, are formal features of the developed passion and should not be read as an archival record of the governors of Phoenicia.
- Not to be confused with three other saints of the name already in this collection: Christina of Persia (March 13), scourged to death in the Persian persecution; the Christina numbered among Romanus, Teletius and Christina of Nicomedia; and Christina of Tyre should also be kept distinct from the western Christiana entered on the same day in some martyrologies. The name is common and the confusions are old.