Eikon

Elizabeth the Wonderworker

Our Venerable Mother Elizabeth the Wonderworker of Constantinople

Venerable · Wonderworker · b. at Heraclea in Thrace — d. 5th century (traditional; some accounts c. 540, and see Disputed questions)

Commemorated 24 April — Repose at Constantinople

Elizabeth the Wonderworker was an ascetic and abbess of the convent of the Holy Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian at Constantinople, born at Heraclea in Thrace of wealthy and long-childless parents who obtained her by prayer and gave her back to God. She kept virginity and an austerity that astonished the capital: a single coarse garment winter and summer, bare feet, no bath, no bread, wine or oil, whole Lents without food, and three years in which she would not so much as raise her eyes to look at the sky. To this life God joined the gift of wonders — she killed a great serpent by her prayer, healed a woman with an issue of blood, and cast out unclean spirits — and after her repose on April 24 both her incorrupt relics and the earth of her grave became a standing remedy for the sick.

Birth at Heraclea, and a child given back

Elizabeth's home was Heraclea in Thrace (Perinthus, on the Propontis), and her parents were Christians of substance who had been long without children. They obtained her, the Life says, by persistent prayer, and after a vision that promised them a child; and, recognising in the manner of her coming that she was not properly theirs, they consecrated her to God — the pattern of Hannah and Samuel, and of the Theotokos's own parents Joachim and Anna, which the Byzantine hagiographers used deliberately whenever a barren couple's prayer was answered.

Her parents nonetheless expected, as parents do, that their fortune would pass through her by marriage, and Elizabeth refused the expectation absolutely. The Greek accounts have her mother die when she was twelve and leave her fully orphaned by about fifteen; the inheritance she then controlled she disposed of, and went into the monastic life. She was received at Constantinople into the convent of the holy Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian — one of the several foundations of the capital dedicated to the physician-saints (compare Cosmas and Damian of Mesopotamia and Cosmas and Damian of Arabia) — and there she spent the rest of her life.

The ascetic struggle

The Life dwells on her austerities with more than usual particularity, and it is worth recording them as transmitted, since they are almost the whole of what is known of her interior life:

  • She ate herbs and vegetables only, and would not touch bread, wine or oil — the refusal of oil in particular being the standing Byzantine measure of extreme fasting.
  • In the great fasts she frequently took nothing at all, keeping whole forty-day periods without food.
  • She wore a single coarse hair-garment (τρίχινον), with wide sleeves, all the year round, enduring the winter cold and ice of Constantinople in it; she went barefoot; and she never washed her body with water.
  • For three years she held her mind so fixed on God that she would not lift her eyes to the sky — refusing herself even the innocent pleasure of looking at the beauty of the visible heaven, that she might look only at its Maker.

Her contemporaries were struck, the sources insist, not by the severity alone but by its combination with gentleness: she was tender toward others in exactly the measure that she was hard on herself, and was sought out above all by the sick and by those tormented in mind. Her community elected — or, in the Greek tradition, the patriarch appointed — her abbess (ἡγουμένη) of the house of Cosmas and Damian. The Greek synaxarists name Gennadius I, Patriarch of Constantinople (458–471), as the hierarch who set her over the convent; this is the single firmest chronological anchor the tradition supplies, and it places her squarely in the fifth century.

Miracles and traditions

Three wonders are transmitted from her lifetime, and they are the ones her hymnography takes up:

  1. The serpent. A great and venomous serpent — the Greek accounts call it a drakon — was terrorising a place at, or on the road to, her native Heraclea. Elizabeth came against it with nothing but the Precious Cross and prayer, killed it, and set her foot on it. This is why the Greek tradition knows her as Elizabeth the Dragon-slayer, and why her images show her treading on a serpent; it is also a happy coincidence of the calendar that her feast stands the day after the Great-Martyr George the Trophy-bearer, the other dragon-slayer of the Byzantine year.
  2. The woman with an issue of blood. She healed a woman who had suffered many years from a haemorrhage — the evangelical parallel (Mt 9:20) being, again, entirely deliberate on the hagiographer's part.
  3. The expulsion of unclean spirits. She delivered a number of the possessed, and the stichera of her office single this out: that she was given grace "to drive away the sicknesses of souls and bodies, and by the Holy Spirit to expel evil spirits."

Repose

Toward the end of her life she made a journey back to Heraclea. In a church there — the accounts have it a church of the Theotokos — she received a vision of the Mother of God, who told her that her end was near and that she should return to her own monastery. She went back to Constantinople and reposed in peace on April 24. The Greek synaxarion verse plays on her Old Testament name and her state: Elizabeth, leaving the earth behind, O Word of God, a fair bride beholds Thee, the fair Bridegroom; on the twenty-fourth Elizabeth went up to heaven.

Relics and later cultus

She was buried in a church of St George, and her body was found whole and incorrupt. Her relics became a healing shrine, and — a detail the sources repeat with emphasis, and which is characteristic of the older Constantinopolitan cults — so did the earth (κόνις) of her grave, which the sick took away and which was held to be a remedy for every kind of sickness. Portions of her relics are today venerated in Greek monastic houses, among them the Monastery of St Anna in Crete and the Monastery of Ntaou Penteli in Attica.

Her cultus is universal in the Byzantine rite, but modest: she has a canon and stichera in the Menaion for April 24, which makes her the day's principal saint hymnographically, and she is one of the few women of the Constantinopolitan calendar known by the plain epithet "the Wonderworker."

Feast and commemoration

April 24 (church date; New Calendar civil April 24, Old Calendar civil May 7), the day of her repose. In the Greek Menaion she is the first-named commemoration of the day and the office of the day is hers: the canon, the stichera at Vespers and the apolytikion of a venerable woman are appointed to her, with the martyr Sabbas Stratelates and his seventy soldiers commemorated alongside in the synaxarion. Slavonic and Antiochian usage lists her with the day's other saints without a proper office. Old Calendar Churches keep the feast on civil May 7. Because the day falls a fortnight after Pascha in most years — and always in the Paschal or late-Lenten part of the Pentecostarion cycle — her office is normally sung in combination with the resurrectional or festal propers.

Hymns

Apolytikion

In thee, O Mother, was that which is according to the image preserved with exactness; for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Therefore doth thy spirit, O venerable Elizabeth, rejoice together with the Angels.

Iconography

Elizabeth is painted as a veiled ascetic nun: in the dark monastic mandyas and koukoulion, thin-faced and grave, with the right hand raised in blessing or in prayer and frequently a scroll in the left. Two features distinguish her from the general run of venerable mothers. The first is the serpent or dragon beneath her feet, coiled and trodden down, which gives her the epithet Dragon-slayer and which she may confront with a hand-cross held out before her; the parallel with the equestrian George of the day before is unmistakable and was surely intended by the painters who developed the type. The second is her occasional depiction barefoot, in a single coarse hair-garment with wide sleeves, in reference to the Life's insistence on that one garment worn winter and summer. In menologion cycles for April she stands at the head of the day's saints, before the soldier-martyr Sabbas.

No pre-1900 image of her has been located for this collection: searches of Wikimedia Commons under her English, Greek and Russian names returned nothing, and the modern Greek panels of her that circulate are living artists' work and cannot be stored.

Disputed questions

  • Her date. This is genuinely open. The traditional Greek synaxaria make her a fifth-century saint, and the notice that Patriarch Gennadius I (458–471) made her abbess fixes that reading; the Prologue-derived and some modern popular accounts give the round repose-year c. 540, i.e. the sixth century; and scholarly assessment of the surviving Greek Life — which is late, rhetorical, and edited only in the twentieth century (F. Halkin, Analecta Bollandiana 91, 1973, publishing the Life of Elizabeth of Heraclea, abbess at Constantinople) — has proposed dates spread anywhere from the sixth to the ninth century. The OCA's own notice concedes that the period of her life is uncertain and "probably between the sixth and ninth centuries." This entry follows the Greek synaxarion's fifth century and indexes her there, while recording that the question is not settled; the Gennadius notice, whether historical or a later attempt to date her, is the earliest anchor the tradition offers.
  • Heraclea or Constantinople? She is styled both "of Heraclea" (birth, and the place of the serpent and of her final vision) and "of Constantinople" (her monastery, her repose, her tomb). Both are correct; the Greek books prefer the plain epithet the Wonderworker, which is why this entry uses it.
  • Not to be confused with the Righteous Elizabeth, mother of the Forerunner (see Zachariah and Elizabeth, September 5), nor with the New-Martyr Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Moscow (†1918), nor with the Elizabeth who is one of the women martyred with Alexander of Adrianople. The dragon-slayer epithet belongs to this Elizabeth alone.
  • The serpent. Whether the drakon of the Life is a literal snake, a plague or pestilence figured as a serpent (a common Byzantine metaphor), or the demon of a pagan cult-site at Heraclea, the sources do not permit deciding. The iconography took it literally, and her epithet followed the iconography. That her feast falls the day after George the Great Martyr, the other dragon-slayer of the Byzantine year, is coincidence — but the painters plainly felt the parallel.

Sources

  1. Greek Menaion for April 24 (glt.goarch.org) — synaxarion notice and verses ("Μνήμη τῆς Ὁσίας Ἐλισάβετ, τῆς θαυματουργοῦ"), the appointed apolytikion of a venerable woman in the Plagal Fourth Mode, and the day's hymnographic arrangement; consulted live.
  2. Synaxarion of Constantinople and the Great Synaxaristes, April 24 — the Greek received Life: Heraclea in Thrace, the childless parents, the death of her mother in her twelfth year, the convent of Cosmas and Damian, the appointment as abbess by Patriarch Gennadius I, the killing of the serpent with the Precious Cross, and the healing earth of her grave.
  3. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, April 24 — "Saint Elizabeth, Wonderworker of Constantinople" (consulted for the austerities, the three years without raising her eyes, the woman with the issue of blood, the vision of the Theotokos at Heraclea, the burial in the church of St George and the incorrupt relics, and for the explicit acknowledgement that her dating is uncertain).
  4. F. Halkin, "Sainte Élisabeth d'Héraclée, abbesse à Constantinople," Analecta Bollandiana 91 (1973) — the critical edition of the Greek Life, and the basis of the modern re-dating discussion recorded under Disputed questions.
  5. Greek devotional and diocesan agiologia for April 24 (consulted live) for the epithet Dragon-slayer, the relic-portions at the Monastery of St Anna in Crete and at Ntaou Penteli, and the hymnographic commentary of Fr George Dorbarakis on her office.