Euphemia the All-praised

Origins and early life

Euphemia was born at Chalcedon, the city on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus opposite Byzantium, the daughter of the senator Philophron and his wife Theodosia, Christians of rank and piety. She was consecrated to virginity and was still young when the persecution of Diocletian's reign reached Bithynia at the opening of the fourth century.

Martyrdom

The passio relates that Priscus, proconsul at Chalcedon, decreed that the whole population attend the festival of the god Ares and share in its sacrifices, on pain of torture. Forty-nine Christians, Euphemia among them, kept away and worshipped in a hidden house. Discovered and brought before Priscus, they withstood nineteen days of torments without yielding, and were finally sent to the emperor for judgment; the proconsul kept back only Euphemia, the youngest, reckoning that a girl alone would break.

Her contest then unfolded as a series of frustrated cruelties. Bound to a wheel set with knives, she was cut about until, at her prayer, the wheel stopped and — the passio says — an angel lifted her from it healed. Ordered into a burning furnace, the soldiers Victor and Sosthenes saw angels in the flames and refused to cast her in, confessing Christ on the spot; they were condemned to the beasts and died in the arena, called by a voice from heaven, their bodies untouched (they are commemorated with her on September 16). Other soldiers threw Euphemia into the fire, where she remained unharmed while flames burst outward on her tormentors. She was preserved likewise from a pit of blades concealed under earth, from drowning — the canon of her feast sings of her kept whole "with the beasts in the waters," as Jonah in the deep and Daniel among the lions — and from other engines of torture. At last she was condemned to the beasts in the arena. Bears and lions did no more than lick her feet, until one she-bear gave her a single wound, and with that, her prayer to be received was granted and she gave up her spirit. An earthquake shook the city at that moment, and in the panic her parents recovered her body and buried it near Chalcedon. The year was 304 (some sources 303); the Greek synaxarion's verses for September 16 remember precisely this manner of death: killed for God by the jaws of a bear, and crowned with fair speech — a play on her name, "she of good report."

Relics and translations

Over her grave outside Chalcedon rose a great martyrium basilica, one of the most celebrated shrines of the East. Evagrius Scholasticus describes the splendid three-part complex on its rise above the Bosphorus and records the wonder for which it was famous: from her relics there issued at intervals a flow of fragrant blood, gathered by the clergy with sponges and distributed to the faithful — a miracle the kontakion and oikos of her feast still celebrate. Egeria and the pilgrim literature knew the shrine; the empress Pulcheria and the court honoured it, and it was here that the Fourth Ecumenical Council convened in 451.

When the Persians overran Chalcedon in 617, the relics were carried across the strait to Constantinople (c. 620), where a church of Saint Euphemia was established in the former palace rotunda of Antiochus beside the Hippodrome. Under iconoclasm the tradition relates that the reliquary was cast into the sea — the deed is ascribed to Leo III or to Constantine V in different accounts; it was rescued by pious shipmasters, sheltered on the island of Lemnos, and solemnly returned to Constantinople in 796 under Constantine VI and the empress Irene, the church by the Hippodrome being restored to receive it. In the later centuries the relics were kept in the quarter of Petrion on the Golden Horn, in the church of Saint George; when that church became the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1601, the great-martyr's shrine remained with it, and her marble sarcophagus stands today in the north aisle of the patriarchal church of Saint George at the Phanar, where the faithful venerate her incorrupt relics. Portions of the relics are found elsewhere, notably at Kykkos Monastery on Cyprus and in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Saint Petersburg.

Veneration and later cultus

Euphemia's cultus was universal from the fourth century, in both East and West: churches bore her name in Constantinople, Rome, Ravenna, and across the Adriatic (the town of Rovinj in Istria keeps a rival tradition of her body — see Disputed questions). In the Byzantine world her veneration acquired a second, dogmatic dimension after 451: she is not only a great-martyr but the guardian of the Chalcedonian definition, "the boundary-stone of the Fathers." The title Πανεύφημος, "All-praised", became inseparable from her name.

Miracles and traditions

The miracle of the Tome (451). The Fourth Ecumenical Council — six hundred and thirty bishops, summoned by the emperor Marcian and the empress Pulcheria against the Monophysite teaching of Eutyches — met in October 451 in Euphemia's martyrium at Chalcedon. The tradition of the Church relates that when the disputing parties could not be brought to one confession, the Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople proposed to commit the judgment to the great-martyr herself. Two tomoi were written — the orthodox definition of the two natures of Christ united without confusion, change, division or separation, and the contrary confession of the Monophysites — and both scrolls were sealed inside her coffin upon her breast. The shrine was sealed in the presence of the emperor, and after days of prayer and fasting (the accounts speak of three) it was opened: the heretical tome lay beneath the saint's feet, and the orthodox definition she held in her right hand, extending it to the assembled Fathers as if alive. The council's own letter to Pope Leo speaks of Euphemia as the one who presided over their gathering, receiving their definition as her own confession and crowning it; the exaposteilarion of her feast sings that "she received the definition of orthodoxy from the Fathers and keeps it." On the strength of this miracle she is venerated as the patroness of the Council of Chalcedon, and the Church appointed her a second feast, July 11, in commemoration of it.

The flow of blood. The periodic effusion of blood from her relics at Chalcedon, attested by Evagrius and celebrated in the oikos of her service ("the dead body, as though living, pours forth blood that fragrances all"), made the shrine one of the great healing sanctuaries of the East.

Hymnographic and literary legacy

The full service of September 16 in the Menaion carries idiomela ascribed to Anatolius and to Byzantios, a complete canon, and the kathismata and exaposteilarion proper to her; the whole cycle interweaves her contest with her guardianship of the Chalcedonian faith. Asterius, bishop of Amasea (c. 400), delivered a celebrated ekphrasis describing a painted cycle of her trial and martyrdom — one of the earliest surviving Christian descriptions of narrative religious art, later read into the acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787) in defence of the holy icons.