Five Virgin-Martyrs of Persia
The Holy Virgin-Martyrs Thecla, Mariamne, Martha, Mary and Ennatha, beheaded in Persia
Martyr · Virgin · d. c. 346, near the village of Aza in Persia
Commemorated 9 June — Beheading of the five consecrated virgins under Shapur II
The five holy virgins Thecla, Mariamne, Martha, Mary and Ennatha were consecrated women of the Church in Persia, living near the village of Aza, who were put to death about the year 346 in the long persecution of Shapur II. Their story is remembered chiefly for the terrible part played in it by their own spiritual father, the priest Paul, to whom they had entrusted their goods: when the persecutors demanded of them apostasy and of him the treasure, Paul saved his money by conforming to the religion of the Persians, and — the synaxarion says — cut off with his own hand the heads of the five women who refused to follow him. His gain lasted a day: the Persians killed him the following evening and took everything he had. The virgins are honoured as martyrs and their betrayer as a warning, and the Church has kept them together in one memory since antiquity.
Consecrated virgins in the Church of Persia
The five belonged to that order of consecrated virgins — women vowed to continence and to the service of the Church, living in their own houses or in small communities rather than in an enclosed monastery — which existed everywhere in the fourth-century East and which in Persia and Mesopotamia was called the bnāth qyāmā, the "daughters of the covenant." The Russian books, which describe them as nuns, are translating this reality into a later vocabulary. They lived near the village of Aza in the Persian territories, and, having renounced the world, they had made over their property — the synaxarion says it was considerable — to the keeping of their priest.
Their names, as the Greek and the Slavonic-derived synaxaria transmit them, are Thecla, Mariamne, Martha, Mary and Ennatha. Nothing else of their lives is recorded: no city, no family, no age. They enter history only at the moment of their death, which is the ordinary condition of the martyrs of the Persian persecution, whose acts were compiled from the memory of surviving Christians rather than from court records.
The persecution of Shapur II
Shapur II reigned over the Sasanian empire from 309 to 379, and from about 340 he made war on the Christians of his realm for the length of a generation. The reasons were political as much as religious: after the conversion of the empire under Constantine, the Christians of Persia — many of them Aramaic-speaking subjects of the Great King, with kinsmen and bishops across the Roman frontier — came to be regarded as the party of Rome, and the Zoroastrian priesthood pressed the point. A double poll-tax was laid on them; the churches were destroyed; and clergy, monastics and consecrated virgins were required to renounce Christ and to worship the sun and fire. The Persian martyrology of these forty years is the largest of the ancient Church after that of the Roman persecutions, and it names bishops such as Simeon bar-Sabba'e, priests, deacons, and very many women of the covenant.
The apostasy of the priest Paul
In or about the year 346 the persecution reached Aza. The magistrates seized the priest Paul together with the five virgins under his care, and made the two demands at once: that all of them should renounce the faith and sacrifice, and that the treasure of the community should be handed over.
Paul had been entrusted with that treasure, and — the tradition is explicit that avarice, not fear, was his ruin — he had already come to regard it as his own. To keep it he accepted the religion of the Persians. The five women refused. They would not be turned by their father's example, by argument or by threat; they confessed Christ, and they were condemned to the sword.
And then, the synaxarion says, the judges required of Paul a proof of his conversion, and appointed him their executioner; and he took the sword and beheaded the five virgins who had been his spiritual daughters. It is one of the darkest scenes in the whole hagiographic record, and the tradition neither softens it nor moralises it beyond what follows. On the evening of the next day the Persians put Paul to death — drowned him, in the version the Orthodox Church in America transmits — and seized the wealth for which he had sold his soul, so that he lost in a single day his faith, his daughters, his money and his life.
The five received, in the words of the synaxarion, their incorruptible crowns; and their memory has always been kept as one, undivided, as they died.
Veneration
They belong to the great body of Persian martyrs whose acts came west through the Syriac collections and were entered in the Greek synaxaria; they have no shrine, no translation of relics and no proper office, and their veneration is purely calendrical — the annual reading of the notice, and the singing of the common of women martyrs. The West commemorates the same group, and enters the priest Paul with them, on June 9 in the Roman martyrology.
Feast and commemoration
June 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 22). They are kept universally on the Byzantine calendar, though always as a lesser commemoration on a day dominated by Cyril of Alexandria, and in the Russian books also by Cyril of White Lake; the Greek synaxarion notice follows Cyril's, and the day's service is his. Some calendars note them again on September 26 (see Disputed questions).
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
O Lord Jesus, Thy lambs cry out with a loud voice: We are wounded with love for Thee, O our Bridegroom, and we run to seek Thee; we are crucified with Thee, and buried in Thy baptism; we suffer for Thy sake, that we may reign with Thee; we die for Thee, that we may live in Thee. Accept us as spotless sacrifices offered to Thee in love. By their prayers, O merciful One, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Betrayed by the shepherd who should have kept you, O virgins, you were not betrayed by the Shepherd who laid down His life; and receiving the sword in place of the bridal crown, you were joined for ever to Christ, in whom you had already given away all that you had.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The five are painted, when they are painted at all, as a company of young women standing in a row, in the long maphorion and tunic of the women saints, each holding in her right hand the martyr's cross and with the left hand raised or covered — the ordinary type of the virgin-martyr, distinguished only by the number and by the inscription of the names above their heads. Where the passion itself is shown the group kneels with hands bound and the executioner stands over them with the sword; the tradition does not, so far as is recorded, depict the executioner as their priest, which the scene would require and which no iconographer appears to have wished to paint.
No storable image is used here. The Menologion of Basil II, the first resort for minor saints of the fixed year, illustrates only September to February and cannot serve a June commemoration; and a search of Wikimedia Commons (June 2026) under the Greek and the Russian forms of the names returns nothing for this company. Any image found under the single names Thecla, Mariamne or Ennatha would belong to the better-known saints of those names listed under Disputed questions and would misidentify these martyrs. The entry therefore stands in the list of icons still being sought.
Disputed questions
- How many, and which names. The Greek synaxaria and the Orthodox Church in America give five names — Thecla, Mariamne, Martha, Mary and Ennatha — and the entry is titled accordingly. The Russian calendars in current use commonly list only three (Thecla, Martha and Mary), and older books vary in the spelling of the fourth and fifth (Mariamna, Marianna; Ennatha, Enniatha, Ennafa). The reduction to three is best explained as the loss of the two names whose forms duplicate others in the list. The five-name form is followed here, with the variation recorded rather than resolved.
- The year. 346 is the year usually given; some notices place the martyrdom about 330, at the beginning of Shapur's reign rather than in the height of the persecution, and the Orthodox Church in America's Life carries both figures. Neither can be established.
- The second commemoration. A further commemoration of this group on September 26 is noted in some calendars. Whether it is a doublet of the same company or the memory of another group of Persian women has not been settled here.
- The priest Paul. In this transmission Paul is an apostate and the executioner of the virgins, and dies unrepentant and unhonoured. Other Western and Syriac notices of a Paul, priest, with the virgins of Persia place him among the martyrs. The two cannot both be right; the Byzantine synaxarion tradition followed here is the one that makes him the betrayer, and the discrepancy is recorded.
- Not to be confused, above all, with the Five Virgins of Caesarea — Martha, Mary, Cyria, Valeria and Marcia, martyred at Caesarea in Palestine and kept only three days earlier, on June 6. Two companies of five consecrated virgins, both containing a Martha and a Mary, commemorated in the same week, are as confusable as anything in the calendar; they are distinct groups of different countries and different persecutions, the one Roman and Palestinian, the other Persian.
- Not to be confused, further, with the great namesakes with whom the individual names collide: Thecla of Iconium, the protomartyr and Equal-to-the-Apostles, disciple of St Paul (September 24); Mariamne, the sister of the Apostle Philip (February 17); and Ennatha, Valentina and Paula, the virgin-martyrs of Caesarea in Palestine under Firmilian (†308, February 10), whose Ennatha is a different woman of a rare name. Nor are the Martha and Mary of this company the sisters of Lazarus.