Glykeria of Novgorod
The Holy Righteous Virgin Glykeria of Novgorod, daughter of Panteleimon
Righteous · Virgin · d. c. 1522, at Great Novgorod
Commemorated 13 May — Commemoration of the righteous virgin, kept on the day of her patron the martyr Glyceria
Glykeria was a maiden of Great Novgorod, daughter of Panteleimon, an official of Legoshcha Street, who reposed about the year 1522 and was buried by the stone church of the Holy Martyrs Florus and Laurus. Fifty years later, on 14 July 1572, her body was found incorrupt behind that church, and the Second Novgorod Chronicle records that Archbishop Leonid of Novgorod, informed by an old woman named Nastasia of a healing received fifty years before, had the relics taken up and laid in the church. Healings followed at the burial, among them the recovery of the small son of one Bogdan Suvorov, and these miracles were the ground of her glorification. She is one of the righteous laywomen of the Novgorod calendar, and she is kept on May 13, the day of her patron the ancient martyr Glyceria of Heraclea.
The daughter of Panteleimon
Everything transmitted of Glykeria's life fits into a single sentence of chronicle: she was the daughter of Panteleimon, a starosta — an elected officer or headman — of Legoshcha Street in Great Novgorod, and she died a virgin, about the year 1522. The Greek synaxaristes, which carries her among its Russian entries, says only that she lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and reposed in peace in 1522.
That is the whole of the biography, and it is worth saying plainly why the Church remembers her anyway. Glykeria performed no public work, founded nothing, wrote nothing, suffered no persecution and held no office. She belongs to that class of Russian saints — the pravedniki, the righteous — who are glorified not for deeds but for a hidden life in the world lived without reproach, and whose sanctity became known only when God disclosed it after their death. The Novgorod calendar has several such, and Glykeria is among the most purely typical of them: a girl of a tradesman's street, remembered because her body did not decay.
The finding of the relics, 1572
She had been buried, as ordinary townspeople were, in the ground beside the stone church of the Holy Martyrs Florus and Laurus in Novgorod. On 14 July 1572 — the Second Novgorod Chronicle preserves the date — her body was discovered there incorrupt.
The chronicle's account of what followed is unusually circumstantial. An old woman named Nastasia came to Archbishop Leonid of Novgorod and told him that she had received a healing at that grave fifty years before, when Glykeria was newly buried; the memory of the townswomen, not any official record, is what identified the body. Leonid ordered the relics taken up and, during the very rite of their reburial inside the church, healings of the sick were worked — among them the cure of the four-year-old son of a man named Bogdan Suvorov. It was on the strength of these miracles, the account says, that her veneration was established.
Later veneration
Her relics remained in the church of Florus and Laurus, and her name entered the roll of the saints of Novgorod. She appears in the old composite icons of the holy men and women of Novgorod, in the sixth register, beneath the Mother of God and Saint John the Forerunner — a placing that shows how the local Church ranked her: not among the hierarchs and princes of the upper rows, but with the righteous laity. In the nineteenth century a chapel in her honour was erected at the Simonov Monastery in Moscow, which is the furthest her cult travelled.
Feast and commemoration
May 13 (church date; New Calendar civil May 13, Old Calendar civil May 26). Glykeria is a local saint of Novgorod, kept in the Russian calendars and by the Orthodox Church in America, and listed also in the Greek Great Synaxaristes among its Russian entries; she is not in the Antiochian or the received Greek Menaion, and she has no proper service. She is commemorated within the synaxis of the saints of Novgorod and, by the general rule, on the Sunday of All Saints of Russia (the second Sunday after Pentecost). Because the date of Pascha moves, May 13 falls in some years within the Paschal season and in others after Pentecost, and no fixed seasonal note belongs to the day. The finding of her relics on 14 July 1572 is recorded in the chronicles but is not kept as a separate feast.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a righteous woman)
Adorned with virginity and shining with the beauty of a hidden life, thou wast pleasing to God in the midst of the city, O righteous Glykeria; and God, who glorifies those who glorify Him, made thy body incorrupt and thy grave a fountain of healing. Pray for us who honour thy memory.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Glykeria is painted as a young Russian maiden: bareheaded or in a simple kerchief, with loose or single-braided hair as befits an unmarried girl, in a plain long sarafan or tunic and mantle, hands folded or one raised in prayer, and without the martyr's cross — the absence of the cross being the visual sign that she is righteous and not a martyr, and the readiest way of telling her from her Thracian namesake. Her proper setting is the composite icon of All the Saints of Novgorod, where she stands in the sixth register below the Mother of God and Saint John the Forerunner among the righteous laity; single panels of her are rare and belong mostly to the nineteenth century and to the Novgorod churches. Because her feast falls in May, the Menologion of Basil II (September–February) is irrelevant to her, and in any case she is a saint of the sixteenth century. No pre-1900 image of her that can be securely distinguished from the martyr Glyceria has been located for this collection; the icon stored under the martyr's entry is inscribed мц., "martyr," and therefore belongs to the Thracian saint and not to her. None is stored here.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with Glyceria of Heraclea, the second-century virgin-martyr of Trajanopolis who is commemorated on the same day, May 13. The Russian Glykeria was named for the martyr and is kept on her patronal day, which is exactly why the two are adjacent in every Slavic calendar and are constantly confused in English lists. They are distinguished by fourteen centuries, by nation, and by kind: the one is a martyr who died under torture, the other a righteous virgin who died in her bed and was glorified for her incorrupt relics. Russian icon inscriptions distinguish them by the abbreviation — мц. (muchenitsa, martyr) for the Thracian, прав. or св. дева (righteous, holy virgin) for the Novgorodian.
- The year of repose. The commonly given date is 1522, computed as fifty years before the finding of the relics in 1572 on the strength of Nastasia's testimony; it is therefore an inference from the chronicle rather than a recorded date, and "c. 1522" is the honest form. The OCA gives "approximately 1522"; the Greek notice gives 1522 flatly.
- The date of her feast. Her relics were found on 14 July, and one might expect that day to be her feast; instead she is commemorated on May 13, the day of her name-saint. This is normal Russian practice for locally glorified saints whose day of repose is unknown.
- Her father's office. Starosta of Legoshcha Street is rendered in English variously as "official," "elder," "headman" and "alderman" of the street — the elected representative of one of Novgorod's self-governing street communities, a position of standing in the city's artisan and merchant class but not of nobility.