Hieria of Mesopotamia
Our Venerable Mother Hieria of Mesopotamia, the widow who was converted by the holy Febronia
Venerable · d. early 4th century, at Nisibis
Commemorated 3 June — Repose in peace at the convent of Bryaine
Hieria was a wealthy young widow of noble family in Mesopotamia who, in the last persecution, fell into conversation with the nun Febronia at the convent of the abbess Bryaine near Nisibis, and was so shaken by it that she wept the night through, brought her parents and her whole household to the faith, and was baptised. When the prefect Selenus came against the convent and Febronia was tortured to death before the people, Hieria came out of the crowd and rebuked him to his face for his cruelty, and was threatened with arrest; but she was not put to death. She gave her whole fortune to the convent, asked the abbess to receive her in Febronia's place, was clothed as a nun, and reposed in peace beside the relics of the martyr whose death had made her. She is therefore hosia, venerable, and not a martyr, and her memory is kept on June 3, three weeks before Febronia's own feast on June 25.
A widow of Mesopotamia
Everything known of Hieria comes from the Life and Passion of St Febronia, one of the great Syriac-Greek martyr-narratives, where she is a secondary but fully drawn figure. She was a young woman of illustrious family in Mesopotamia — the Greek notice says of senatorial rank — and a widow, and she was still a pagan; and she had wealth of her own to dispose of, which proves to matter.
The convent she came to was a house of women under the abbess Bryaine, near Nisibis in the Roman province of Mesopotamia (some witnesses place it at Sivapolis in Assyria; see Disputed questions). Its most remarkable member was the young nun Febronia, Bryaine's own niece, kept under an especially strict rule and famous in the city for her teaching, which she gave from behind a curtain to the women who came on the appointed days. Hieria came, as others came, to hear her.
The night of weeping
The notice makes the conversion turn on a single conversation. Hieria heard Febronia and went home and wept the whole night; and the change did not stop with her. She brought her parents and her kinsfolk to the Christian faith, and she was baptised together with her household. The narrative gives Febronia's part in it as "guidance and prayer" — catechesis, and intercession.
The martyrdom of Febronia, and Hieria's protest
Then came the persecution. The prefect Selenus, a bitter enemy of the Christians, fell upon the convent; his nephew and officer Lysimachus, secretly inclined to Christ through his mother's teaching, protected the other nuns as far as he could and refused to touch Febronia, and it was Selenus himself who pressed the case. Febronia was offered honours, wealth and marriage, refused, and was tortured to death with a savagery the Life describes at length — she was mutilated limb by limb, and at last beheaded — in the public place, before the crowd of the city.
Out of that crowd stepped Hieria. She reproached Selenus openly for his boundless cruelty, and he threatened to have her seized; the narrative marks the moment as an act of pure courage, a newly baptised woman of rank standing up in front of a governor in the middle of an execution. She was not arrested — Selenus, in the account, was already unravelling; he shortly went out of his mind and killed himself against a marble column — and Hieria lived.
The nun
What she did with her life is the reason the Church remembers her. She gave her whole fortune to the convent and begged Bryaine to receive her in Febronia's place: not merely to admit her, but to let her fill the gap the martyr had left in the community's service. She was clothed as a nun, lived out her days in that house beside the relics of Febronia, which the abbess had gathered and enshrined and to which the whole city came, and reposed in peace.
Her memory is kept on June 3; Febronia's on June 25. The Greek books call Hieria ὁσία, the title of the monastic saint who dies in her bed, and it is exactly right: she is the fruit of the martyrdom rather than a sharer in it, and the calendar has preserved her as the standing proof that the martyr's death converted somebody.
Feast and commemoration
June 3 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 16). The commemoration is Greek: Hieria is named in the Greek synaxaria of the day, third after the martyrs of Byzantium and Athanasius the Wonderworker, and is carried into English lists as "St Hieria, widow of Mesopotamia." The Slavonic calendar does not keep her, and she is not named in the Antiochian or Russian June 3. She has no office of her own in the printed Menaion, where the common of a venerable woman serves; the Greek hymnographer Gerasimos Mikragiannanites (1905–1991) composed a proper apolytikion and kontakion for her in the twentieth century, and these are what modern Greek service texts use.
Her feast stands three weeks before June 25, the feast of Febronia, and the two commemorations are read together: at Febronia's feast Hieria is named in the synaxarion notice as her disciple.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O mother, the image of God was preserved unimpaired: for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore with the angels thy spirit rejoiceth, O venerable Hieria.
Iconography
Hieria has no independent type of any antiquity. She is painted, where she is painted at all, as a nun: a woman of middle years in the black mandyas and veiled koukoulion, holding a scroll or a cross, her hands raised in prayer. Two things distinguish her when an iconographer chooses to distinguish her — she may be shown as a noblewoman in rich dress at the moment of her protest, one hand thrown out toward the enthroned governor while the martyr suffers, which is her scene in the narrative cycle of St Febronia; or she may be shown beside Febronia's shrine, since the Life ends her there. In the developed vita-cycles of Febronia — Greek and Syriac alike — the figure in the crowd rebuking Selenus is Hieria, and that is the surest place to look for her.
No pre-1900 image identified as Hieria has been located: what exists are the Febronia cycles, in which the accompanying figures are rarely inscribed, and an uninscribed woman in a crowd cannot responsibly be captioned with a name. No image is therefore stored.
Disputed questions
- Martyr or venerable? Venerable. Some abbreviated notices and popular retellings run the two halves of her story together and have her beheaded with Febronia, or executed after her protest — an easy confusion, since the same paragraph contains her defiance of the governor and the recovery of the martyr's remains. But the Life is explicit that she survived, endowed the convent, was tonsured, and died in peace; the Greek calendar styles her ὁσία and not μάρτυς; and the man who might have killed her was dead before he could. The entry follows the Life.
- Nisibis or Sivapolis? The convent is placed at Nisibis in Mesopotamia by most witnesses and at Sivapolis in Assyria by others (so the OCA life of Febronia). The two are not reconcilable as a single place-name and the question belongs properly to the Febronia dossier; Hieria's epithet in the Greek calendar is simply "of Mesopotamia," which this entry keeps.
- The date. The persecution is that of Diocletian (284–305), so the martyrdom of Febronia falls in the first years of the fourth century and Hieria's repose somewhat later. No year is transmitted for her death.
- Not the Hieria of the iconoclast council. The name is otherwise familiar to Church history as a place: the palace of Hieria on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, where the iconoclast synod of 754 — the "council of Hieria," repudiated by the Seventh Ecumenical Council — was held, and which is named for that reason in the lives of Stephen the New, Germanus of Constantinople, Tarasius of Constantinople and John of Damascus. There is no connection whatever between the suburb and the saint of June 3.
- Related persons of the same dossier: the martyr Febronia of Nisibis (June 25), whose entry is now in this reference; and, not entered here, the abbess Bryaine and Lysimachus, who after his uncle's death renounced the idols, was baptised and became a monk.