Irene the Great Martyr

Penelope in the tower

The Acts of Irene, which present themselves as the work of her tutor Apellian, open in the small kingdom of Magedon, whose ruler Licinius and his wife Licinia had one daughter of extraordinary beauty, named Penelope. When the girl was six, her father — the account says, to guard her beauty and to keep her from the eyes of men — built a high tower outside the city, furnished it with gold and with idols, and shut her in it with thirteen maidens of her own age and an elderly tutor.

The tutor was Apellian, and he was secretly a Christian. Over the years of her seclusion he taught her letters and, with them, the Scriptures and the faith of Christ, so that the girl grew up a believer in a house full of idols. When she came of age her father began to speak of a marriage; and it was then, the Acts relate, that Penelope received the sign that decided her.

The three birds

Three creatures came in at the window of her chamber on three successive days: a dove bearing an olive branch, which laid them on the little table; an eagle carrying a garland of flowers; and a raven which dropped a serpent. Troubled, she asked Apellian what they meant. He read them as her whole life foretold: the dove was the meekness of her soul and the olive the grace of baptism; the eagle with its crown was the victory and reward of a martyr's contest; the raven with the serpent was the malice of the enemy and the sufferings that were to come. From that hour, the account says, she gave herself wholly to Christ.

A priest named Timothy — whom the Greek and Slavonic tradition identifies with Timothy the disciple of the Apostle Paul — came to the tower, catechised her, and baptised her, giving her in place of Penelope the name Irene, "peace." She then refused the marriage her father had arranged, and, going into the chamber where the household idols stood, she threw them down and broke them.

The conversion of Licinius

Licinius, told what his daughter had done and what she now confessed, commanded that she be bound and trampled by wild horses in the hippodrome outside the city. The horses stood still; one of them — in the fuller account, the very horse harnessed to drag her — turned, seized the king by the right arm and tore it away, and threw him down dead (or mortally hurt). The people cried out; Irene prayed, and her father was raised up and his arm restored to him.

The miracle broke him. Licinius confessed Christ with his wife, with his household, and — the Acts say — with about three thousand of the people; he laid down his kingdom, went up into the very tower he had built for his daughter, and lived out his life there in repentance. Irene remained with Apellian and began openly to teach.

The cycle of the tortures

What follows in the Acts is a chain of confrontations with a succession of rulers, each ending in Irene's deliverance and in the conversion of the onlookers. It is this extraordinary series — rather than any single execution — that earned her the title great-martyr.

• Sedekias, who succeeded to the government, summoned her, forbade her to preach and bade her sacrifice. She refused; she was thrown into a pit filled with vipers and serpents, and after ten days was drawn out unhurt. She was then bound to a saw, which would not cut her, and set upon a millwheel, whose water stood still.
• Sapor, son of Sedekias, took up the persecution and marched against her. Irene met him and prayed; his army was struck blind, and at her further prayer their sight was given back — but Sapor persisted, and the account says he was killed by a bolt of lightning. She returned to Magedon with Timothy and converted five thousand more.
• At Callinicum (called Callipolis in some Greek copies) she was taken before King Numerian, who had three bronze oxen heated white-hot and shut her in them one after another; the third split asunder and she came out unharmed, at which, the Acts say, many thousands believed. After Numerian's death his eparch Babdonus tortured her further, again without effect.
• At Constantina — a city set some forty miles north-east of Edessa — she was arrested by the Persian king Sapor, and there she was beheaded and buried. Raised again, she went on to Mesembria in Thrace, where the king of the place and his people received baptism at her hands.

Throughout, the Acts attribute to her not only endurance but an apostolic ministry: she preaches, disputes with priests and magistrates, heals, and leaves baptised congregations behind her. The synaxaria reckon her converts in tens of thousands, and it is on this ground that later Greek writers speak of her as an equal of the apostles in effect, though the calendars do not give her that title.

Repose at Ephesus

Irene came at last to Ephesus, where she worked many miracles and where, the account says, it was revealed to her that her end was near. Taking Apellian and a few companions — six in number — she went out of the city and found a new tomb hewn in the rock in which no one had been laid. Signing herself with the cross, she went in alone and charged her companions to close the entrance with a great stone and to leave it undisturbed for four days. Apellian, returning after two days, found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. Her repose is conventionally placed about the year 315.

Veneration and later cultus

Irene's cult was early and very wide. Churches were dedicated to her at Constantinople from the fifth century; her name — Slavonic Irina — became one of the great baptismal names of Orthodox women, and it was to this Irene, not to any other of the name, that the Russian tsaritsa Irina Godunova and countless namesakes were entrusted. Fragments of relics are shown at the Kykkos monastery in Cyprus and at the church of St George of the Greeks in Venice; older reports variously place relics at Constantinople, Patras, Samos and Patmos, and none of these can be reconciled with the others or with the empty tomb of the Acts.

In the West she was received as Sant'Irene, and became the patroness of Lecce in Apulia, holding that place until 1656, when she was replaced by St Orontius; the great Theatine church of Sant'Irene at Lecce (1591–1639) remains hers, and she is patroness of Altamura. In modern Greece she is invoked for a good and speedy marriage and is honoured as patron of the police. Russian devotion counts her among the twelve virgin-martyrs seen in the vision granted to St Seraphim of Sarov and, in 1831, to the nun Eupraxia.