Julitta the Venerable

Our Venerable Mother Julitta

Venerable

Julitta is one of the many names in the synaxarion of Constantinople of which nothing further has come down: she is styled hosia — venerable, that is, an ascetic and not a martyr — and the whole of her notice under June 14 is that she reposed in peace. Her memory survives with a couplet of verse and nothing else, and this entry records exactly that, without supplying a life she has not left.

The Greek synaxarion for June 14 names, after the Prophet Elisha, the Patriarch Methodius and the hieromartyr Cyril of Gortyna, the venerable Julitta, and adds one sentence: she reposed in peace. The received books preserve for her only the customary distich, which turns on the paradox that the Word of God took flesh in order to bring her out of the flesh.

That she is called hosia and not martys places her among the ascetics; the epithet is used in the synaxaria of women who lived the monastic life and died a peaceful death, and it is the one substantive thing the tradition tells us about her. Neither her country, her century, her monastery nor the circumstances of her repose is transmitted, and the Synaxaristes of Nikodemos the Hagiorite states plainly that no further details survive. Nothing in this entry is inferred beyond what the notice says.

Feast and commemoration

June 14 on the church calendar (Old Calendar civil June 27). The commemoration is Greek and synaxarial: she is named in the day's list without an office, the service of the day belonging to the Prophet Elisha and Methodius of Constantinople. Where her memory is kept, it is kept with the common of a venerable woman.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)

In thee, O mother, was the divine image preserved with exactness, for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ; and thou didst teach by thy deeds to despise the flesh, for it passes away, and to care rather for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Julitta, thy spirit rejoices with the angels.

Original translation from the Greek

Synaxarion

The Word of God, who for our sake appeared in flesh, leads Julitta forth out of the flesh.

Iconography

No iconographic type is transmitted for her, and no image has been located that can be shown to depict this Julitta rather than one of the martyrs of the name. Where a hosia of the synaxaria has no attributes, the painters give the general type of the venerable woman: an ascetic in the monastic mantle and veil, a cross or a scroll in her right hand, her left open before her breast, inscribed with her name. Any panel labelled simply "Saint Julitta" is far more likely to be the mother of Cyricus, who is almost always painted holding or standing beside her child, and should not be taken for this saint.

Disputed questions

Identity. A commemoration of a Julitta is easy to confuse with the far better-known martyrs of the name, and the closeness of the calendar makes it worse. She is not Julitta the mother of the child-martyr Cyricus (Kērykos), kept on July 15; not Julitta of Caesarea in Cappadocia, the widow despoiled of her estate and burned under Diocletian, whom Saint Basil praises and who is kept on July 30; and not Julitta of Ancyra, one of the seven virgins drowned in the lake with the martyr Theodotus, kept on May 18. All three of those are martyrs; this Julitta reposed in peace.
Whether she is a doublet. Because June 14 also carries a Cyril — the hieromartyr of Gortyna — the pairing of "Cyril" and "Julitta" on one day invites the suspicion that this notice is a displaced fragment of the celebrated Cyricus-and-Julitta commemoration. The synaxaria give no warrant for that: the two saints of June 14 are separately introduced, the one a bishop martyred in Crete and the other a woman who died in peace, and Nikodemos prints them as distinct. The possibility is recorded here as a caution, not as a finding.