Lydia of Philippi
The Holy and Equal-to-the-Apostles Lydia of Philippi, the Seller of Purple
Equal to the Apostles · Righteous
Commemorated 20 May — The first baptism in Europe, at the river outside Philippi
Lydia was a merchant of purple from Thyatira in Asia Minor, settled in the Roman colony of Philippi in Macedonia, and a God-fearer among the Jewish women who gathered for prayer by the river outside its gate. When the Apostle Paul came there about the year 49 or 50 — his first preaching on European soil, undertaken at the summons of the Macedonian seen in a vision at Troas — "the Lord opened her heart," and she and her whole household were baptised in the river: the first Christians of Europe. She then compelled the apostles to lodge with her, and her house became the first house-church on the continent, the place to which Paul and Silas returned after their scourging and imprisonment. The Greek Church honours her as Equal-to-the-Apostles and keeps her memory on May 20.
Thyatira, and the trade in purple
Everything certain about Lydia comes from twelve verses of the Acts of the Apostles (16:11–15 and 16:40), and every word of them is informative. She is "a woman named Lydia, a seller of purple (πορφυρόπωλις), of the city of Thyatira, who worshipped God."
Thyatira, in the district of Lydia in western Asia Minor — the modern Akhisar, and one of the seven churches of the Apocalypse — was a centre of the dyeing trade, famous for a red-purple obtained from the madder root rather than from the murex shell, and its inscriptions record a guild of dyers. Lydia's own name is the name of the region, which has suggested to many readers that it is a trade-name or a freedwoman's name rather than a family one; the question is not resolvable and does not matter much. What the text establishes is that she was in business in a luxury commodity, in a Roman colony far from her birthplace, at the head of a household — and that she had the standing to invite four travelling foreign men to live under her roof and to insist on it. She was, on any reading, a woman of independent means; a widow is the commonest guess.
She was also, before she was a Christian, a worshipper of the God of Israel — one of the σεβόμεναι τὸν Θεόν, the God-fearers who attached themselves to the synagogue without becoming Jews. Philippi seems to have had no synagogue building; the "place of prayer" (προσευχή) was outside the gate by the river, and the company that met there on the Sabbath was of women.
The first preaching in Europe
Paul had been turned back twice — from Asia and from Bithynia — before the vision at Troas of a man of Macedonia saying Come over and help us. With Silas, Timothy, and the author of Acts (the first of the "we" passages begins here), he crossed by Samothrace to Neapolis and came up to Philippi, "the chief city of that part of Macedonia, a colony."
On the Sabbath they went out of the gate to the riverside — traditionally the Zygaktes (or Gangites) — sat down, and spoke to the women who had gathered. Lydia heard; and the text attributes the decisive act to God and not to the preacher: ἧς ὁ Κύριος διήνοιξεν τὴν καρδίαν — "whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended to the things spoken by Paul."
She was baptised, and her household — in the river, where they stood. It is the first baptism recorded on the European continent, and Lydia is therefore the first-fruits of Europe: the phrase the Greek service uses of her, and the reason the Church of Constantinople came to reckon her among the isapostoloi.
The first house-church of Europe
Her response was immediate and practical, and Acts preserves the form of words: "If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there." Luke adds that she constrained us — the verb (παρεβιάσατο) is one of pressure, not politeness.
The house so given became the base of the Macedonian mission. When Paul and Silas had been dragged before the magistrates for the exorcism of the slave-girl with the spirit of divination, beaten with rods, jailed, and then released with an apology once their Roman citizenship was known, they did not leave the city directly: "they went out of the prison, and entered into the house of Lydia; and when they had seen the brethren, they comforted them, and departed" (Acts 16:40). "The brethren" are already a congregation, and it is meeting in her house. Lydia is thus the founding patroness of the church at Philippi — the community Paul would afterwards address in the warmest of all his letters, and the only one from which he consented to accept money.
Scripture says nothing further of her. She is not named in the Epistle to the Philippians, which has prompted the guess that she had died or moved on by the mid-fifties; the argument from silence is weak, and no tradition of her later life or repose has been transmitted. She is not a martyr, and the Church has never claimed she was.
Veneration
Her cult is ancient in Macedonia and has become conspicuous in the modern period. At Krinides, beside the archaeological site of Philippi and on the bank of the Zygaktes, an octagonal Orthodox baptistery of St Lydia has been built over the traditional place of her baptism — one of very few Orthodox churches in the world designed principally as a baptistery, and a place of pilgrimage where baptisms are still performed in the river. Excavation at Philippi has also uncovered a large early basilica near the site, popularly associated with her.
Her formal inscription in the calendar of the Ecumenical Patriarchate is recent: the OCA records the act of glorification as of 23 May 1972, from which time a proper service has been sung. Her title in the Greek books is Ἰσαπόστολος, Equal-to-the-Apostles — the rank given to those who first brought a whole people to the faith — and she holds it not for having preached but for having been the door by which the preaching entered Europe.
Feast and commemoration
May 20 (church date; New Calendar civil May 20, Old Calendar civil June 2). Because May 20 always falls within the Pentecostarion — never in Bright Week, and in different years before or after the Ascension — her commemoration in practice shares the day with the paschal propers, which suits her: the readings of the season are from the Acts of the Apostles, and in some years the appointed reading for the days around her feast is the very passage that contains her. She is kept with particular solemnity at Philippi and in the metropolis of Philippi, Neapolis and Thasos, where the baptistery at Krinides is her shrine, and she is honoured as a patroness of dyers and of women in commerce.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Illumined by the word of Paul beside the flowing river, thou wast the first in Europe to be washed in the font of grace, O all-honoured Lydia; and opening thy house to the heralds of the Gospel, thou didst make it the first temple of the West. Wherefore, as equal to the apostles, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst sell the purple of the merchants, O Lydia, and didst buy the purple of the Blood of Christ; the Lord opened thy heart, and by thee He opened Europe to the preaching. Cease not to pray for us who keep thy holy memory.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Lydia is painted as a mature woman in the dress of a well-to-do first-century householder, maphorion over her head, and the colour of her garments is the point: she wears purple or deep red, the merchandise that named her in Scripture. Her attributes are two. She very often holds a shell or vessel of dye, or a bolt of purple cloth, in reference to her trade; and in the fuller compositions the river of her baptism is shown behind or beneath her, with the Apostle Paul standing in the water. A common modern Greek type sets her beside Paul at the riverside with the other women of the proseuche looking on — an icon of the event rather than of the person. Because she is isapostolos she may also be given the scroll.
No storable icon has been located. Her iconography is almost entirely a product of the twentieth century and later — the consequence of a cult formalised only in 1972 — and the images in circulation, including those at the Krinides baptistery, are the copyrighted work of living iconographers. A Wikimedia Commons media search for her under her Greek and English titles returns no results at all. The entry is therefore left without an image.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the Martyr Lydia of Illyria, wife of Philetus the senator, martyred with him and with their sons Macedon and Theoprepius (and with Amphilochius and Cronides) under Hadrian, and commemorated on March 27. The two are entirely distinct: this Lydia is the first-century purple-seller of Acts 16, who reposed in peace; that Lydia is a second-century martyr of Illyricum. The Slavonic calendars, which do not carry the Philippian Lydia on May 20, list only the martyr — and modern reference works have consequently produced the muddle by which "St Lydia" is assigned March 27 (or, in some lists, March 23) and given the biography of Acts 16. The Greek usage, followed here, keeps the purple-seller on May 20; some Russian presentations place her instead on June 25.
- Lydia's status — free woman or freedwoman, householder or agent of a firm — is debated by commentators on the basis of her single name and her trade. Acts does not say, and neither reconstruction affects the veneration.
- The identification of the "river" of Acts 16:13 with the Zygaktes rather than the Gangites is a local tradition of long standing, not a datum of the text.