Martha of Antioch
Our Venerable Mother Martha of Antioch, mother of Symeon the Stylite of the Wonderful Mountain
Venerable · b. at Antioch, early 6th century — d. 551, near Antioch; buried at the foot of the Wonderful Mountain
Commemorated 4 July — Repose at Antioch; her tomb at the foot of the Wonderful Mountain
Martha of Antioch (†551) is the mother of Symeon the Stylite of the Wonderful Mountain, and one of the very few women in the calendar honoured neither as martyr nor as nun but as a mother — a married Antiochene laywoman whose whole sanctity lay in prayer, mercy and the giving of her child to God. Denied the virginity she had wanted, she was assured at the shrine of the Forerunner that her obedience would be blessed, vowed the child before his birth, and after her husband's death gave her nights to prayer with tears and her days to the poor, the sick, the dying and the newly baptised, for whom she sewed the white garments with her own hands. She was forewarned of her death a year before it, reposed in 551, and was buried at the foot of her son's mountain, where he built a chapel over her tomb and offered the Liturgy for her; her cult grew up beside his at the great Antiochene shrine. She is not the Martha who was mother of Symeon the Stylite the Elder.
An Antiochene girl who wanted to be a nun
Martha was born at Antioch on the Orontes in the opening years of the sixth century, of a Christian family of the city. What the sources emphasise first is what she did not get: from girlhood she desired virginity and the monastic life, and her parents refused it and pressed her into marriage. She was betrothed to John, a perfumer originally of Edessa, settled in Antioch in that trade.
The tradition — preserved in the Life of Martha, transmitted in the manuscripts together with the enormous Life of her son — sets the turn of her life at the shrine of Saint John the Forerunner in Antioch, where she went to pour out her grief at the loss of the life she had chosen. There she was assured, in a vision or a dream, that her obedience to her parents was itself acceptable, and that her marriage would be blessed with a child dedicated to God. She accepted the marriage on those terms, and vowed the child to God before his birth. In due time she bore a son and named him Symeon, after the Elder whose column stood in the hills north-east of the city.
The earthquake, and widowhood
About 526, when the boy was five or six, the great earthquake destroyed Antioch — one of the deadliest disasters of the ancient world. Her husband John was killed in the collapse, and mother and child were separated for some days in the ruin before being reunited. Martha did not remarry. From that point the accounts show a widow of settled discipline, living in the shattered city and its outskirts and bringing up a son who would leave her for a pillar before he was eight.
(A shorter strand of the tradition, followed by the Russian synaxarial life, says only that "her husband died soon after the marriage" without naming the earthquake. The two are easily harmonised — five or six years is "soon" in a hagiographer's reckoning — and the earthquake of 526 is fixed by the Life of her son.)
The rule of a laywoman
The Life describes an asceticism carried on entirely in the world, and this is what makes her entry unusual in a calendar whose women are overwhelmingly virgin-martyrs and nuns. She rose every night for prayer, which she made with warmth and with tears. She was habitually silent, and the Life says that no idle or false word was ever heard from her. She attended the services of the church with reverence and constancy, and would not be kept from them.
Her mercy is described in a list that has the ring of an eyewitness memory rather than of a formula: she fed and clothed the poor; she visited the hospitals and served the sick with her own hands; she buried the dead who had no one to bury them; and she sewed the white baptismal garments for those preparing for Holy Baptism, giving them freely. In a city repeatedly emptied by earthquake and by the plague that began in 542, each of those works was a public necessity, not a devotion.
She also went up regularly to her son on his column, and the Life of Symeon records the exchanges between them: she is one of the very few people permitted to interrupt his silence, and something of the mother's authority survives in the picture.
Forewarned, and the repose
A year before her death — the detail is given in both Lives — Martha saw a vision of angels bearing candles, who told her that they would return for her at the end of the year; and the Theotokos herself, the account says, showed her the dwellings prepared for her. She told no one but prepared herself, and when the year was out she fell asleep in peace, in 551.
She was buried at the foot of the Wonderful Mountain (Θαυμαστὸν Ὄρος), the height south-west of Antioch where her son's last pillar stood. The consequences for both cults were large. Symeon desired to offer the Holy Sacrifice for his mother's memory with his own hands, and the Life connects that desire with his ordination to the priesthood on the column by Dionysius of Seleucia in 560; he built a chapel over her tomb, and her relics were afterwards translated into the church of the monastery. Miracles are recorded at the tomb, and appearances of Martha to the brotherhood; her memory was kept at the shrine with her son's, so that the Wonderful Mountain became one of the rare places in Christendom where a mother and her son are venerated together at one site.
Feast and commemoration
July 4 (church date; New Calendar civil July 4, Old Calendar civil July 17). She is kept throughout the Byzantine rite, and with particular warmth in the Patriarchate of Antioch, whose own soil holds her grave: the Wonderful Mountain above Samandağ in the Hatay is her shrine as much as her son's. The Menaion gives her no proper office — she is named in the synaxarion of the day, which is dominated by Andrew of Crete — and the common of a venerable woman is used. Her son Symeon is commemorated on May 24, and the devotion of the shrine keeps the two feasts as a pair.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O mother, was the image restored with exactness: for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Martha, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst render to God the child thou hadst vowed him, and thyself with the child; and, keeping in thy house the silence of the desert, thou didst clothe the naked and bury the dead and array the newly-illumined in white. O Martha, mother of the wonderworker, entreat Christ for our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Martha is painted as a matron, not as a nun: in a long dark or deep-red maphorion covering the head and shoulders in the manner of the holy women, her hands raised in prayer or her right hand held before the breast in acceptance. She has no instrument and no attribute of her own, and her identification in practice depends on context and inscription — she is shown at the foot of her son's column, looking up, in scenes of the Wonderful Mountain, and this grouping, with the inscription Ἡ ὉΣΙΑ ΜΑΡΘΑ, is the only secure identification. The same scheme serves for the other Martha at the foot of the Elder's column, so that an uninscribed mother-and-stylite composition proves nothing about which Martha is meant — a caution that applies to a good many museum captions.
No pre-1900 image securely inscribed for this Martha has been located for this collection. The 1699 Antiochian panel from Balamand stored with her son's entry shows both Symeons and their pilgrim crowds but does not name her, and was not used here.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the other Martha, mother of Symeon the Stylite the Elder. The two great Syrian stylites each had a mother named Martha, and both mothers are honoured — which is exactly the trap the name sets. This Martha is the Antiochene wife of John the perfumer, mother of the Younger Symeon (521–596), who died in 551 and lies at the foot of the Wonderful Mountain south-west of Antioch, and who is commemorated in the Byzantine calendar on July 4. The other Martha was the mother of the Elder Symeon (c. 390–459); the tradition of that Life relates that she came to her son's pillar at Telanissos, north-east of Antioch, longing to see him, was refused entry to the enclosure, waited outside until she died there, and was buried at the foot of his column, in what became the great martyrium of Qalʿat Simʿān. She is venerated chiefly in the Syriac and Maronite tradition and has no July 4 commemoration. The two women lived more than a century apart, at two different mountains on two sides of the same city, and neither their lives nor their feasts should be merged. Conflation is easy and common, because the Greek calendars say only "Martha, mother of Symeon the Stylite" and leave the reader to supply which Symeon.
- The year of her repose. 551 is the figure carried by the synaxaria and by the chronology of her son's Life (his ordination in 560 follows her death); a few notices give 555. The July 4 date is uniform.
- Her classification. The Greek books style her ὁσία and the Slavonic преподобная — the word normally reserved for a monastic saint — although she was never tonsured and died a laywoman and a widow. The calendars' usage is followed here (venerable), and the anomaly is recorded rather than corrected: the Church evidently judged that a rule of night prayer, silence, fasting and mercy kept in a house in Antioch was the monastic life under another form. It is a point worth pressing, since it is the reason her memory has been so much loved in the Antiochene tradition.
- The Life. Her Life is a separate but dependent text, transmitted with the Vita antiquior of Symeon the Younger and drawn from the same monastic memory on the Wonderful Mountain; there is also an account of the translation of her relics into the monastery church. Nothing about her is known from outside that dossier.