Matrona of Constantinople

Our Venerable Mother Matrona of Constantinople

Venerable · b. c. 420, Perge in Pamphylia — d. c. 492

Matrona of Constantinople (c. 420 – c. 492) was born at Perge in Pamphylia and married young to a man named Dometian, to whom she bore a daughter, Theodota. Drawn wholly to the monastic life, she left her husband and, cutting her hair and dressing as a man, entered under the name Babylas a monastery of men led by the abbot Bassianos in Constantinople, where she lived undetected until her sex was disclosed. Sent away to protect the brotherhood, she passed through convents at Emesa, Jerusalem and Sinai, evading her husband's pursuit, before returning to Constantinople and founding a convent of her own, which she governed as abbess into great old age. She is one of the most celebrated of the holy women who took the monastic habit in male disguise, and is commemorated on November 9.

Origins and marriage

Matrona was born about the year 420 in the city of Perge in Pamphylia, in Asia Minor. She was given in marriage to a well-to-do man named Dometian and bore him a daughter, Theodota; the family afterwards settled in Constantinople. There the young wife — she is remembered as about twenty-five — was drawn ever more strongly to the churches and the all-night services of the city, and to a life given wholly to God, which her marriage did not allow. Entrusting her daughter to a devout woman named Susanna, she resolved to leave the world.

The disguise and the monastery of Bassianos

To escape both her husband and the notice that a woman living alone would draw, Matrona cut off her hair, put on a man's clothing, and presented herself as a eunuch named Babylas at a monastery of men in Constantinople governed by the abbot Bassianos. There she lived as a monk, and her ascetic labour and humility were such that none suspected her. The disguise was at length uncovered — the tradition tells it in more than one way, whether through a dream given to Bassianos, or through her own disclosure to the abbot when concealment grew impossible. Bassianos, recognising the genuineness of her calling but unable to keep a woman in a house of men, arranged for her to be received into a convent at Emesa in Syria.

Wanderings and the convent at Constantinople

Dometian, learning that his wife had entered religion, sought her out, and Matrona was obliged for a time to move from place to place to avoid him — through Emesa, and, in the fuller accounts, to Jerusalem and to Mount Sinai — living in strict asceticism wherever she went and gaining a reputation for holiness and spiritual counsel. After her husband's death removed the danger, she returned at last to Constantinople, where, with the support of Bassianos and of the imperial family, she founded a convent of women and became its abbess. She governed it for many years, forming her nuns in the ascetic life and receiving those who came to her for guidance, and reposed in great old age — reckoned by tradition at about a hundred years — around the year 492.

The tradition of the disguised monastic

Matrona stands among the best known of a distinctive company of holy women whom the Church commemorates as having lived, for a season or for life, in the habit and identity of men within monasteries: Pelagia, Eugenia, Euphrosyne of Alexandria, Theodora of Alexandria, Anastasia the Patrician, Apollinaria, Mary called Marinos, and others. In most of these lives the disguise is the means of a radical flight from the world — from a marriage, a betrothal, or a persecution — and the hidden asceticism it makes possible is presented as a particular sign of humility. Matrona's Life, one of the fuller and better attested of the group, was widely read in Byzantium and helped to fix the type.

Not to be confused with the martyrs of the same name: the Matrona of Ancyra who is one of the seven virgins martyred with Theodotus of Ancyra (May 18), Matrona of Thessalonica (March 27), and Matrona of Chios (October 20).

Feast and commemoration

November 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil November 22), kept universally in the Byzantine rite, among the several commemorations of the day. She is to be distinguished from the later Matrona of Chios, the fifteenth-century wonderworker of the Greek island, and from the various Russian saints and blessed ones of the name.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8

In you, O Mother, was the divine image surely preserved: for taking up the Cross, you followed Christ; by your deeds you taught us to despise the flesh, for it passes away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Therefore, O venerable Matrona, your spirit rejoices with the angels.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Matrona is depicted as an abbess in the dark monastic habit, holding a cross or a scroll; icons that recall her disguise show her tonsured and in a monk's riassa. She belongs to the ranks of venerable mothers and is so painted in the menologion series for November.