Olympia and Euphrosyne of Lesbos
The Holy Venerable Martyrs Olympia the Abbess and Euphrosyne, of Karyes on Lesbos
Venerable Martyr · Virgin · d. 1235, at Karyes on Lesbos
Commemorated 11 May — Martyrdom of the abbess and the eldress at the hands of pirates
Olympia and Euphrosyne were nuns of the monastery of Karyes at Thermi on Lesbos, put to death by pirates in 1235 — Olympia the young abbess of the house, Euphrosyne an eldress of it. Euphrosyne was hanged from a tree and burnt; Olympia was burnt over her whole body with torches, had a heated iron driven through her ears, and was at last nailed to a board with twenty nails. Their memory was lost for seven centuries and recovered in 1959, when their relics were found at the site of the ruined monastery in the same series of Lesbian discoveries that brought to light the relics of St Raphael and his companions. They are commemorated on May 11, and on Bright Tuesday with the Lesbian saints.
Karyes at Thermi
Olympia's parents, the tradition recovered on Lesbos relates, were of Constantinople: her father a priest, her mother of a priestly family. For reasons the account does not preserve they left the capital and went to the Peloponnese, and it was from there that the child came at last to Lesbos, where an aunt named Dorothy was abbess of the monastery of Karyes at Thermi, on the eastern side of the island above the gulf of Kalloni.
She entered the monastery at ten, on the death of her parents; was tonsured at nineteen; and was chosen abbess at twenty-five — an early age for the office, and a sign both of her formation and of the smallness of the house. Euphrosyne was one of the elder nuns of the community, remembered as an eldress — a spiritual mother of the sisters.
The thirteenth century was for the islands of the Aegean an age of collapse. The Fourth Crusade had destroyed the Byzantine state in 1204; the Aegean lay open between the Latin lordships, the Nicaean emperors and the Turkish coast; and piracy became endemic and organised, with island monasteries — undefended, holding vessels and plate, and containing captives worth selling — among its regular objects. Lesbos suffered repeatedly. The martyrdom of the sisters of Karyes belongs to that condition, and so does the destruction of the record of it: the monastery was destroyed and the memory of what happened there survived only in the soil.
The martyrdom
In 1235 pirates landed and fell upon the monastery. The community was scattered, taken or killed; the two who are commemorated were the abbess and the eldress, who did not flee and who were tortured — the tradition is explicit that the object was apostasy and information about hidden valuables, and that neither was given.
Euphrosyne was hanged from a tree and burnt beneath it. Olympia was burnt over her whole body with lighted torches; a red-hot iron rod was driven through her ears; and finally she was nailed to a board with twenty nails, and so died. The exactness of the recovered account — the number of the nails, the manner of each torture — is a feature of the Lesbian discoveries and is treated below.
Loss and rediscovery
The monastery was never rebuilt, and the martyrs' names disappeared from every calendar. Their recovery belongs to the extraordinary sequence of events on Lesbos in the mid-twentieth century: from 1959, at the site of the ruined monastery of Karyes at Thermi, relics were uncovered which were identified as those of Olympia and Euphrosyne, and the account of their lives and deaths came to be known through the same channel — reported visions and dreams given to local people — by which the story of St Raphael, St Nicholas and St Irene of Thermi had been recovered from 1959 onward, at a site scarcely distant from theirs. The discoveries were received by the Metropolis of Mytilene, the relics enshrined, and services composed; the two nuns entered the Greek calendar for May 11 and were joined to the Bright Tuesday commemoration of the Lesbian saints.
Feast and commemoration
May 11 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 24). The commemoration is proper to the Church of Greece and above all to the Metropolis of Mytilene, where the martyrs are honoured at the site of Karyes at Thermi; it is not in the Slavonic Menaia and is not kept in Antiochian usage. They are also commemorated on Bright Tuesday together with Raphael, Nicholas and Irene and the other saints of Thermi — a movable commemoration which belongs to the paschal cycle and not to this fixed day. Their proper Greek office is a modern composition and its texts are not reproduced here.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of women martyrs)
As lambs of the flock of Christ ye were found in the fold of Karyes, and when the wolves came ye did not flee, O Olympia and Euphrosyne; for by fire and by iron ye were perfected, and hidden in the earth for many generations, ye have been revealed in these latter days to the joy of Lesbos: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
The tortures of the enemies of Christ ye endured with courage, O venerable martyrs, the one hanged upon the tree and the other pierced and nailed; and now, your relics being made manifest, ye pour out healings upon those who honour you.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The two are painted together as nuns in the full monastic habit — black rason, apostolnik and mantle — each holding the martyr's cross, Olympia the younger and marked as abbess by the pastoral staff or by her position at the left, Euphrosyne the elder and grey. Narrative panels show the two martyrdoms side by side: the eldress bound to a tree with the fire beneath her, the abbess stretched upon the board with the nails, and the torches and the heated rod in the hands of the pirates; the ruined monastery of Karyes and the sea with the pirate vessel supply the background. Because their memory was recovered only in 1959, all icons of them are modern works, and none can be stored here; nor, from the destruction of Karyes in the thirteenth century until the discoveries, was there any cultus that could have produced an older image.
Disputed questions
- The character of the sources. There is no medieval vita, no synaxarion notice, and no manuscript witness to these martyrs: the whole narrative — names, dates, family, ages, and the details of the tortures — derives from the twentieth-century Lesbian revelations of 1959 and after, together with the physical evidence of the relics found at Karyes. The relics themselves and the ruins are objective; the biography attached to them rests on a category of evidence that the Church has received in this instance (the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Metropolis of Mytilene sanctioned the commemoration) but that stands on a different footing from documentary hagiography. This entry records the tradition as the Church of Lesbos transmits it and marks its provenance rather than treating it as a chronicle.
- The year 1235. The date given by the tradition falls in the period of Latin and Turkish pressure on Lesbos and is historically plausible, but is not independently attested. Some accounts of the Lesbian saints place the destruction of Karyes in the same wave of raids as other island losses of the mid-thirteenth century.
- Not to be confused with Olympias the Deaconess of Constantinople (†408, July 25), the friend and correspondent of St John Chrysostom, nor with the several other saints named Euphrosyne — in particular Euphrosyne of Alexandria (September 25) and Euphrosyne of Polotsk (May 23).