Oraiozele of Byzantium
The Holy Virgin-Martyr Oraiozele of Byzantium, disciple of the Apostle Andrew
Martyr · Virgin · d. c. 95, at Byzantium
Commemorated 26 July — Beheading at Byzantium under Domitian
Oraiozele — the name means something like "beautiful in zeal" — belongs to the small group of saints attached to the first preaching of the Apostle Andrew at Byzantium, before that town was Constantinople. A pagan by birth and, the notice says, an educated woman, she was converted and baptised by St Andrew himself, who authorised her to teach the faith to other women. She attached herself to the church of the Archangel Michael at Rheuma on the European shore of the Bosphorus, gathered disciples, and brought many of the town's pagans to Christ. In the persecution of Domitian she was arrested, beaten — and, the account notes, seemed not to feel the blows, as though another were bearing them — and at last beheaded, her body being burned. She is invoked by mothers who cannot conceive or cannot nurse. Her feast is July 26.
Byzantium in the apostolic age
The tradition of the Church of Constantinople holds that the Apostle Andrew the First-called preached along the Black Sea and the Bosphorus and founded the church of Byzantium, ordaining Stachys, one of the Seventy, as its first bishop. Oraiozele belongs to this cycle. Whatever the historical weight of the Andrean foundation — and it is a question with a long and contested literature — the small company of Byzantine saints attached to it is old and stable in the Greek synaxaria, and she is one of them.
She is described as having been a pagan who came to hear the Apostle preach, was persuaded, and was baptised by his own hand. She was, unusually, a woman of some education, and was able to master the teaching quickly and accurately; on that ground Andrew is said to have given her a commission to catechise women, a role the early Church regularly entrusted to women and which the later order of deaconesses formalised.
At the Archangel's church at Rheuma
She settled near the shrine of the Archangel Michael at Rheuma (τὰ Ῥεύματα, "the currents") on the Bosphorus — one of the oldest sanctuaries of the Archangel in the region, on the European bank north of the town. There she lived an ascetic life, taught, and brought a number of the townspeople to baptism. Two women, formerly idolaters, became her permanent disciples and shared her fasting and vigils.
Martyrdom
Under Domitian (81–96), whose persecution the tradition places at the end of the reign, she was denounced and brought before the authorities — the notice says before the emperor himself, which is a hagiographical convention rather than a datum. She would not deny Christ. She was ordered to be beaten, and the account preserves an arresting detail: she gave no sign of feeling the blows, "as though it were another who was being struck." Sentence was then passed and she was beheaded; her body was afterwards burned, which is why no relics of her were ever shown.
Cultus
Her cultus is local to the Bosphorus and to the Greek Church. The synaxaria of Constantinople keep her on July 26, and she is invoked in particular by women who are barren or unable to nurse — a patronage attested in the Greek notices and reflected in the prayers said at her commemoration. She is not carried by the Slavonic menaia, and the Antiochian and Russian calendars do not keep her; the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Church of Greece do.
Feast and commemoration
July 26 (church date; New Calendar civil July 26, Old Calendar civil August 8), kept in the Greek usage among the several commemorations of the day. She is a synaxarion saint: there is no proper canon in general circulation, and the service is taken from the common of a virgin-martyr with her name inserted. On the same day the Church of Constantinople keeps the Icon of the Mother of God "of the Emvolon", also a commemoration of the capital.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy lamb, O Jesus, crieth out with a loud voice: thee, my Bridegroom, I love, and seeking thee I contend, and am crucified and buried with thy baptism; I suffer for thy sake that I may reign with thee, I die for thee that I may live in thee. Receive as a spotless sacrifice her that was slain in love for thee. At her entreaties, O merciful One, save our souls.
Iconography
No early image of Oraiozele is known, and she has no fixed attribute of her own. Where she is painted at all — chiefly in modern Greek calendars and in the churches of the Bosphorus shore — she takes the standard type of the virgin-martyr: a young woman standing, in a long tunic and maphorion, holding the cross of martyrdom in the right hand and with the left open before the breast. Because she was a disciple of the Apostle, some compositions place her among the figures around Andrew the First-called in cycles of his Bosphorus preaching, and because her church was the Archangel's she is occasionally shown with a small view of the shrine at Rheuma behind her.
No pre-1900 image of this saint could be located; the surviving depictions are modern and under copyright, so none has been stored.
Disputed questions
- How much is history? The record is a synaxarion notice, not a passion of any length, and it depends entirely on the Andrean foundation-tradition of Byzantium, which cannot be documented before the later Byzantine centuries. Nothing here is independently attested. This entry gives an honestly short Life for that reason.
- The dating. Baptism by Andrew (who is placed at Byzantium in the 30s–50s) and martyrdom under Domitian (81–96) require a very long life. The synaxarion is untroubled by this; a critical reader should be.
- The name. Ὡραιοζήλη is otherwise almost unattested as a personal name; some have taken it for an epithet ("of beautiful zeal") that hardened into a name. Variant spellings Oraiozeli, Horaiozele and Oreozeli occur in the manuscripts.