Parasceva of the Balkans

Origins and early life

Parasceva was born in the village of Epibatai (Epivates, the modern Selimpaşa) on the north shore of the Sea of Marmara between Selymbria and Constantinople, to wealthy and pious parents; the conventional dating places her in the eleventh century. Her name — Paraskeue, "Friday," the day of the Lord's Passion — was borne by several earlier saints and would follow her through every language of her later veneration: Petka among the Serbs and Bulgarians, Parascheva and "Sfânta Vineri" (Holy Friday) among the Romanians.

The turning point of her childhood is told exactly as the Gospel gives it. At about ten years of age she heard read in church the words "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself" (Matthew 16:24), and took them as spoken to herself: from that day she repeatedly gave away her rich clothing to the poor, returning home in beggars' dress, for which she endured much grief from her family. Her elder brother heard the same call and left home first, becoming a monk under the name Euthymius; after some thirty years in the monastic life he was consecrated Bishop of Madytos on the Hellespont, and is himself venerated as a saint (Euthymius of Madytos, May 5).

Ascetic struggle

On the death of her parents Parasceva left Epibatai for good. She went first to Constantinople, where she was tonsured — the OCA's account places her tonsure at the age of fifteen — and then, by way of Herakleia in Pontus, where the Life of the saint has her spend five years in a convent, she made the pilgrim's journey to Jerusalem. From the Holy City she withdrew into the desert of the Jordan, taking up in a woman's measure the life of the great desert dwellers: extreme fasting, night vigil, unceasing prayer, and complete hiddenness from the world. The hagiographic tradition dwells on the severity of her regime — herbs for food, tears in place of drink, the bare ground for a bed — and on the warfare with the demons that the desert fathers before her had known in the same wilderness.

When she had lived there many years, an angel of the Lord appeared to her and commanded her to return to her homeland: "there thou must leave thy body to the earth, and pass with thy soul to the Lord." She obeyed, travelled back through Constantinople — venerating the holy places and the church of the Wisdom of God — and settled again in the region of her birth, at Epibatai and the neighbouring Kallikrateia, living her last two years in ascetic stillness attached to the church there. She died young — at twenty-seven, in the account the OCA transmits — a stranger among her own people, and was buried without honour near the sea, as an unknown woman of prayer.

The uncovering of the relics

The uncovering of her body is the hinge of her whole cultus, and the Lives tell it with homely vividness. A sailor's corpse was cast up by the sea near her grave, and its stench so afflicted a nearby ascetic — a stylite in the transmitted account — that he had workmen dig a pit to bury it. Digging, they found a woman's body whole and incorrupt, and, thinking nothing of it, buried the corpse beside it and went home. That night one of them, a pious man named George, saw in a dream a queen enthroned in light amid a host of angels, who reproached the diggers for leaving her body in the mire beside a corpse and named herself: Parasceva of Epibatai. A devout woman named Euphemia saw the same vision. The village clergy and people exhumed the body, found it fragrant and entire, and translated it with candles and censing to the church of the Holy Apostles at Epibatai, where healings began at once and continued — the OCA's notice says — for about a hundred and seventy-five years, until the relics began the long journey that carried her name across the peninsula.

Relics and translations

The odyssey of Parasceva's relics is a map of Balkan history; the entry records the standard sequence and notes the divergent dates under Disputed questions.

• To Tarnovo. In the years after his victory at Klokotnitsa (1230), when his power reached the Aegean, the Bulgarian tsar John Asen II obtained the relics from the region of Kallikrateia — then under Frankish lords — and had them translated in state to his capital Tarnovo, an event usually dated 1238 (the OCA gives 1223). Met by the tsar, the patriarch Joachim, and the whole city, the relics made Parasceva the patroness of Tarnovo and of the Second Bulgarian Empire; as Petka Tarnovska she entered the heart of Bulgarian devotion, and in the fourteenth century the last great patriarch of Tarnovo, Euthymius, wrote the Life that became the classic account of her.
• To Vidin and Belgrade. When Tarnovo fell to the Ottomans (1393), the relics were carried to Vidin on the Danube, and on Vidin's fall passed into Serbian keeping — the standard account brings them to Belgrade about 1396 at the instance of the princess Milica, while the OCA transmits a variant involving Mircea the Elder of Wallachia and "Princess Angelina of Serbia" (see Disputed questions). In Serbia the veneration of Sveta Petka struck the deep root it retains today; the spring beside her chapel at Kalemegdan in Belgrade is still resorted to for healing.
• To Constantinople. When Belgrade fell to Suleiman in 1521, the relics were taken to Constantinople, and came to rest in the patriarchal church, where they remained about a hundred and twenty years.
• To Iaşi. In 1641 the Ecumenical Patriarch Parthenius I and his synod granted the relics to Basil (Vasile) Lupu, voivode of Moldavia, who had paid the crushing debts of the Patriarchate. On June 13, 1641 they were received with imperial honours at Iaşi and enshrined in Lupu's newly built church of the Three Hierarchs (Trei Ierarhi). There they survived the centuries — including a fire on December 26, 1888, from which the relics were brought out unharmed, an escape the Romanian tradition counts among her miracles — and in 1889 they were placed in the new Metropolitan Cathedral of Iaşi, where they rest to this day.

Veneration and later cultus

No woman saint is more widely loved in the Orthodox Balkans. In Romania she is Cuvioasa Parascheva, patroness of Moldavia; her October 14 feast at Iaşi draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims annually — queues to venerate the relics run for days — making it one of the largest recurring pilgrimages in the Orthodox world. In Bulgaria she is Petka Tarnovska, a national patroness whose name marks churches from the Danube to the Rhodopes, including the famous church of Sveta Petka Samardzhiyska in Sofia. In Serbia and among the Serbs of Bosnia and Macedonia, Sveta Petka is the protectress of the home and of women, honoured with countless churches, springs, and family patronal feasts on October 27 (the civil date of the Old Calendar). In Moldova and among the Slavs generally her name is a byword for help in trouble; and the Greek synaxaria too keep her memory on October 14 as "our venerable mother Parasceva the New." Folk devotion has woven her deeply into the fabric of the week itself: as the personified holy Friday she inherited, and in places exchanged, the veneration of her earlier namesakes (see Disputed questions).

Hymnographic and literary legacy

Her hagiography is itself a monument of Balkan letters. In the twelfth century the patriarch Nicholas IV Mouzalon of Constantinople, finding in circulation a Life "written by a peasant" and unworthy of the saint, ordered it destroyed and commissioned the deacon Basilikos to write a proper one. The classic Life, however, is the Church Slavonic one composed in the fourteenth century by Euthymius, patriarch of Tarnovo, the greatest man of letters of mediaeval Bulgaria; and the translation of the relics into Serbia was recounted by Gregory Tsamblak, Euthymius's literary heir. Full services to her exist in Slavonic, Greek and Romanian, and her akathist remains among the most used in Romanian and Slavic devotion.