Paul, Tatta and their Children

The Holy Martyrs Paul, Tatta, and their children Sabinian, Maximus, Rufus and Eugene, of Damascus

Martyr

Paul and his wife Tatta, with their children Sabinian, Maximus, Rufus and Eugene, were a Christian family of Damascus who were denounced together for the faith, tortured together, and together gave up their souls to God under their torments. The synaxarion transmits neither year nor persecutor — only the household's common confession, which its verses celebrate: the father bearing witness with his children, and Tatta "wisely ranging herself" with them all. They are commemorated together on September 25.

The whole surviving record of these martyrs is the notice of the synaxaria. Paul and Tatta were husband and wife, citizens of Damascus, and had four children — Sabinian, Maximus, Rufus and Eugene — whom they had raised in the faith of Christ. Denounced to the authorities as Christians, the entire family was arrested; the sources say they were beaten, suspended and scraped, and subjected to other torments, and that in the midst of these tortures, praying for strength and refusing to deny Christ, they surrendered their souls to God. No year, no reigning emperor, and no further circumstances are transmitted; the commemoration preserves what the persecution could not destroy — the names, the city, and the fact of a family martyred undivided.

The Greek verses on the family fix its image: the father witnesses with his children, and the mother's name, Tatta, is turned into a play on the verb tattein, "to range in order" — she ranges herself, with sober wisdom, in the same rank as her husband and sons.

Feast and commemoration

September 25 (church date; Old Calendar civil October 8), a synaxarion commemoration of the universal Byzantine calendar, kept with a notice and verses in the Greek books and listed in the Slavic menologies; the day's proper services belong to Euphrosyne of Alexandria (Greek use) and Sergius of Radonezh (Slavic use).

Iconography

No fixed iconographic type is attested; a depiction would follow the convention for family companies of martyrs — the parents with their four children ranged beside them, each bearing the martyr's cross. No storable pre-modern image of the family has been identified; the saints are recorded among the wanted icons.

Disputed questions

The transmitted forms of the children's names vary slightly between the books (Sabinianus/Sabinian, Eugenius/Eugene); the family is entered here, per repository practice for companies martyred together with no independent cultus of the members, as a single group commemoration.
The OCA online calendar's day-page for September 25 (2026, consulted live) does not carry the family, though the commemoration stands in the Synaxarion of Constantinople, the Greek Menaion for the day, and the Slavic menologies; the difference of enumeration is recorded here per repository policy.