Photini of Blachernae
The Holy Martyr Photini, whose memory is kept beside the Church of Blachernae
Martyr
Commemorated 20 August — Memory kept at her martyrion beside the church of Blachernae in Constantinople
A woman martyr commemorated on August 20 in the Greek synaxaria, of whom the one transmitted detail is topographical rather than biographical: her memory was kept at her martyrion beside the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae in Constantinople. Neither her country, her persecutor, her century nor the manner of her death has come down. She is one of a considerable class of saints in the Byzantine calendar known only from the stational notices of the Synaxarion of Constantinople — saints whose names survived because a shrine in the capital was dedicated to them and the city went out to it on a fixed day.
The whole of the record is the synaxarion's line: the holy martyr Photini, whose synaxis is celebrated near the church of Blachernae.
This is not an accident of loss but a characteristic form of the source. The Synaxarion of Constantinople is, among other things, a stational calendar: it tells the reader of the Great Church where the city's liturgy went on a given day, and a great many of its shortest entries consist of a name and a shrine. In such notices the martyrion is the primary datum. Somewhere in the north-western quarter of the city, under the walls and beside the most venerated sanctuary of the Theotokos in Christendom — the Blachernae, with its holy spring and its relic of the Robe — there stood a small martyrion of a woman called Photini, and on August 20 the clergy and people went out to it. When the shrine perished, everything perished with it except the line in the book.
Her name, Φωτεινή, "the enlightened," is among the commonest names for women martyrs in the Greek calendar, and is the baptismal name traditionally given to the Samaritan woman of the fourth chapter of John.
Feast and commemoration
August 20 (church date; New Calendar civil August 20, Old Calendar civil September 2), within the Afterfeast of the Dormition. She is carried in the Greek day-lists for August 20; the Slavic calendars and the OCA do not list her. No office is appointed her, the day's service being that of the Dormition afterfeast with the Prophet Samuel.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy lamb Photini crieth out to thee with a great voice, O Jesus: I love thee, my Bridegroom, and seeking thee I contend, and am crucified and buried with thee in thy baptism; I suffer for thy sake, that I may reign with thee; I die for thee, that I may live in thee. Accept me as a spotless sacrifice, offered to thee in love. By her prayers, O merciful one, save thou our souls.
Iconography
No image of this martyr has been identified, and the confusion of her name with that of the Samaritan Woman makes any identification hazardous: an icon inscribed simply Ἡ ΑΓΙΑ ΦΩΤΕΙΝΗ will in practice always be the Samaritan at the well, and storing such an image here would prejudge the identity question set out above. Were the martyr of Blachernae painted in her own right, it would be in the common form of a woman martyr — maphorion and long tunic, the cross held before the breast, the hair covered — without narrative attribute, since no passion survives to supply one.
No storable image has been located, and this is recorded as a deliberate rejection rather than a failure of search.
Disputed questions
- Is she the Samaritan Woman? The obvious question, and one the notice does not answer. Photini the Samaritan — the great martyr and equal-to-the-apostles who died at Rome under Nero — was widely venerated at Constantinople, and it is not impossible that the Blachernae martyrion was hers and that August 20 preserves the memory of its dedication rather than of a second saint. Against the identification stands the plain fact that the calendars list this Photini as a distinct commemoration, on a day quite separate from the Samaritan's own feasts (February 26; March 20 in the Slavic books; and the movable Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, which is her principal commemoration). This entry follows the calendars and keeps her separate, while recording that the identification has been made and cannot be excluded.
- Date unknown. No century, emperor or persecution is attached to the notice. This entry accordingly carries no century field and is indexed among the saints whose era the sources do not fix.