Theodora of Thessalonica

Aegina, and the flight from the Arabs

Theodora was born in 812 on Aegina, in a family of the island's clergy: her father a senior priest who ended his life as a monk, her brother a deacon, her sister a nun. She was taught to read from the Psalter at about seven, and was betrothed young to a man of standing on the island.

Her childhood coincided with the collapse of Byzantine security in the Aegean. The Arab conquest of Crete in the 820s turned the islands into a raiding ground, and the population of Aegina — like that of many of the Cyclades — abandoned it. Her brother was killed in one of these attacks. About 826 Theodora emigrated with her husband and her father to Thessalonica, the second city of the empire and the natural refuge of the northern Aegean, where the family had relatives in positions of consequence in the Church.

The daughter given to God

She bore children in Thessalonica and lost two of them in infancy. On the birth of a third, a daughter, she vowed to dedicate the child to the monastic life — the vow of Hannah, and a common enough resolution in a Byzantine household that had buried two babies. The girl, Theopiste, was given at the age of six to the convent where an aunt, Aikaterina, was in authority. (Modern students of the Life note that six is the schematic age of hagiography and may be an idealisation; the fact of the dedication is not in doubt.)

Her husband died in 837. Theodora distributed what she had to the poor and entered the convent of St Stephen the Protomartyr in Thessalonica, and her daughter was transferred there to be with her. For fifteen years mother and daughter lived and worked side by side in the same community. Then Theopiste was elected superior — and Theodora spent the remaining twenty-four years of her life under the obedience of the child she had borne.

The ascesis of obedience

This is the substance of her sanctity, and her biographer knows it. The Life does not record extreme fasts, or visions, or healings worked in her lifetime; it records that she was obedient, that she did not answer back, that she worked without complaint at whatever the community set her to, and that she bore for a quarter of a century a situation that the ancient world found grotesque — a mother under her daughter's rule — without ever using her motherhood as a claim. The Byzantine reader was expected to find this harder than a hair shirt, and to recognise in it the whole of the monastic programme: the cutting off of one's own will.

There is a second reason her memory was cherished at Thessalonica. Her life spans the iconoclast crisis — she was born under the second iconoclasm and lived to see the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 — and her Life is embedded with material about the confessors of the city, above all Antony, archbishop of Thessalonica, and with a polemic against the emperor Leo V. Her biography is thus also a document of the Thessalonican Church's memory of the persecution.

Repose, translation, and the myrrh

Theodora died on 29 August 892, at the age of eighty, and was buried in the common tomb of the nuns. Some time afterwards the authorities of the church determined to move her body to a sarcophagus of its own. The translation, as the Life tells it, was made at night, with clergy and the devout gathered; the stone would not be moved until they had prayed; and when the tomb was opened there flowed from it a fragrant, healing myrrh, which is the beginning of her cultus. Her biographer records a series of subsequent miracles, one of them the healing of his own sister — the kind of authorial detail that argues for a contemporary writing rather than a later legend.

Thessalonica has kept her ever since among its own saints. Byzantine and later Slavic art carried her further: Dionisius painted her among the venerable women at Ferapontov in 1502, and her name appears in the Russian menologia through the Slavonic translations of the Synaxarion.

The Life by Gregory

Almost everything above rests on one document, and it is a remarkable one. The Life of St Theodora of Thessalonica was written by a certain Gregory, a cleric of the city, within a generation of her death. At something like twenty thousand words it is the longest Byzantine hagiography of a woman that survives — longer than the lives of far more famous saints — and it is unusually circumstantial: it names streets and churches, dates events, and embeds a separate account of the translation of the relics. It is preserved in two recensions, one from a twelfth-century Moscow manuscript, another from a Vatican manuscript of the thirteenth or fourteenth century. For social historians it is a principal source for the life of ordinary women, for refugee movement in the ninth-century Aegean, and for the internal life of a Byzantine urban convent; for the Church it is the record of a saint whose greatness was hidden in the ordinary.