Tryphaena of Cyzicus
The Holy Martyr Tryphaena of Cyzicus
Martyr
Commemorated 31 January — Martyrdom at Cyzicus
Tryphaena of Cyzicus was a Christian martyr of Cyzicus on the Hellespont, a noblewoman who, moved by zeal to strengthen the wavering faithful during a persecution, came forward of her own accord to confess Christ boldly before the pagan authorities and to reproach the worship of idols. For this she was subjected to a succession of savage torments and at last given to the wild beasts, dying when a maddened bull gored her. She is venerated in the Greek tradition as the patroness of her city and is invoked by nursing mothers; her feast is January 31.
Tryphaena was a native of Cyzicus (Greek Kyzikos), the ancient city on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, and — the tradition holds — the daughter of devout and well-born parents, the senator Anastasius and his wife Socratia. Reared in the faith, she was consumed with love for Christ, and when persecution came upon the Christians of the region she did not hide, but, seeing the faithful shaken and some drawn toward apostasy, she came forward openly to strengthen the weak — publicly confessing Christ before the governor and boldly denouncing the emptiness of the idols.
For this the authorities seized her and put her to the ordeal of the martyrs. The accounts relate a series of torments from which she was preserved unharmed — casting into a heated furnace, suspension and the tearing of her flesh, exposure to fire — and finally her being thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. There, when the beasts would not touch her, a maddened bull was loosed upon her, which gored and tossed her, and of these wounds she died, receiving the crown of martyrdom. In the Greek tradition it is told that at her death milk rather than blood flowed from her wounds, a sign that made her the patroness invoked by nursing mothers and by women who lack milk for their children. She is honoured as a patroness of Cyzicus.
The date of her martyrdom is not securely transmitted: the Orthodox synaxaria place her early — a number of accounts assign her to the first century — while the setting of a formal arena-martyrdom fits the later pagan persecutions; the year is best left open, and her memory kept, as the calendars keep it, on January 31.
Feast and commemoration
January 31 (church date; Old Calendar civil February 13). The received Menaion gives Tryphaena a synaxarion notice rather than a proper service; the common office of a woman martyr serves her. Her cult is strongest at Cyzicus and in the Greek tradition, where she is invoked for the health of nursing mothers.
Iconography
Tryphaena is depicted as a young woman martyr — in the maiden's veil and mantle, holding the cross of martyrdom — and, in the narrative type, with the bull that was the instrument of her death. No identity-verified public-domain icon proper to her has been secured, and none is stored here. (Wanted: a public-domain icon of Tryphaena of Cyzicus — a Menologion of Basil II miniature for January 31 is the likely first-resort source.)