Hagiographia: Saints, Relics & Holy Mysteries

Roman Catholic

Alban of Mainz

A late-Roman priest beheaded at Mainz and pictured for centuries carrying his own mitred head, a cephalophore like Denis of Paris. His cult never stopped at Lauingen on the Danube, where a hospital church keeps relics in his name and blessed bands are still tied on the wrists of the sick against drowning every June 21.

Feast day · June 21

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Avramije the Recluse

Avramije, Abraham the Recluse of Kidun, was a fourth-century Syrian ascetic who fled his own wedding, walled up his cell, and lived half a century behind a small window. When his orphaned niece Mary, whom he had raised, was seduced and fell into prostitution, the hermit did the one worldly thing of his life: he put on a soldier's clothes, rode to the brothel where she worked, and won her back with tenderness instead of judgment. His Life is one of the classic tales of Syrian monasticism.

Feast day · October 29 (November 11 on the new calendar)

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox

Catherine of Alexandria

Catherine of Alexandria was the medieval ideal of the learned virgin martyr: a scholar-princess who out-argued fifty philosophers and broke the wheel built to break her. No text mentions her before the ninth century, and in 1969 Rome quietly took her off the general calendar. The cult was real; the woman is an open question.

Feast day · November 25

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox

Cecilia of Rome

Cecilia was a Roman martyr venerated since late antiquity. The line that made her the patroness of music describes her not listening to it, and the sculptor who saw her opened tomb in 1599 carved what he said he saw: a woman lying on her side, as if asleep.

Feast day · November 22

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox

Christopher the Christ-Bearer

Christopher is the giant who carried a child across a river and found himself bending under the weight of the world's maker. A martyrium near Chalcedon was consecrated to him in 452, so the veneration is ancient; the famous legend is not history, and in 1969 Rome left his feast to local calendars. Eastern icons preserve the strangest layer: Christopher with the head of a dog.

Feast day · July 25 (West), May 9 (East)

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Cosmas and Damian

Cosmas and Damian were brothers and physicians in Asia Minor, raised in the faith by their Christian mother Theodota. They healed the sick and would take no payment, since they kept the command 'freely you have received, freely give.' The tradition tells that Damian once accepted three eggs from a grateful woman, and Cosmas, who had vowed they take nothing, was so angered he asked to be buried apart; a healed camel is said to have spoken to reconcile them, and they were buried together at Fereman. Unlike the other saintly pairs of the same name, this pair died in peace. They are the patrons of doctors and pharmacists, invoked for healing, and in the Serbian lands their feast on 14 November is Vračevi, the day of the healers.

Feast day · November 14 / 1 November old calendar (Vračevi, Serbian Orthodox; the Asian pair)

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Cyriacus the Anchorite

Cyriacus the Anchorite was a hermit of the Palestinian desert who lived from 449 to 557, dying at the age of a hundred and nine. His life was written by Cyril of Scythopolis, who knew the men who knew him. He is called the anchorite because he kept withdrawing, from monastery to monastery and desert to deeper desert, until he was living alone in a cave with a lion for a guard. In the Serbian folk calendar his feast on 12 October is Miholjdan, and the warm days that linger around it are called the miholjsko leto, the Indian summer.

Feast day · October 12 (September 29 old calendar); folk name Miholjdan

Eastern Orthodox

Demetrius of Thessaloniki

Demetrius died at Thessaloniki in the early fourth century, speared in prison after a young man he had blessed killed the emperor's champion in the arena. His shrine became the heart of the city, and his relics were said to stream a fragrant myrrh, which gave him the name Mirotočivi. The historical martyr is faint, and the armoured warrior on the red horse is a later image, but the cult is one of the oldest and largest in the Orthodox world. Serbian families keep him as Mitrovdan on 8 November.

Feast day · Mitrovdan, 8 November (26 October old calendar)

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox

Denis of Paris

Denis was sent to convert Paris and beheaded around 250; the legend has him carry his own head north from Montmartre, preaching as he walked, until he chose the spot where the abbey of Saint-Denis rose, the burial church of the French kings. In the 830s the abbot Hilduin fused him with Dionysius the Areopagite and with the mystical writer now called Pseudo-Dionysius, a three-in-one identity that held for three centuries until Abelard doubted it out loud and had to leave the abbey.

Feast day · October 9

Roman Catholic · Anglican · Lutheran

Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant who gave up everything for a life of absolute poverty, founded the Franciscan order, and reshaped medieval Christianity. He preached to birds, is said to have tamed the wolf of Gubbio, staged the first Nativity scene at Greccio in 1223, and wrote the Canticle of the Sun that calls the sun, moon, and death his brothers and sisters. In 1224, on Mount La Verna, he became the first person on record to receive the stigmata, the five wounds of the crucified Christ. He died in 1226 and was canonized two years later; his feast is October 4, and he is the patron of animals and of ecology.

Feast day · October 4

Roman Catholic

Gallus of the Steinach

Gallus was a wandering monk, traditionally Irish, who came to the Continent with Columbanus around 610. At Tuggen he burned the local pagans' temple and had to flee for his life; when Columbanus pressed on to Italy, Gallus stayed behind sick and settled as a hermit in the Steinach valley of what is now northeastern Switzerland, where the tradition says a bear fetched wood for his fire in exchange for bread. He is said to have exorcised the possessed daughter of Duke Gunzo, refused the bishopric of Constance in favor of his own student, and died at Arbon around 646. A century later the Abbey of Saint Gallen rose on the site of his hermitage and became one of the great monastic libraries of Europe; the city and canton of St. Gallen carry his bear to this day.

Feast day · October 16 (Gallustag)

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox · Muslim folk veneration (al-Khidr)

George of Lydda

A soldier martyred at Lydda around 303, venerated across the whole Mediterranean within a century or two. His written acts were so wild that a Roman decree of 496 listed them among the apocrypha, making George perhaps the only saint whose file the church stamped 'unreliable' while the cult was still young. The dragon and the princess are an eleventh-century addition that swallowed everything that came before.

Feast day · April 23

Folk Catholic

Guinefort the Greyhound

Guinefort was a greyhound killed by his own knight in a moment of misreading: the bloodied dog had saved the baby from a serpent, not attacked it. Peasants of the Dombes buried him with honors and began bringing sick children to the grave. The inquisitor Stephen of Bourbon dug up the bones, burned the grove, and forbade the cult; a folklorist found people still praying in Saint Guinefort's wood in 1879.

Roman Catholic

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc heard Michael, Margaret and Catherine from the age of about thirteen, led an army at seventeen, and was burned as a heretic at nineteen. The transcripts of both her trials survive, which makes her the rarest thing in hagiography: a saint we can read in her own recorded words.

Feast day · May 30

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox · Islam (as the prophet Yahya) · Mandaean

John the Baptist

John baptized in the Jordan, criticized a king's marriage, and was beheaded at the fortress of Machaerus. Josephus records him independently of the Gospels, three religions keep his memory, his birth feast sits on midsummer, and four cities claim his skull.

Feast day · June 24 (nativity); August 29 (beheading)

Eastern Orthodox

Lazar of Serbia

Lazar Hrebeljanović held the largest of the Serbian lands after the empire of Dušan fell apart. On 28 June 1389 he led a coalition against Sultan Murad I on the field of Kosovo. Both rulers died; Lazar was captured and beheaded. The battle was militarily inconclusive, but out of it came the Kosovo Covenant, the story of a prince who chose a heavenly kingdom over an earthly one, and the day of it, Vidovdan, became the axis of Serbian identity.

Feast day · Vidovdan, 28 June (15 June old calendar)

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Luke the Evangelist

Luke was a physician, a Greek of Antioch, and the companion of Paul who wrote the third gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. A later tradition made him something more: the first icon painter, who is said to have painted the Virgin from life, and so the patron saint of every iconographer who came after. His symbol is the ox, and tradition holds he died at Thebes in Greece, hanged on an olive tree at the age of eighty-four. His relics rest today at Padua. In the Serbian lands his feast on 31 October is Lukindan, an old household slava that also marks the turn from autumn into winter.

Feast day · October 31 / 18 October old calendar (Lukindan, Serbian Orthodox); October 18 (Roman Catholic)

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic · Coptic Orthodox

Mark the Evangelist

Mark is the evangelist behind the second gospel, traditionally the interpreter of the Apostle Peter, and by tradition the founder and first bishop of the church of Alexandria, where he was martyred. His symbol is the winged lion. In 828 two Venetian merchants stole his relics from Alexandria and carried them to Venice, hidden in a basket under salt pork so the Muslim officials would not search it, and Mark became the patron of Venice, his lion its emblem. In the Serbian lands his feast on 8 May is Markovdan, an old household slava and a day when no one works the fields, for fear of the hail the saint is said to carry.

Feast day · May 8 / 25 April old calendar (Markovdan, Serbian Orthodox); April 25 (Roman Catholic)

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox · Anglican

Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene appears in all four Gospels as a follower of Jesus, freed of seven demons, present at the crucifixion when the men had fled, and the first person to find the empty tomb and see the risen Christ, sent by him to tell the others. The early church called her the Apostle to the Apostles. In 591 Pope Gregory the Great fused her with two other women into a single repentant prostitute, an identity the West kept for fourteen centuries and the East never accepted. This entry follows the real woman under the legend: the first witness, the invented harlot, the teacher of the Gnostic Gospel of Mary, the Provence hermit of medieval legend, and the bride of modern bloodline myth.

Feast day · July 22 (civil August 4 on the Julian reckoning — Blaga Marija in Serbia)

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox · Anglican

Michael the Archangel

Michael is the warrior archangel whose name is a question: Mîkā'ēl, 'Who is like God?' In the Book of Daniel he is the angelic prince who guards Israel; in Revelation 12 he leads the heavenly host and throws down 'the great dragon, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan.' Later tradition made him the weigher of souls at the Last Judgment, scales in hand, a role borrowed in image from older traditions including the Egyptian weighing of the heart. His sanctuaries sit on high places from Skellig Michael to Monte Sant'Angelo, often on ground that held an older cult. He is named in the Qur'an as Mīkāl. He is constantly confused with Saint George, but they are different figures: Michael is an eternal archangel whose dragon is evil itself, while George is a mortal soldier-saint whose dragon-slaying was added to his legend only in the Middle Ages.

Feast day · September 29 (Michaelmas); November 8 in the East (Synaxis of the Archangels)

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox

Nicholas of Myra

A bishop of Myra who died around 343, of whom no contemporary record survives; the earliest full life was written almost five centuries later. Sailors from Bari stole his bones from Myra in 1087, and the tomb has produced a liquid called manna ever since. In 1953 the anatomist Luigi Martino measured the skeleton, which is why we have a reconstructed face for Santa Claus: an old man with a broken nose.

Feast day · December 6 (translation feast May 9)

Roman Catholic

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Our Lady of Guadalupe is the image on the tilma kept in the basilica at Tepeyac in Mexico City, and the account of the four apparitions to Juan Diego in December 1531. The written apparition story surfaces late, in two books printed in 1648 and 1649, while the earliest hard paper about the shrine is a bad-tempered church quarrel of 1556. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, writing in the 1570s, recorded that the pilgrims walking to the new church still called the place by the name of the goddess whose temple had stood there, Tonantzin, and called that a satanic invention. This entry keeps his complaint in his own words, and keeps the question he raised open.

Feast day · 12 December

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox

Our Lady of Sorrows

Our Lady of Sorrows, the Mater Dolorosa, is the Virgin Mary shown with her heart pierced by seven swords, one for each of the Seven Sorrows of her life. The image grows from a single line of prophecy in Luke, where the old man Simeon tells her a sword will pierce her own soul. Medieval Italy built a devotion and an order around it; Orthodox Russia arrived at the same seven-sworded heart on its own. This entry follows how one sword became seven, and a mother's grief became an emblem carried through the streets.

Feast day · September 15 (also the Friday before Palm Sunday)

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Peter and Paul

Peter and Paul are kept on one feast, Petrovdan, and shown in one icon, often embracing or holding the Church between them. One was a Galilean fisherman who denied Jesus three times; the other was a Pharisee who watched Stephen die and then met a light on the road to Damascus. They led different missions, clashed in public at Antioch, and by tradition were both martyred in Rome under Nero. The Church remembers the concord, though the record also keeps the argument.

Feast day · Petrovdan, 12 July (29 June old calendar)

Eastern Orthodox

Petka (Paraskeva of the Balkans)

Petka, known in Greek as Paraskeva, was born near Constantinople around the eleventh century, gave everything to the poor, and died a hermit at about twenty-seven. Her body was found uncorrupted, and for nine hundred years it was carried from Epivates to Tarnovo to Belgrade to Constantinople to Iaşi as the states that held it rose and fell. She is one of the most venerated saints of the Serbian and Balkan Orthodox world, patron of the sick and of women, and her folk cult absorbed an older Slavic layer tied to Friday and women's work.

Feast day · October 27 (October 14 on the old calendar), Petkovdan

Eastern Orthodox

Procopius of Caesarea

Eusebius, who lived through the persecution, records Procopius as a reader and exorcist from Scythopolis, beheaded at Caesarea in 303 as the first to die in Palestine under Diocletian. Centuries later a second story grew over the first: a pagan officer named Neanias, sent to hunt Christians, is stopped on the road by a shining cross and a voice, and turns from soldier of the emperor to soldier of Christ. The warrior great-martyr of the icons is that later figure. Serbian families keep him as Prokopijevdan on 21 July, a patron of brides, children, and miners.

Feast day · Prokopijevdan, 21 July (8 July old calendar)

Eastern Orthodox

Prohor of Pčinja

Prohor of Pčinja was an 11th-century hermit who spent decades in a cave on Mount Kozjak in the far south of the Serbian lands. Tradition says that as a young ascetic he met a hunter named Diogenes and foretold that he would one day be emperor, asking only to be remembered; the hunter is identified with Romanos IV Diogenes, who did take the Byzantine throne in 1068. After Prohor's death the emperor is said to have found his relics and built a monastery over them, one church dedicated to the Apostle Luke and one to Prohor himself, and holy myrrh flowed from the bones. His monastery still stands on the Pčinja, and his feast is kept on 1 November.

Feast day · November 1 / 19 October old calendar (Serbian Orthodox; a second commemoration 15 January)

Roman Catholic

Rita of Cascia

Margherita Lotti of Roccaporena pardoned her husband's murderers, entered the convent at Cascia, and bore a wound on her forehead for the last fifteen years of her life. She became the saint people turn to when nothing else has worked.

Feast day · May 22

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic · Serbian folk religion (as Sveti Ilija Gromovnik, the Thunderer) · venerated also by islamicized Serbs (folk)

Saint Elijah the Prophet (Sveti Ilija)

The Old Testament prophet Elijah shut heaven for three and a half years, called fire down on Mount Carmel, and was taken up alive in a chariot of fire. Serbian folk religion made his July feast, Ilindan, the day of Sveti Ilija Gromovnik, the Thunderer whose wheels are the thunder, and it kept traits of the pre-Christian thunder god Perun. His sister Ognjena Marija hides the date from him so he will not burn the world.

Feast day · August 2 (July 20 Julian) — Ilindan

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic (as Margaret of Antioch) · Serbian folk religion (as Ognjena Marija)

Saint Marina of Antioch (Ognjena Marija)

Marina of Antioch was baptized at twelve, tortured under Diocletian, and beheaded at fifteen after seizing a copper hammer and beating Satan with it. Serbian folk religion keeps her July feast as Ognjena Marija, the Fiery Mary who rules fire and fever beside Elijah the Thunderer, first of a trio of women's days when no work is done.

Feast day · July 30 (July 17 Julian)

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic (as Saint Pantaleon, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers) · Serbian folk tradition (as Sveti Pantelija)

Saint Panteleimon of Nicomedia (Sveti Pantelejmon)

A young physician of Nicomedia, baptized by the priest Hermolaus, healed a blind man in the name of Christ and was denounced by the doctors of the city. Beheaded under an olive tree around 304, he became the Orthodox world's great healer, invoked at every blessing of water and oil. Serbian villages kept his day, Pantelijevdan, as the last of the fire days, and one recorded folk song gives him the strangest birth in the calendar: two sisters who had no brother made one.

Feast day · August 9 (July 27 Julian) — Pantelijevdan; July 27 in the West

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Saints Joachim and Anna (Sveti Joakim i Ana)

An old couple, childless for fifty years, shamed at the temple and answered by an angel: the parents of the Virgin Mary come not from the Gospels but from the Protoevangelium of James, written in the second century. The church rejected the book and kept the story. Orthodox tradition calls Joachim and Anna the bogootci, the Ancestors of God, and ends every Divine Liturgy with their names. Their day is September 22, the day after Mala Gospojina.

Feast day · September 22 (September 9 Julian), the day after Mala Gospojina; July 26 in the Roman Catholic calendar

Eastern Orthodox

Sava of Serbia

Sava was born Rastko, the youngest son of the Serbian ruler Stefan Nemanja. He fled the court for Mount Athos as a teenager, founded the monastery of Hilandar, and in 1219 secured an independent Serbian Church with himself as its first archbishop. He wrote its first legal code and is remembered as the father of Serbian literacy, honored every January on Savindan, the patron day of Serbian schools. In 1595 the Ottomans burned his relics on a hill in Belgrade to break his hold on the people; the largest Orthodox church in the Balkans now stands on the spot.

Feast day · January 27 (January 14 old calendar), Savindan

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Sergius and Bacchus

Sergius and Bacchus were high officers at the Roman court, honoured for their courage until the emperor learned they were Christians. When they refused to sacrifice to the idols they were stripped of their rank and sent east, in women's clothing, to the governor Antiochus. In the tradition Bacchus was beaten to death, and Sergius, made to walk in iron shoes studded with nails, was beheaded at Resafa in Syria around the year 303. Resafa became Sergiopolis, one of the great pilgrimage cities of the East, and Sergius became a patron of soldiers across the Christian and Arab world. In the Serbian lands their feast on 20 October is Srđevdan, an old household slava.

Feast day · October 20 / 7 October old calendar (Srđevdan, Serbian Orthodox); October 7 (Roman Catholic)

Eastern Orthodox

Stefan Dečanski

Stefan Uroš III, called Dečanski after the monastery he raised, was a king of the Nemanjić line, son of King Milutin and father of Tsar Dušan. The tradition holds that his father had him blinded and that Saint Nicholas restored his sight; historians doubt the blinding was ever complete. He founded the monastery of Visoki Dečani and won the battle of Velbužd in 1330. He was deposed and killed at the fortress of Zvečan, and the sources divide over whether he was strangled, drowned, or died on his own. Scholarship dates his death to 1331; the church tradition says 1336. The Serbian church keeps him as a martyr-king, a 'holy king', and his feast on 24 November is Mratindan, a day whose folk name came from Saint Martin and whose folk calendar keeps a wolf-shepherd.

Feast day · November 24 / 11 November old calendar (Mratindan, Serbian Orthodox)

Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Stephen the Protomartyr

Stephen, one of the seven deacons of the Jerusalem church, was stoned outside the walls after a speech before the Sanhedrin. Acts names the young man minding the executioners' cloaks: Saul of Tarsus, who would become Paul. He is the protomartyr, the first to die for the name, and in Serbian homes his feast is the slava Stevandan on 9 January.

Feast day · December 27 / 9 January (Stevandan); December 26 in the West

Eastern Orthodox

The Protection of the Theotokos (Pokrov)

The feast of the Protection, Pokrov, remembers a night at the Blachernae church in Constantinople when Saint Andrew the Fool and his disciple saw the Mother of God stand in the air above the congregation and spread her veil, her omophorion, over the people. The vision is Greek and the saint who saw it a Byzantine holy fool, but the feast belongs to the Slavs, who made it a great day of the year while the Greek church let it fade. It is kept on 14 October, and in Serbia the day of the veil is a women's feast and the marker of the turn to winter.

Feast day · October 14 (1 October old calendar); folk name Pokrovice

Roman Catholic · Eastern Orthodox · Saint Thomas Christians (Mar Thoma)

Thomas the Apostle

Thomas said he would not believe until he put his finger in the wounds, and two millennia of art show him doing it. John's gospel never says he did; the invitation is followed by the confession, and the touch is the painters' addition. His apocryphal Acts sent him to an Indian king named Gondophares whom scholars took for fiction, until coins and an inscription proved the king real, and the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala still trace their church to his landing.

Feast day · October 19 / 6 October old calendar (Tomindan, Serbian Orthodox); July 3 (Roman Catholic, moved from December 21 in 1969)

Roman Catholic

Ursula of Cologne

A fourth-century inscription in Cologne honors virgins martyred there, and gives no number and no names. Six centuries later they were eleven thousand, led by a British princess named Ursula. The Golden Chamber of her basilica displays the bones; the bones came from a Roman burial ground.

Feast day · October 21 (traditional)

Roman Catholic

Wiborada of St Gallen

Wiborada of St Gallen lived for decades as an anchoress, walled into a cell with no door. She bound the abbey's books and, in 926, warned the monks to hide the library before the Magyars came. She would not leave her own cell, and they broke through its roof and killed her at prayer. In 1047 she became the first woman ever formally canonized by a pope, and she is the patron saint of libraries and librarians.

Feast day · May 2