The Cult East and West

The veneration of St. Anastasia is one of the oldest cults common to the Latin West and the Greek East, and the two traditions developed in characteristic ways: at Rome, around the titular church of Sant’Anastasia and the saint’s embedded commemoration at the dawn Mass of Christmas Day, with her name in the Roman Martyrology; in the East, around her 22 December feast in the Synaxarion, her status as a Great Martyr and Pharmakolytria, and her veneration across the Greek, Slavic, Romanian, and Georgian Churches. This file traces both, and is source-critical about the famous Constantinopolitan ambiguity — the church called Anastasia where St. Gregory the Theologian preached, whose name may honor the martyr Anastasia or signify the Resurrection (Anastasis) — and about the breadth and origin of the relic claims.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Deliverer from Potions)

An Ancient Common Cult

Anastasia is among the relatively few saints whose cult is securely attested in both halves of the early Church before their later divergence — venerated at Rome in the Latin liturgical books and at Constantinople in the Greek synaxaria, and woven in both into the Christmas cycle. The shared cult rests on the historical core treated in The Historical Core: a martyr Anastasia genuinely honored at Sirmium in Pannonia, a frontier region whose cults flowed naturally both toward Rome and toward the new Eastern capital. What the West and East each made of that common kernel differed in form — liturgical and topographical at Rome, monastic and thaumaturgic in the Greek world — but the underlying veneration is one, and its antiquity is the firmest fact in the whole dossier (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936).

The West: Rome, the Titular Church, and the Christmas Mass

In the West the cult is anchored at Rome in the ancient basilica of Sant’Anastasia at the foot of the Palatine, the titulus Anastasiae, attested by name at the Roman synod of 499 and standing among the oldest of the Roman title-churches (the full treatment is in The Roman Titular Church; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1). The church’s antiquity raises, in the West as in the East, the question whether its name originally honored a martyr at all or attached first to a Roman founder or donor later assimilated to the Sirmium saint — a founder-versus-martyr ambiguity that parallels the Eastern Anastasia/Anastasis problem discussed below, and that is set out fully in the Section 05 treatment.

The most distinctive Western feature of the cult is liturgical: Anastasia’s commemoration was embedded in the oldest stratum of the Roman Christmas liturgy, at the second (dawn) Mass of Christmas Day, whose statio — the day’s appointed station church — was Sant’Anastasia. In the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries the dawn Mass of the Nativity carries a commemoration of the martyr Anastasia, so that her name was spoken at Rome each Christmas morning as the station gathered at her basilica (the Roman Sacramentaries, Gelasian and Gregorian; The Roman Martyrology; treated in The Roman Titular Church). This commemoration is the earliest documented form of her Western cult and the reason her feast belongs to the Christmas cycle in both East and West. She is entered in the Roman Martyrology under 25 December — the Sirmium date of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum — as a martyr; her name’s proximity to the Christmas liturgy gave the Western cult a fixed and prominent place that long outlasted any vivid memory of the legend (The Roman Martyrology; Martyrologium Hieronymianum, ed. de Rossi–Duchesne, 1894).

It should be said precisely, against a common overstatement, that Anastasia’s commemoration is a station and a liturgical commemoration of great antiquity, attached to the Christmas-dawn Mass, rather than a name fixed in the central text of the Roman Canon (the unvarying eucharistic prayer); her place is “Canon-adjacent” in the sense of belonging to the oldest Christmas liturgy whose station was her church, and this collection states it that way to avoid claiming more than the sacramentaries bear (the Roman Sacramentaries; reported per METHODOLOGY §2). The honest summary of the Western cult is a securely attested ancient church, a securely attested ancient Christmas-dawn commemoration, and a martyrology entry — a cult firm in its liturgy and topography while thin, as everywhere, in verifiable biography.

The East: Constantinople, the Synaxarion, and the Great Martyr

In the East the cult is gathered around the saint’s status as a Great Martyr and as the Pharmakolytria, “the deliverer from potions/poisons,” and around her feast on 22 December — a date in the Nativity fore-feast, so that here too the cult belongs to the Christmas cycle, three days before the Roman commemoration. Her feast and its place in the fore-feast are treated in Feast and Cult; the title and healing patronage in Deliverer from Potions. The Byzantine liturgical memory of the saint is preserved in the Synaxarion of Constantinople, the official calendar-with-notices of the Great Church, which carries her commemoration and the connected legend’s outline (Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye 1902). In the Greek world the cult took its most concrete form not in a single great liturgical station but in monastic veneration and healing pilgrimage, above all at the Monastery of St. Anastasia Pharmakolytria in Chalkidiki, which holds her head relic and dispenses the holy water and oil of her patronage (treated in The Relics and the Monastery in Chalkidiki).

From the Greek center the cult spread across the Orthodox world. In the Slavic Churches Anastasia (Анастасия) is venerated as Great Martyr and Uzoreshitelnitsa — a Slavonic title rendering her patronage as “the looser of bonds” or deliverer, carrying the same sense of release from poison, sickness, and captivity that Pharmakolytria names — and her 22 December feast is kept in the Russian and other Slavic calendars (the Slavic veneration as reported in the Synaxarion tradition and the Orthodox liturgical calendars; reported per METHODOLOGY §3.5). She is venerated likewise in the Romanian and Georgian Churches, sharing the common Byzantine inheritance of the Synaxarion and the fore-feast date. The breadth of this Eastern veneration — Greek, Slavic, Romanian, Georgian, and Athonite — is the measure of how thoroughly the once-Sirmian martyr became a pan-Orthodox Great Martyr, her healing patronage carried wherever the Byzantine calendar went (Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye 1902; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1).

The Constantinopolitan Church: Anastasia or Anastasis?

The most famous and most treacherous point in the Eastern cult is the church called Anastasia in Constantinople, celebrated as the place where St. Gregory the Theologian (Gregory Nazianzen) preached during his ministry in the capital in 379–381, including the great Theological Orations that won him his title (Gregory Nazianzen, Orations; and the modern discussion of the church). That Gregory preached at a church so named is genuinely attested; the difficulty is what the name means, and the question is a textbook case of the conflation the dossier everywhere confronts.

Two derivations stand against each other. On the one hand, the church may have been named for the martyr Anastasia, so that it honored — and, on some tellings, housed relics of — the saint of this collection, and Gregory’s choice of it would be incidental to the martyr’s cult. On the other hand, and more probably in the judgment of much of the tradition and scholarship, the name Anastasia here renders the Resurrection — Greek Anastasis, “rising again” — and was given or understood to signify the “resurrection” of Nicene orthodoxy that Gregory’s preaching effected in a capital long held by the Arians: in this reading the little church was the place where the true faith “rose again,” and the name commemorates a theological event rather than a martyr (Gregory Nazianzen, Orations; and the scholarly discussion of the church’s name; reported source-critically per METHODOLOGY §2). The early sources and the later synaxaria preserve both senses, and the very ease with which Anastasia (the saint) and Anastasis (the Resurrection) slide into one another is why the conflation took hold and proved durable.

The consequence for the cult of the martyr is twofold. First, the Constantinopolitan church cannot be confidently claimed as a center of her cult on the strength of its name alone, since the name may belong to the Resurrection and not to her. Second, and correspondingly, any relic-translation tradition that anchors the martyr’s body in this church — the tradition that her relics were brought from Sirmium or from Rome to the capital and enshrined there (treated in The Relics and the Monastery in Chalkidiki) — inherits the same uncertainty: a translation “to the church of Anastasia” proves nothing about the martyr if that church was the church of the Anastasis. The careful position is that Gregory’s Anastasia is securely attested as a church and as the scene of his preaching, while its dedication to the martyr (as against the Resurrection) is genuinely disputed, and the cult of the martyr in Constantinople must be argued from the Synaxarion and the calendar rather than from this ambiguous church (Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye 1902; Gregory Nazianzen, Orations; the name-question per METHODOLOGY §2).

[Disputed: the dedication of the Constantinopolitan church and the breadth and origin of the relic claims. (a) The church where St. Gregory the Theologian preached his Theological Orations in 379–381 is securely attested as the Anastasia (Gregory Nazianzen, Orations), but its name’s reference is debated: it may honor the martyr Anastasia, or it may render Anastasis, “Resurrection,” signifying the restoration (“rising again”) of Nicene orthodoxy in the capital; the sources and scholarship preserve both, and the Anastasia/Anastasis conflation is itself part of the record. (b) The relic claims are broad and their origin unsettled: traditions variously translate the martyr’s relics from Sirmium or from Rome to Constantinople and enshrine them in the church bearing her name (Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye 1902), while the Chalkidiki monastery venerates a head relic of the same saint (its tradition); because the saint of later devotion is a conflation of distinct figures (see The Passio and the Conflation), no single secure provenance can be reconstructed. This collection reports the church as attested and its martyr-dedication, and the breadth and origin of the relic claims, as disputed.]

Two Faces of One Cult

The Western and Eastern cults are best read as two developments of a single ancient veneration, each true to its tradition’s instincts. The West fixed Anastasia in liturgy and topography: a named title-church, a station, a commemoration spoken every Christmas dawn, an entry in the Martyrology under the Sirmium date. The East fixed her in status and patronage: a Great Martyr in the Synaxarion, the Pharmakolytria and (in the Slavic tongue) the looser of bonds, a healing shrine with a relic and holy water, a fore-feast day kept from Greece to Georgia. The Roman name’s founder-versus-martyr question and the Constantinopolitan name’s martyr-versus-Resurrection question are, strikingly, the same kind of ambiguity arising independently at both ends of the empire — a sign of how readily the bare name Anastasia, “resurrection,” gathered cult and meaning to itself. Through all of it the historical core holds: a real martyr, genuinely honored at Sirmium and at Rome from very early times, became the common saint of a Church not yet divided, and remained a Great Martyr venerated across the whole Orthodox world (treated in Feast and Cult and Legacy and Assessment; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1; Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs, 1933).

References

Gregory of Nazianzus (Gregory the Theologian). Orations (including the five Theological Orations, Orations 27–31), delivered at the church called Anastasia in Constantinople, 379–381. Cited for the attestation of the church and the disputed sense of its name.
Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae. Ed. Hippolyte Delehaye. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902. (The Eastern commemoration of Anastasia and the relic-translation tradition.)
The Roman Martyrology (entry under 25 December, the Sirmium martyr Anastasia).
Martyrologium Hieronymianum. Ed. G. B. de Rossi and L. Duchesne, Acta Sanctorum, Novembris II.1. Brussels, 1894. (The Sirmium attestation and the 25 December date.)
The Roman Sacramentaries (Gelasian, Gregorian) — the commemoration of Anastasia at the second (dawn) Mass of Christmas Day, with the station at Sant’Anastasia.
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre. Subsidia Hagiographica 23. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936.
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les origines du culte des martyrs. 2nd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1933.
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia.” Rome: Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961.
METHODOLOGY.md, this repository.