Feast and Cult

St. Anastasia the Pharmakolytria is commemorated in the Orthodox East on 22 December, in the days of preparation before the Nativity — the Nativity fore-feast — where her memory stands among the saints of the Christmas cycle. In the West her commemoration fell historically on 25 December, at the dawn Mass of Christmas Day at Rome, and the Roman Martyrology and the Martyrologium Hieronymianum place the Sirmium Anastasia under 25 December. This file sets out the two dates and the calendar divergence between them, the conflation that underlies it, the commemoration of Anastasia with Chrysogonus, Theodota, and the virgins in the Synaxaria, the old-calendar/new-calendar reckoning of 22 December, and the keeping of the feast across the Greek, Slavic, Romanian, and Georgian Churches — with a structured note on the 22-versus-25 December divergence and its origin.

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

22 December in the Orthodox East

In all the Orthodox Churches St. Anastasia the Great Martyr, the Pharmakolytria, is commemorated on 22 December, three days before the Nativity of Christ. Her notice stands in the Greek Synaxarion and Menaion under this date, where she is honored as the martyr of Sirmium identified with the noblewoman of the connected legend, and where the hymnography gives her the title Pharmakolytria and the patronage of healing (Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye, 1902; Greek Menaion, 22 December). The date is fixed and pan-Orthodox: the same 22 December is kept by the Greek, Slavic, Romanian, and Georgian Churches alike, on whichever calendar each follows for the fixed feasts.

The significance of 22 December is that it falls within the fore-feast of the Nativity — the days of preparation immediately before Christmas, when the hymnography of the Church has already turned wholly toward Bethlehem and the coming of Christ in the flesh. By 20 December the fore-feast of the Nativity has formally begun, and the canons and stichera of the daily services anticipate the feast; the saints commemorated in these days — Anastasia on the 22nd, the Ten Martyrs of Crete on the 23rd, the eve and the vigil following — are drawn into the Nativity’s orbit, their own hymns interwoven with the fore-feast’s preparation for the Lord’s birth (Greek Menaion, 20–24 December; for the structure of the fore-feasts and the Nativity cycle see The Great Feasts and The Church Calendar). Anastasia is thus, in the East as in the West, a saint of the Christmas cycle: her feast is not an isolated commemoration but one of the lights set in the days before the Nativity, and her vita, ending in the deliverance of the martyr through fire, is read against the approaching feast of the Light that the darkness did not overcome.

The Western Date: 25 December and the Christmas-Dawn Mass

In the Latin West the commemoration of Anastasia fell historically not on 22 but on 25 December, the feast of the Nativity itself, and specifically at the second (dawn) Mass of Christmas Day, whose statio was the ancient titular church of Sant’Anastasia at the foot of the Palatine (the Roman Sacramentaries; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; treated fully in The Roman Titular Church). The historic Roman Rite kept three Masses on Christmas Day — the night Mass, the dawn Mass, and the day Mass — and the dawn Mass, stationed at Sant’Anastasia, carried a commemoration of the saint herself, the “et beatae Anastasiae martyris” of the Roman Missal, embedded in the oldest stratum of the Roman Christmas liturgy and transmitted in the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries (the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries; the Roman Missal; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). In the West, then, Anastasia’s day was Christmas Day, her commemoration absorbed into the Nativity itself by the conjunction of her feast, her station-church, and the structure of the three Masses.

The documentary anchor of this Western date is older than the Roman Missal. The Martyrologium Hieronymianum — the oldest Latin martyrology, compiled in the fifth–sixth century out of still older local lists and falsely ascribed to St. Jerome — places the Sirmium Anastasia under 25 December, recording a martyr Anastasia at Sirmium in Pannonia on that day (Martyrologium Hieronymianum, ed. de Rossi–Duchesne, 1894; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). This notice, independent of and earlier than the connected Passio, is the firmest documentary witness to her cult, and it dates her to 25 December — the very date on which the Roman liturgy later commemorated her at the Christmas-dawn Mass. The Roman Martyrology, the official martyrology of the Latin Church, likewise carried her notice under 25 December, where she stood for centuries among the saints of Christmas Day; in the revised General Roman Calendar of the post-conciliar reform her commemoration was retained on 25 December as an optional memorial of the martyr Anastasia (the Roman Martyrology; the General Roman Calendar). The Western tradition is thus internally consistent across its sources — the Hieronymianum, the sacramentaries, the Missal, the Roman Martyrology, and the reformed calendar all give 25 December — and that consistency makes the divergence from the Eastern 22 December the more striking.

The Divergence and Its Cause: 22 versus 25 December

The two traditions, then, honor Anastasia on two different days: the East on 22 December, the West on 25 December. The divergence is not a calendar artifact of the kind that separates Julian from Gregorian reckoning — both dates are fixed dates in the sanctoral year — but a genuine difference in the day assigned to the saint, and it has its roots in the same conflation that governs the whole dossier. The Sirmium martyr of the Hieronymianum is dated to 25 December; the Roman cult, stationed at Sant’Anastasia and woven into the Christmas liturgy, naturally honored her on that day, the day of her church’s great station. The Eastern cult, developing the connected legend and the Pharmakolytria devotion, fixed her commemoration three days earlier, on 22 December — close enough to the Nativity to keep her among the saints of the Christmas cycle, but distinct from Christmas Day itself, so that the martyr received her own feast within the fore-feast rather than being absorbed into the Nativity (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

That the East should give the Sirmium martyr a date different from the Hieronymianum‘s 25 December is itself a sign of the composite character of the cult. Where the documents preserve more than one figure named Anastasia, and where the connected Passio gathered several originally separate martyrs into one narrative (see The Historical Core and The Passio and the Conflation), the feast-dates attached to the name need not coincide across the traditions, because they may descend from different strands of the dossier — the Sirmium notice in one place, a Constantinopolitan synaxary tradition in another. The honest statement is that the East and the West fixed the martyr’s day differently, that the Western 25 December is the older documented date and is tied directly to the Sirmium notice and the Roman station, and that the Eastern 22 December is the date of the developed Byzantine cult of the Pharmakolytria; the precise mechanism by which the Eastern date was set three days before the Nativity is not documented and is reconstructed, not certain.

[Disputed: the origin of the 22-versus-25 December divergence in Anastasia’s feast. The Martyrologium Hieronymianum (ed. de Rossi–Duchesne, 1894) and the Western liturgical tradition place the Sirmium martyr Anastasia under 25 December, where the Roman dawn Mass of Christmas commemorated her at the statio of Sant’Anastasia; the Roman Martyrology and the reformed General Roman Calendar likewise give 25 December (now an optional memorial). The Greek Synaxarion and Menaion commemorate her on 22 December, within the Nativity fore-feast (Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye, 1902; Greek Menaion, 22 December). The divergence is generally traced to the composite character of the cult — the conflation of several Anastasias and the descent of the dates from different strands of the dossier — with the Western 25 December tied directly to the Sirmium notice and the Roman station, and the Eastern 22 December the date of the developed Byzantine cult (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). The exact reason the Eastern cult fixed the feast on 22 December rather than 25 is not documented; this collection reports the two dates and the conflation behind them rather than asserting a single mechanism.]

With Chrysogonus, Theodota, and the Virgins

In the Synaxaria the commemoration of Anastasia does not stand alone but in the company of the martyrs whom the connected Passio gathered around her. The Greek Synaxarion and the Menaion of 22 December join to her memory the names of Chrysogonus, her teacher and confessor in the legend; Theodota and her children; and the three virgin-martyrs of the dossier, Agape, Chionia, and Irene — the figures whom Delehaye identified as originally independent cults fused into the single connected narrative (Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye, 1902; Greek Menaion, 22 December; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). The liturgical commemoration thus preserves, in the very list of names honored with her, the source-critical fact that “Anastasia” stands at the head of a group of martyrs whose cults the Passio connected: the synaxary notice is itself a witness to the conflation, carrying forward the names of the separate martyrs even as it honors them as one company around the central figure (see The Passio and the Conflation). What the source-critic reads as a fusion of distinct cults the liturgy keeps as a fellowship of martyrs, commemorated together on the saint’s day.

The grouping is significant for understanding the feast. Anastasia is honored on 22 December not merely as an individual martyr but as the head and chief of the martyrs of her legend — Chrysogonus the teacher, Theodota the fellow-confessor, the virgins Agape, Chionia, and Irene — so that her commemoration carries with it the whole connected company of the Passio. This is the form the developed cult took in the East: the romance that united the separate martyrs in a single narrative produced a single feast on which they are all remembered together, with Anastasia at their center (Greek Menaion, 22 December; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

Old Calendar and New Calendar

Because 22 December is a fixed date in the sanctoral year, its observance is affected by the division between the Churches that keep the older Julian calendar for the fixed feasts (the “Old Calendar”) and those that have adopted the Revised Julian or Gregorian reckoning (the “New Calendar”). For the Churches and monasteries that follow the Old Calendar — among them the Church of Jerusalem, the monasteries of Mount Athos, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Serbian and Georgian Churches, and the Old-Calendarist communities of Greece — the feast falls on 22 December by the Julian reckoning, which in the present period corresponds to 4 January by the civil (Gregorian) calendar; for the New-Calendar Churches the feast is kept on 22 December of the civil calendar itself (for the calendar division and its reckoning see The Church Calendar). The thirteen-day difference between the calendars in the present period is the general rule for fixed feasts; the precise correspondence shifts over the centuries as the gap widens, and the figures here are given as the present-period reckoning rather than as a fixed equivalence (for the principle, see The Church Calendar).

The point of substance is that the liturgical date is one and the same — 22 December — across all the Orthodox Churches; the calendar question concerns only which civil day that liturgical date falls upon. An Athonite monastery keeping the feast on what the civil calendar calls 4 January and a New-Calendar parish keeping it on civil 22 December are observing the same feast of the same saint on the same liturgical day; the difference is one of calendar alignment, not of the date of the feast (see The Church Calendar).

The Feast Across the Orthodox World

The feast of St. Anastasia the Pharmakolytria is kept throughout the Orthodox world. In the Greek Church and on Mount Athos her cult is especially developed, anchored by the great Monastery of St. Anastasia Pharmakolytria in Chalkidiki near Thessaloniki, where her relics and the holy water and oil of her shrine give the feast a particular intensity (see The Relics on Athos; Greek Menaion, 22 December). In the Slavic Churches — Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian — she is commemorated on 22 December as a Great Martyr, where she is sometimes distinguished in popular devotion as a patroness invoked in particular needs; in the Romanian Church she is likewise honored on 22 December; and in the Georgian Church her commemoration is kept on the same fixed date (Greek Menaion and the Slavic Mineia, 22 December; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). Across these traditions the date is constant and the saint is one — the Great Martyr Anastasia, the Pharmakolytria, the deliverer from potions and the healer — and the feast is everywhere kept within the days of preparation before the Nativity, one of the lights of the Christmas fore-feast (see Anastasia in Orthodox Piety and Deliverer from Potions).

The keeping of the one feast across so many Churches, on the one fixed date, is itself a witness to the antiquity and the unity of the cult. Whatever the source-critical complexity behind the saint’s identity — the conflation of the Sirmium martyr, the Roman titular saint, and the figures of the connected legend — the living veneration is single and pan-Orthodox: on 22 December the whole Orthodox world remembers Anastasia the Great Martyr, and remembers her as one saint, the Pharmakolytria, in the days before Christ’s birth (Greek Menaion, 22 December; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

See Also

References

  • Martyrologium Hieronymianum. Ed. G. B. de Rossi and L. Duchesne, Acta Sanctorum, Novembris II.1. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1894. (The Sirmium Anastasia under 25 December.)
  • Synaxarion of Constantinople (Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae). Ed. Hippolyte Delehaye. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902. (The 22 December commemoration and the company of martyrs.)
  • The Greek Menaion for 22 December (and the Slavic Mineia for the same date). (The hymnography of the feast, the Pharmakolytria title, and the commemoration of Chrysogonus, Theodota, and the virgins.)
  • The Roman Sacramentaries: the Gelasian Sacramentary and the Gregorian Sacramentary; and The Roman Missal. (The dawn Mass of Christmas with the commemoration of Anastasia.)
  • The Roman Martyrology; and the General Roman Calendar (post-conciliar reform). (The Western commemoration on 25 December, retained as an optional memorial.)
  • Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre. Subsidia Hagiographica 23. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936. (The dossier, the conflation, and the feast-dates.)
  • Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia.” Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961. (The cult, the dates, and the source-critical state of the question.)