Feast and Relics

Catherine’s liturgical veneration in the Orthodox Church: the feast on November 25 (Greek and most Byzantine) and November 24 (Russian and Slavic), the title of Holy Great-Martyr, and the relics venerated at the Monastery of Sinai. This file sets out the firm liturgical facts and treats the date difference and its folk explanations per METHODOLOGY §3.5 and §4.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great-Martyr)

The Holy Great-Martyr Catherine

In the Orthodox Church Catherine is venerated as the Holy Great-Martyr (Greek Megalomartys) Catherine — the title reserved for the greatest of the martyrs, those whose witness and whose place in the Church’s devotion set them above the ordinary rank. She shares it with martyrs such as George, Demetrios, Barbara, and Panteleimon. The title is itself a measure of her standing in the Eastern tradition: whatever the source-critical problems of her legend (set out fully in this collection’s two flagships, see The Source Problem and The Absence of Early Evidence), the Church venerates her among the highest of the martyrs, and this file reports that veneration as the liturgical fact it is.

The Feast: November 25 and November 24

Catherine’s feast is kept in late November, but the Orthodox world is divided over the exact day, and the division is itself a small study in how liturgical traditions diverge.

In the Greek and most Byzantine churches, and in the Roman Catholic Church (where the feast was restored in 2002, see The Medieval Popularity), Catherine is celebrated on November 25. In the Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian (Slavic) churches she is celebrated on November 24; on the Julian calendar still followed by those churches for the fixed feasts, this November 24 corresponds to December 7 on the civil (Gregorian) calendar — which is why Russian-tradition sources often give the feast as “November 24 / December 7.”

The reason for the one-day difference between the Greek November 25 and the Slavic November 24 is genuinely not documented, and the collection declines to assert a tidy explanation.

[Disputed: the origin of the Slavic November 24 feast (against the Greek and Roman November 25) is not known. In eleventh-century Kievan Rus’ the feast was kept on November 25; St Demetrius of Rostov, in his Lives of the Saints (Kniga zhitii sviatykh, 1689), places it on November 24. The plausible structural factor is the collision of November 25 with the Apodosis (Leavetaking) of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple, so that November 24 gives Catherine her own day rather than a co-celebration; but this is inference, not documentation. The popular story that Catherine the Great moved the date to avoid sharing her patronal feast with that Leavetaking is explicitly unsupported by historical evidence and should be treated as folk tradition, not fact (en.wikipedia.org, “Catherine of Alexandria”; the date difference is not a Julian/Gregorian artifact but a genuine divergence of the fixed-feast date).]

In the Greek calendar the feast’s coincidence with the Apodosis of the Entry of the Theotokos gives November 25 a doubled solemnity; in the Slavic calendar the separation onto November 24 lets the Great-Martyr be honored in her own right. Both observances are ancient and both are kept; the collection reports the divergence without resolving it.

The Relics at Sinai

Catherine’s relics are venerated at the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai, the living center of her Eastern cult (the monastery’s history and the late, constructed relic-translation tradition are treated in The Monastery of Sinai). The monastery displays in the catholicon a marble reliquary holding two precious vessels — a gift of the Russian Empire — that contain the saint’s skull and her left hand. Pilgrims who venerate the relics receive from the monks a silver ring bearing Catherine’s monogram, given in memory of the mystical betrothal of the legend (Holy Monastery of Sinai; see East and West). The tradition that a fragrant healing oil, or myrrh, streams from the relics is reported in the cult as a continuing sign of the saint’s intercession; the collection notes it as the content of the tradition rather than as a verified phenomenon.

The relics on Sinai are the firm anchor of the Eastern cult — not because they prove the legend (the early pilgrims to Sinai knew nothing of any body of Catherine, see The Absence of Early Evidence), but because they are the physical focus of a real and centuries-old devotion. Fragments of the relics also reached the West in the Middle Ages — three were at Rouen by the 1040s, the seed of the Western cult (see The Spread of the Cult) — but the principal relics remain at Sinai, where Catherine’s veneration has been kept without interruption for a thousand years.

Hymnography and Liturgical Honor

Catherine’s feast is furnished with a full liturgical office in the Orthodox service-books — apolytikion, kontakion, canon, and the rest — much of it descending ultimately, like the rest of the developed tradition, from the version of the legend shaped by Symeon Metaphrastes, who is named in the scholarship as the source of “all later compositions, including the hymns for her feast” (see The Source Problem). The hymns celebrate the themes the legend made central: the wisdom by which she confounded the orators, the steadfastness by which she endured the wheel and the sword, and her glory among the company of the martyrs. The liturgical honor paid to her — the Great-Martyr’s title, the full office, the relics on the holy mountain, the feast kept across the Orthodox world — is the Eastern Church’s reception of Catherine, and it is the proper object of this collection’s veneration, held alongside the honest source-critical account of her legend.

See Also

• The Monastery of Sinai — the relics and the monastery that holds them
• Iconography — how the feast’s saint is depicted
• The Spread of the Cult — the relic-fragments and the Eastern observance
• The Medieval Popularity — the Western feast, its 1969 removal and 2002 restoration
• The Absence of Early Evidence — the source-critical frame for the cult
• Orthodoxy Guide: Women in Orthodoxy — holy women in the Orthodox tradition

References

• “Great-Martyr Catherine of Alexandria.” Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, November 24. (The Great-Martyr title; the feast on November 24/December 7 in the Russian tradition.)
• “Catherine of Alexandria.” Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki. (The feast on November 25 in the Greek and Roman calendars and November 24 in the Slavic; the eleventh-century Kievan observance; the Demetrius of Rostov date; the unsupported Catherine-the-Great story.)
• Holy Monastery of Sinai (official accounts). (The skull and left-hand relics in the Russian-gift vessels; the silver ring; the streaming oil.)
• Demetrius (Tuptalo) of Rostov, St. Kniga zhitii sviatykh [The Lives of the Saints], 1689. (The November 24 placement in the Russian tradition.)
• Symeon Metaphrastes, Passio S. Catharinae (BHG 32), in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 116, named as the source of the hymns for her feast (Sacred Texts Archive).