Feast and Customs

The commemoration of St. Marina the Great Martyr (Margaret of Antioch): 17 July in the Orthodox East and 20 July in the traditional Western calendar — the one saint kept on two days under her two names. This file fixes the dates of the feast, sets it in the calendar, and describes the festal customs of the Eastern and Western commemorations, including the popular observances by which the one saint’s two great cults marked her day.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; virgin-martyr); with the Western reception of Margaret of Antioch

The Two Dates

The one saint is commemorated on two days, reflecting the two branches of her cult. In the Orthodox East, the feast of the Holy Great Martyr Marina is kept on 17 July (in the Julian calendar still followed by some Orthodox Churches, this corresponds to 30 July on the civil calendar) (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Marina”; the Orthodox liturgical calendar). In the traditional Western (Latin) calendar, the feast of St. Margaret of Antioch was kept on 20 July (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Margherita di Antiochia”; the Roman calendar prior to the 1969 revision).

[Disputed: the Eastern and Western calendars assign the saint different days — 17 July (East) and 20 July (West) — and the relation of the two dates is a function of the separate development of the two branches of the cult rather than of two distinct saints; the saint is one (see Marina and Margaret, East and West). It should further be noted that St. Margaret of Antioch was removed from the universal Roman calendar in the 1969 revision (on the grounds of the legendary character of her Passio), though her veneration and local commemoration continued; the Orthodox commemoration on 17 July has never been in question. This guide reports both traditional dates and the post-1969 Western change.]

The Feast in the Calendar

In the Orthodox East, 17 July falls in the summer cluster of martyrs’ feasts, and Marina’s commemoration is among the well-kept fixed feasts of July, marked with the proper hymnography of a Great Martyr — the troparion and kontakion that praise her virginity, her contest, and her victory over the enemy, sung at Vespers and Matins and the Divine Liturgy of her day (the Orthodox menaion for 17 July; on the festal life of the Church, see Great Feasts). Where her relics are kept — above all at Vatopedi on Mount Athos (see The Relics) — and in the many churches dedicated to her, the feast is the high point of her veneration, the icon of the demon-subduing maiden set out for honor and her intercession solemnly invoked.

The hymnography of the day is worth dwelling on, for it is the form in which the Church’s own reading of Marina is fixed and sung. The menaion provides for her the full proper texts of a Great Martyr: the troparion and kontakion of her dismissal, the stichera at “Lord, I have cried” and the aposticha of Vespers, and a canon at Matins (the Orthodox menaion for 17 July). The matter of these hymns is the matter of her Passio read spiritually — her youth and her virginity offered to Christ, her steadfastness under torture, her confession before the magistrate, and above all her victory over the enemy of mankind, the bound demon of the legend become in the hymns the trampled adversary of the soul (the Orthodox menaion for 17 July; the Greek Passio as the matter behind the hymns). It is significant for the argument of this collection that the liturgical texts do not labor to defend the dragon and the demon as history; they take up the episodes of the legend and turn them to praise and to the edification of the faithful, honoring in song the spiritual truth the tradition saw in them. The hymnography is thus itself an instance of the discipline the collection commends — the legend received and used as the carrier of spiritual meaning, the saint venerated for her holiness — set to music and sung on her day.

In the West, the feast of St. Margaret on 20 July was, in the height of her cult, a major popular observance, in keeping with her standing among the Fourteen Holy Helpers and as one of the most invoked saints of the later Middle Ages (see The Cult, East and West). The Roman calendar before the 1969 revision kept her memorial on 20 July, and the immense diffusion of her Golden Legend chapter through the later medieval centuries made her vita one of the most widely read of any saint’s, her day an occasion for the recitation of that legend and for the devotions it inspired (Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, “St. Margaret,” trans. Ryan; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Margherita di Antiochia”).

The 1969 revision of the Roman calendar, carried out after the Second Vatican Council, removed St. Margaret of Antioch from the universal calendar — together with a number of other widely venerated saints whose acta were judged too legendary to stand as universal commemorations (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Margherita di Antiochia”; on the legendary character of the Passio, see The Passio and the Gelasian Decree). It is essential to be precise about what this change did and did not mean. It was not a judgment that Margaret was no saint, nor a suppression of her veneration; local commemoration, dedications, and devotion continued, and her name remains in the Roman Martyrology. What the revision withdrew was her place as an obligatory commemoration on the universal calendar, and the stated ground was the legendary character of her Passio — the same legendary character this collection has documented throughout. The action is, in fact, of a piece with the older Western discipline that reserved her acta in the Gelasian tradition: the Church distinguishing the historical thinness of the record from the reality of the saint, and ordering its public commemorations accordingly, without ceasing to honor her (see The Passio and the Gelasian Decree). The Orthodox commemoration on 17 July, it bears repeating, has never been touched by any of this; the Great Martyr Marina is kept on her day as she always has been.

The Customs

The festal customs of the one saint’s two cults reflect, above all, her patronage. In the East, Marina’s day is observed with particular devotion by and for women, in keeping with her patronage of women and of childbirth; her feast is an occasion for the prayers of expectant mothers and for the veneration of her relics and icons (see The Protectress in Labor). In many Orthodox lands her day carries local popular customs of the high-summer season, and her veneration is woven into the festal life of the village and the parish.

In the West, where Margaret’s patronage of childbirth was among the most active of all saintly devotions, her feast and her cult were closely bound to the rites and protections of the birthing-chamber — the reading of her legend, the use of the Margaret-roll and birth-girdle, the invocation of her aid in travail (set out in The Protectress in Labor). Her day was, for medieval women especially, the feast of the saint who would bring them safely through their most dangerous hour.

The two cults thus meet at the same point — the childbirth-patronage that East and West alike drew, with remarkable independence, from the one episode of the dragon — but they express it through different customs shaped by their different religious cultures. In the East the devotion is liturgical and relic-centered: the prayers of expectant mothers, the veneration of the Vatopedi hand and of the icons, the keeping of the feast (see The Relics). In the West it took a more textual and quasi-instrumental form: the legend read aloud at the bedside, the parchment roll inscribed with her life and laid upon the labouring woman, the girdle of the saint borrowed from a shrine and girded about her — practices Wendy Larson has analysed as the working-out of patronage in relation to a particular audience of women (Larson, “The Role of Patronage and Audience,” in Gender and Holiness). The two sets of customs are not the same, and this collection does not flatten them into one; but they answer the same need, and they grow from the same legendary root. That a single fabulous episode — a saint swallowed by a dragon and emerging unharmed — should have become, in two divided halves of Christendom, the wellspring of the most tender of all the protections sought in the hour of birth is among the most striking facts of the whole tradition (see The Protectress in Labor).

[Disputed: the specific popular and local customs of Marina’s/Margaret’s feast vary widely by region and tradition (Greek, Slavic, and other Orthodox observances in the East; the diverse medieval Western practices), and no single canonical set of customs obtains across the whole cult. This guide reports the broad and well-attested patterns — the festal hymnography and relic-veneration of the East, the childbirth-devotions of East and West — without claiming a uniform body of customs.]

One Saint, Two Feasts

The two dates, like the two names, are the marks of a single cult that branched East and West — and the feast, like everything else in the tradition, is best understood as the commemoration of the one saint under her two observances (see Marina and Margaret, East and West). The point is easily missed, and worth stating plainly: there are not two saints here but one, kept on two days under two names by the two branches of a cult that grew apart before and after the schism. Marina of the Greek East and Margaret of the Latin West are the same figure of the same legend, and the divergence of the calendars — 17 July in the one, 20 July in the other — records the parallel development of the two observances, not any real difference in the saint commemorated (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Marina” and “Margherita di Antiochia”). To see the two feasts as the two halves of one commemoration is to see, in the calendar itself, the unity of a cult that the divisions of Christendom could distribute over two days and two names but could not divide into two saints. On 17 July the Orthodox East keeps the Great Martyr Marina; on 20 July the traditional West kept Margaret of Antioch; and the saint they honor — the shepherd-girl who confessed Christ, overcame the dragon and the demon, and intercedes for women in their travail — is one. The feast is where the whole cult, with all its legend and all its love, is gathered into a day; and on that day the Church does what this collection has argued it does throughout: it venerates the saint, keeps the legend as the legend, and receives the cult as the testimony it is.

References

Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 8, “Marina” (17 July, the Eastern feast) and “Margherita di Antiochia” (20 July, the Western feast; the 1969 calendar revision). Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII, 1966–1967.
The Orthodox menaion for 17 July (the proper hymnography of the Holy Great Martyr Marina).
Larson, Wendy R. “The Role of Patronage and Audience in the Cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch.” In Gender and Holiness. London: Routledge, 2002. (The Western childbirth-customs of the feast.)