The Name Paraskevi

Paraskeve (Παρασκευή) is the Greek word for “preparation” and the ordinary name of the sixth day of the week — Friday, the day of preparation before the Sabbath and, for Christians, the day of the Lord’s Passion. The Great Martyr’s tradition holds that she was born on a Friday and named for it. But several distinct holy women bear the name, and this file sets the whole disambiguation in place at the outset: the Roman Great Martyr (2nd c., feast 26 July), Petka of Epivates (11th c., feast 14 October), and Paraskevi of Iconium — three different saints whose conflation is the central problem of the cult.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; healer of the eyes)

The Word: “Preparation,” and the Sixth Day

The name Paraskeve (Παρασκευή) is not a personal name in origin but a common Greek noun meaning “preparation” or “making ready,” from the verb paraskeuazo, “to prepare.” In the Greek of the Jewish and Christian world it had long since become the fixed name of the sixth day of the week — Friday — because it was the day of preparation (paraskeue) for the Sabbath, on which food was made ready and work concluded before the day of rest began at sundown (Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon, s.v. παρασκευή; cf. the technical use already in Josephus, Antiquities 16.6.2). The New Testament uses the word in exactly this sense: all four Gospels call the day of the Crucifixion the paraskeue — “It was the day of Preparation, and the Sabbath was beginning” (Luke 23:54; cf. Matthew 27:62; Mark 15:42; John 19:14, 19:31, 19:42). The Friday of the Passion is thus, by its very name, the day of preparation, and the word carries a double freight from the beginning: the mundane preparation for the Sabbath, and the cosmic “preparation” of salvation accomplished on the Cross.

In modern Greek, Paraskevi remains the everyday word for Friday; in the Slavic languages the same day is named Petka (from pet, “five,” the fifth day after Sunday in the older reckoning) or Pyatnitsa (Russian Пятница, “Friday”), which is why the eleventh-century Balkan saint who shares the Greek name appears in Slavic and Romanian sources as Petka (Sveta Petka) — a translation, not a different name (see Petka of the Balkans). To name a daughter Paraskeve / Petka was, in the Christian East, to name her for Friday and so, by association, for the Passion of the Lord — a fact that shaped both the legend of her birth and, in time, the texture of her cult.

Born on a Friday, Named for the Day

The Greek Passio of the Roman Great Martyr makes the name the hinge of its opening. Paraskevi, it says, was born to pious Christian parents — in the developed tradition named Agathon and Politeia — who had long been childless and prayed for a child; she was born on a Friday, and her parents named her Paraskeve in honor of the day, and reared her in the faith (so the Passio, BHG 1420; summarized in the Synaxaristes of Nikodemos the Hagiorite for 26 July). The detail is plainly an etiology — a story told to explain a name — and it should be received as such: the legend reads the name back into a birth, weaving the day of the Passion into the saint’s very origin so that her later martyrdom appears as the fulfillment of what her name already announced. [Disputed: the names of Paraskevi's parents (Agathon and Politeia) and the Friday-birth etiology appear only in the developed *Passio* tradition and its synaxarial summaries (BHG 1420), with no early attestation; they are hagiographic specification, not biographical record — see the *Bibliotheca Sanctorum* entry on Parasceve of Rome and Delehaye, *Legends of the Saints*, on the etiological habit of the epic *passio*.]

The naming-for-the-day gives the cult its governing symbolism. Because she bears the name of the Passion-day, the saint is read throughout her tradition as one “prepared” for martyrdom from birth, and the Friday associations — fasting, the Cross, the readiness of the soul — gather around her. It is from this same nexus of name, Passion, and “preparation” that her later patronage of the eyes would grow, by a wordplay and a legend-episode treated in their own place (see Healer of Blindness).

The Disambiguation: Which Paraskevi?

Here the foundation must be laid plainly, because the single most common error in the whole tradition is to fuse saints who are in fact distinct. At least three holy women named Paraskeve are venerated in the Orthodox Church, and they differ in century, biography, feast, and patronage. The reader should fix them apart before going further.

(1) Paraskevi the Great Martyr of Rome — 2nd century — feast 26 July. A virgin-martyr, daughter of Christian parents at Rome, who according to her Passio gave away her inheritance after her parents’ death, preached Christ publicly, and was put to death under the emperor Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161) after a sequence of tortures including a cauldron of boiling pitch and oil. She is the patroness of the eyes and the healer of blindness, and she is the subject of this collection. Her record is wholly legendary (see The Historical Core).

(2) Paraskevi (Petka) of Epivates / of Tarnovo / of the Balkans — 11th century — feast 14 October. A very different saint: not a martyr but an ascetic and hermitess, born at Epivates on the Sea of Marmara (near Constantinople), who lived in the deserts of the Jordan and the wilderness, returned home, and reposed in peace. Her incorrupt relics travelled across the Balkans over the following centuries — Epivates → Tarnovo → Belgrade → Constantinople → Iași — and she became one of the most beloved saints of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania, where her body is enshrined to this day at Iași. She is treated, on her own terms and kept rigorously distinct, in Petka of the Balkans. Her feast is 14 October, not 26 July, and her cult, biography, and patronage are entirely separate from the Roman martyr’s.

(3) Paraskevi of Iconium — early martyr — of more shadowy record. A third holy woman of the name, a martyr associated with Iconium in Asia Minor, attested in the synaxaria but with a slender and partly overlapping record. She is sometimes confused with the Roman martyr (the two martyr-legends share standard motifs) and sometimes treated as a doublet. She is discussed in Paraskevi of Iconium and the Overlaps.

The differences are not subtle. The first is a Roman virgin-martyr of the second century, beheaded under Antoninus Pius, patroness of sight, feast 26 July. The second is a Balkan ascetic of the eleventh century, who died in peace, whose fame rests on her incorrupt relics and their long journey, feast 14 October. To collapse them — to imagine “St. Paraskevi” as a single figure who was both a second-century Roman martyr and an eleventh-century Balkan hermitess whose relics rest at Iași — is a category error that nonetheless pervades popular devotion, calendars, and even some printed Lives. Why it happens, who has pointed it out, and how to read the evidence is the matter of The Conflation Problem.

Why the Name Multiplies the Confusion

The conflation is so persistent precisely because of the name. A name that is also the word for Friday is a name many pious families would give, in many centuries and regions, for the same devotional reason — and so it recurs. Where one saint of the name became famous, her fame tended to gather the others into her orbit; and because the Slavic Petka and the Greek Paraskeve are the same word, a Greek hearing of “St. Paraskeve” and a Bulgarian hearing of “Sveta Petka” could easily suppose they spoke of one saint when they spoke of two. The shared name, the shared veneration as a holy woman, and the shared iconographic type of the standing virgin in a red maphorion did the rest. Disentangling them is therefore not pedantry but the first act of honesty the cult requires; and it is why this collection lays the disambiguation in its foundations rather than leaving it to a footnote.

A note on a further folk-figure is in order, since it feeds the confusion. In Slavic popular religion there developed a quasi-personified “Friday” (Pyatnitsa / Petka) — a folk patroness of women’s work, spinning, and the Friday fast, sometimes called Paraskeva-Pyatnitsa — who absorbed features of pre-Christian and apocryphal lore and who is a folkloric figure layered onto the cult of the saints rather than a saint herself (so the standard Slavic-folklore scholarship). This folk “Friday” is neither the Roman martyr nor the Epivates ascetic, though her name and Friday-associations have bled into the popular memory of both; she is noted here only so that the reader can set her aside.

References

Lampe, G. W. H., ed. A Patristic Greek Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. (παρασκευή as “preparation” and “Friday.”)
Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940. (παρασκευή, παρασκευάζω.)
The Holy Bible (Scripture cited by book chapter:verse). Luke 23:54; Matthew 27:62; Mark 15:42; John 19:14, 31, 42 (the paraskeue of the Crucifixion).
Josephus. Jewish Antiquities 16.6.2. (The technical use of paraskeue for the Sabbath-eve.)
Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (BHG) 1420–1420f. Ed. François Halkin. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957. (The Passio of Paraskevi of Rome.)
Bibliotheca Sanctorum. Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII, 1961–1970. (Entries on the several saints named Parasceve.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. The Legends of the Saints. Trans. Donald Attwater. New York: Fordham University Press, 1962. (On the etiological habit of hagiographic legend.)
Nikodemos the Hagiorite. Synaxaristes. (The 26 July notice on Paraskevi of Rome; the Friday-birth and parents’ names.)