St. Philothei of Athens

The foremost woman neomartyr: Revoula Benizelou, in religion Philothei (c. 1522–1589), the Athenian noblewoman who, widowed young, became a nun and founded a monastery in Ottoman Athens, and whose ransoming and sheltering of enslaved and abused women — Christian women fleeing forced conversion, marriage, and the harem — drew the Ottoman hostility that killed her. Attacked in her convent in 1588, she died of her injuries on 19 February 1589 and is venerated as a righteous martyr and a mother of Athens.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (woman neomartyr of the Ottoman period)

The Noblewoman of Athens

Philothei was born about 1522 in Athens, into the noble Benizelos (Benizelou) family, one of the leading Christian houses of the Ottoman city, and was named at baptism Revoula (Regoula) (life of St. Philothei in the synaxaristic tradition; Sanidopoulos, “Holy New Martyr Philothei of Athens (+1589),” johnsanidopoulos.com; Pemptousia, “St. Philothei of Athens 1522–1589”). Married young and against her wish, she was widowed within a few years, and, freed by her widowhood and her means, she turned to the monastic life. She built a monastery in Athens dedicated to St. Andrew, becoming its abbess under the name Philothei, and made it the center of a wide work of charity — schools, workshops, hospices, and refuges — funded from her family’s wealth (synaxaristic tradition; Pemptousia, “St. Philothei of Athens”; the Benizelos mansion in Athens is preserved as associated with her family). She is thus, unlike most neomartyrs, a figure of stature and public works before she is a martyr: an eminent laywoman turned monastic founder and benefactress in the enslaved city.

The Ransoming of Women

Philothei’s charity had a particular and dangerous focus. She used her house and her wealth to ransom, shelter, and hide women — among them Christian women who had been enslaved, or seized for Muslim households and harems, or pressed to convert to Islam through marriage, and who sought escape or refuge (synaxaristic tradition; Sanidopoulos, “Holy New Martyr Philothei of Athens”). In an order where a Christian woman’s passage into a Muslim household and into Islam was socially and legally facilitated, and her passage back out was forbidden, to shelter such women — and above all to receive women who had fled that passage — was to place oneself directly athwart the conversion-boundary that the law protected (see The Apostasy Law and the Count). The tradition holds that this work repeatedly brought her into conflict with the Ottoman authorities, that she was more than once summoned and endangered on account of women she had received, and that she persisted (synaxaristic tradition; Pemptousia, “St. Philothei of Athens”). Her martyrdom, when it came, grew directly out of this work — she is, in effect, a martyr of Christian charity toward women under pressure, which is why she stands at the head of this section.

The Attack and the Death

According to the tradition, on 3 October 1588 a band of men broke into her convent — one account says during a vigil at a dependency at Patesia, outside the city — and beat the elderly abbess savagely, leaving her gravely injured (synaxaristic tradition; Sanidopoulos, “Holy New Martyr Philothei of Athens”; Orthodox Times, “Martyr Philothei the Monastic of Athens”). She lingered for some months and died of her injuries on 19 February 1589, at about sixty-seven years of age. She is commemorated on 19 February.

Philothei’s case sits at the boundary of the categories treated in The Word and the Three Paths. She was not required to deny Christ at the point of death in the manner of the classic confessor; she was assaulted for her Christian work, and died of the assault. The Church venerates her as a righteous martyr (hosiomartys / venerable-martyr) — one whose ascetic and charitable life was crowned by a violent death suffered for the faith and its works — a category close to the “passion-bearer” reasoning the repository discusses for other saints (cf. What a New Martyr Is, on the several kinds of martyric death). The precise circumstances of the attack come to us through the devotional tradition and are reported as such (METHODOLOGY §3.5); what is firm is her prominence, her work for women, the violence that ended her life, and the early and enduring cult.

Mother of the City

Philothei’s relics were enshrined in Athens, and she became one of the patrons of the city — the “second foundress” of Christian Athens in its Ottoman humiliation, honored to this day at the Metropolitan Cathedral, where her relics rest (synaxaristic tradition; the modern Athenian veneration). Her cult is notable for uniting the several things a neomartyr’s memory could hold: a woman of the native elite who chose poverty and the veil; a builder of schools and refuges in an occupied city; a protector specifically of women whom the conversion-order had entrapped; and a martyr whose death was the direct cost of that protection. Where St. Cosmas of Aetolia preserved a people by preaching and schools (see Cosmas of Aetolia: The Preservation of a People), Philothei preserved the most vulnerable of that people, one ransomed woman at a time, and paid for it as he did. She is, fittingly, among the most beloved of all the women saints of the Ottoman centuries, and the natural head of any treatment of the women neomartyrs.

References

Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St., and St. Makarios of Corinth, comps. Neon Martyrologion. Venice, 1799. (The neomartyrological tradition.)
Orthodox Times. “Martyr Philothei the Monastic of Athens (19 February).” orthodoxtimes.com. (The feast; the attack and death.)
Pemptousia. “St. Philothei (Angelou Venizelou), Athens 1522–1589.” pemptousia.com, 2011. (The dates, the noble family, the monastic foundation and charity; underlying claims in the synaxaristic tradition.)
Sanidopoulos, John. “Holy New Martyr Philothei of Athens (+1589).” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2017. (The ransoming of women, the attack of 3 October 1588, the death of 19 February 1589; underlying claims traced to the synaxaristic tradition.)