HOLY MARTYR IA OF PERSIA

Among the saints, there are kindred spirits, true spiritual brothers and sisters. According to the ancient church writer Rufinus of Aquileia, Saint Nina was captured and brought to Georgia in the Caucasus, where she began preaching. Saint Ia was captured by the Persians. Since she lived after Nina, and by that time Christianity had already become the “official religion” of Persia’s ancestral enemy, the Roman Empire, Saint Ia was executed for her missionary work. If she had lived a little earlier, when Christianity in Rome was still persecuted, Iya, like Nina, would have become the Apostle of her new homeland.

1 On September 24, the orthodox Church honors the memory of the holy martyr Ia. The saint seems forgotten, yet her testimony of faith and the circumstances of her live are very important and relevant for our time. In some calendars, the martyr is also called Eudokia. The Greek word for “witness” sounds like “martyr.” Adding the ending “ia” to it results in “martyria”, that is “martyrdom”. Thus, the holy martyr’s name becomes a diminutive of the holy testimony of faith in Christ Jesus even unto death. Just as in Greek myths, a certain nymph was exhausted by love to such an extent that only an echo remained of her, the love of the holy martyr for Christ “renamed” her in the eyes of her contemporaries into the final syllable of the beautiful biblical word “Martyria”.

2 After Constantine the Great, who legalized Christianity, held the Ecumenical Council of the Church’s bishops in Nicaea, and was baptized on his deathbed in 337, several emperors succeeded each other. Not all of them were fully Orthodox, they nevertheless persecuted paganism and were staunch Christians. In 361, Emperor Julian ascended the throne. The great Doctor of the Church, Gregory the Theologian (329–390), had studied philosophy with him in Athens in his youth. He later recorded his memoirs of how Julian, a catechumen—that is, formally preparing for baptism—gradually drifted away from Christianity during his studies. The future emperor was fascinated by pagan mysteries and sought to communicate with demons. However, before his accession to the throne, he kept all this secret.

3 Julian was Constantine’s nephew. On the outskirts of Paris, the army proclaimed him emperor and solemnly raised him on a shield. It seems that this event, with its apocalyptic unexpectedness, so struck the Christian conscience for centuries that the theme of Christ Jesus raised by angels on a shield as the true and only emperor was later enshrined in the key liturgical hymn of the Orthodox rite, the " Hymn of the Cherubim."

4 Shortly before his accession to the throne, Julian declared himself a pagan, sacrificed to the gods, and embarked on a path of renunciation. His contemporaries nicknamed him Julian the Apostate. He then began to pursue a policy of radical renunciation of the Christian faith throughout the empire. Julian did not deliberately persecute Christians with fire and sword, as his pagan predecessors had done in previous centuries. Like contemporary authorities, Julian mocked the faith, attempting to defeat Christianity through slander, ridicule, caricature, and marginalization. As for the Orthodox, he sought to drive them apart—an all-too-familiar example—by recognizing all bishops, Orthodox, heretics, and schismatics, as equals and recalling them from exile, to drive the disciples of the “Galilean,” as he called Christ, to mutual extermination.

5 Soon, Julian went to war with the Persians. He was killed in battle, and his contemporaries were amazed at how swift and terrible the God of Christians can be in His wrath. God knows how to afflict. The God of the Bible is not at all funny, moreover, He is very good at destroying. The Apostate’s last words were a cry of despair: “You have conquered me, Galilean!”

6 The fifth chapter of the Book of Acts describes the story of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11). This married couple sold their property and brought part of the proceeds to the Apostles. They did it in a kind of communal zeal, but in some downright prophetic image of future “communist” hypocrisy, they hid some of the money for themselves. The Apostle Peter rebuked them, and both Ananias and Sapphira fell dead. This is one of the most difficult narratives to understand in the entire New Testament, when, amid the peaceful and benevolent narrative of Acts, the abyss of God’s wrath suddenly yawns, as if from the pages of the Apocalypse. One might imagine that Julian’s death had a similar effect on contemporaries of those events, both Christians and pagans.

7 But in the life of the martyr Ia, all these apocalyptic events with Julian turned out to be just a prequel to her personal apotheosis. So, the Persians won a victory and captured many prisoners. Among them was a Christian named Ia, a virgin who dedicated herself to God. The Ancient Church saw the dedication of virgins to the God a special, incomparable calling. After all, biblical, apostolic, and early Christian consciousness were able to see in virginity the cessation of time, the collapse of chronology, the end of human self-sufficiency. Indeed, in the understanding of the Ancient Church, virginity dedicated to God was the only place in the universe where immutability reigned. In this uniqueness, this was one of the most radical variants of the likeness to God that man is called to acquire.

8 Thus, the captive Ia found herself in Persia. She began preaching Christ to the Persians, who held pagan beliefs. Since Christianity had become the “official religion” of the Roman Empire since the time of Constantine, Persia was highly suspicious of Christians, especially if they preached. Soon, Saint Ia suffered for her Christian beliefs and her evangelism. Her bones were broken, and her head was cut off. In the face of dire circumstances, trials, persecutions, and calamities, the saint, became an example of steadfastness, a readiness to preach Christ everywhere, always, and in all places.

9 “Be prepared,” said the Soviet Pioneers. This was an undeniable parody of the early Christian expectation of the imminent Coming of Christ. Martyrdom was the ultimate expression of this readiness, the most radical acceleration of His Coming from the personal perspective of the martyr himself.

10 “To him who overcomes I will give a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows except the one who receives it,” says Jesus in the Apocalypse (Revelation 2:17). Around the same time, but slightly earlier, and under different circumstances, Saint Nina was captured and brought to Georgia in the Caucasus. She was the spiritual sister of Saint Ia. After all, she also preached in captivity. Also, like Ia, her true name has not been preserved. After all, “Nina” simply means “Christian.” Similarly, only the ending of Saint Ia’s name, the designation for Christian martyrdom, remains forever.