HOLY MARTYR IRAIDA OF ALEXANDRIA

In the Orthodox liturgy, the prayerful intention for those travelling on the waters is constantly repeated. In the suffering of the holy martyr Iraida of Alexandria, this prayer became a predestination of the apotheosis of her earthly and heavenly destiny.

1 On September 18, the Church celebrates the memory of the holy martyr Iraida of Alexandria. Another name for Saint Iraida found in the calendars is Raisa, and first names derived from it. Therefore, the memory of the holy martyr is the name day of those who bear the names Iraida and Raisa.

2 Saint Iraida of Alexandria is to be distinguished from another saint of the same name, Iraida-Hermione, who lived in a different, earlier era. She was the daughter of the holy Apostle Philip the Deacon, served the early Church in the mysterious office of a prophetess, and whose memory is celebrated on the eve of the same September day. The most important recorded episode of Saint Iraida’s martyrdom is her going to the well to fetch water, as once happened to the Samaritan woman in the Gospel. The significant difference is that Iraida was a consecrated virgin, the daughter of a Christian priest, and very young, unlike the Samaritan woman, who had already had many husbands and was an experienced woman.

3 The event took place near the banks of the Nile. The grace of the martyr’s vocation touched Iraida’s heart at the sight of a barge full of Christian prisoners. They were being taken to ancient Antinopolis in southern central Egypt, on the east bank of the Nile. The “capital” of Greek cultural and religious presence in Egypt, founded by Emperor Hadrian in 122, had been forgotten over time. Today, the city of Sheikh Ibada lies nearby. Saint Iraida took pity on the prisoners and, like Saint Adrian, whose memory the Church celebrates with his wife Natalia ten days before Iraida, asked to be “in the diptychs,” that is, to be included in the lists of those condemned to martyrdom and taken with them to the ship. She feared no threats, and since the chief guard openly expressed his contempt for Christianity, she spat in his face as a sign of contempt for paganism and was executed.

4 This episode is strongly reminiscent of two narratives about ships, one from the lives of saints and one from recent Soviet history. From the life of the Russian saint Procopius of Ustyug (+1303), who may have been the first fool-for-Christ’s sake venerated in Rus, we know that he sat on the shore and blessed the passing ships. This scene was depicted in the painting of the same name by the artist Nikolai Roerich in 1914.

5 From the history of the Russian Civil War, we know that the Bolsheviks once loaded a large number of Russian soldiers and officers onto a barge and drowned them at sea under the pretext of evacuating them. This tragic episode, which occurred just a few years after Roerich’s insightful painting, was retold at the end of Nikita Mikhalkov’s film “Sunstroke.” The grace of the communion of saints, like a sacramental “time machine,” or, as theology once called it, “instrumentum coniunctum,” created a surprising similarity between the innocent virgin and the merciful fool in Christ. This is the mysterious connection between Procopius’s compassion for the fate of the ships sailing into the unknown and Raisa’s mercy for the innocent Christians taken away for torture. On the ship carrying the new martyrs, there was no one to remember them or pray for them, except for the saints who had once shared their fate, both in suffering and in mercy. Their example was the true witness and the first martyr (cf. Revelation 3:14), who shared the fate of all people in history, whose name is Jesus.