Sts. Adrian and Natalia

Adrian was an officer of the court at Nicomedia under Maximian, in charge of the praetorium, and he was present when a group of twenty three Christians taken in a cave outside the city were brought in and tortured. He asked them what reward they were expecting, and the answer they gave him was the one from the Apostle: what eye has not seen, nor ear heard.

He told the clerks to add his name to the list of the accused. He was twenty eight and had been married thirteen months.

Natalia, his wife, was a Christian and had kept it from him. When the news came that he was in prison she came to the prison and got in, cut her hair and dressed as a man to keep getting in, and served the prisoners. When Adrian was released briefly to bring her word of the date, she shut the door in his face, believing he had recanted, until he explained.

The end was brutal even by the standard of these accounts: the prisoners' limbs were broken on an anvil, and Natalia was there, and held her husband's hands to it. She carried away one of his hands and afterward crossed to Byzantium with the relics, where she died soon after. The Church keeps them both on the twenty sixth of August.