St. Marina the Great-Martyr

Marina was born around the middle of the third century at Antioch in Pisidia, the daughter of a pagan priest named Aedesius. Her mother died while she was an infant, and the child was given over to a Christian nurse in the countryside, who raised her in the faith and the love of Christ. When her father learned that she had become a Christian he cast her off, and so the girl who might have inherited his house became instead a keeper of sheep.

In her fifteenth year the eparch Olybrius, passing through the region, saw the beautiful shepherdess and desired her for his wife, on the one condition that she renounce Christ. Marina answered that she was already betrothed to the Lord and would not deny Him. The enraged official had her seized and brought to judgment, where she confessed her faith openly before the tribunal.

She was subjected to terrible tortures, beaten with rods, her body torn with iron combs, burned with torches, and bound and cast into a vessel of water. At each torment, the Synaxarion relates, she was strengthened from heaven and her wounds were healed, so that the crowds who watched began themselves to believe, and many were martyred with her. The tradition tells also of her struggle with the demon in her prison cell, whom she overcame by the sign of the Cross.

At last she was beheaded, around the year 275, while still a girl. Her relics were widely venerated across both East and West, and under the name Margaret she became one of the most beloved virgin-martyrs of medieval Christendom. The Orthodox Church keeps her memory on the seventeenth of July, honoring in her the fearless confession of a child against the powers of the age.