Saint Matrona of Chios and the Other Saints Who Bore the Name Matrona

On July 15, the Greek synaxaria commemorate the finding of the honourable head of Saint Matrona of Chios, a nun and abbess who lived on the island of Chios at the close of the fourteenth century and in the first half of the fifteenth. Her principal feast falls on October 20, the day of her repose; the midsummer commemoration was added later, when her head was found and set forth for veneration. In the calendar of the day the venerable one stands in the shadow of better-known feasts — the Holy Martyrs Cyricus and Julitta, Saint Vladimir, Enlightener of Rus — and her life remains almost unknown to the English-speaking reader.

The name Matrona, however, is borne by several saints of the Church, from different centuries and different lands, and popular piety often confuses them. The most sought-after today is Saint Matrona of Moscow, who reposed in 1952, at whose relics long lines gather daily at the Protection (Pokrov) Convent. Many of those who ask her intercession do not know that the Church honours at least five saints of this name, and that each has her own day, her own life, and her own manner of ascetic struggle. The present article first recounts the life of the venerable one of Chios, then distinguishes the others, so that the reader may know to whom he prays on each day of commemoration.

In the Church, the commemoration of the saints is not mere historical remembrance. Each saint is a person living in Christ, and knowing his life belongs to the very honour paid him: we do not pray to a name, but to a particular person, with his own face and his own path. This is why the Church guards with care the name of each, his day of commemoration, and his history — and why the distinctions among saints who bear the same name are not a scholar’s trifle, but part of the right way of honouring them.

The Virgin of Volissos

Volissos is an old village on the north-west coast of Chios, the same village from which the Church also received Saint Marcella the Great Martyr, protectress of the island. Here, toward the end of the fourteenth century, a girl was born who received at baptism the name Mary. Her parents, Leo and Anna, were well-to-do and respected Christians in the village, and Mary was the youngest of their seven children.

When the time came for her to be married and her parents began to arrange the wedding, Mary refused. She had long since chosen her Bridegroom and wished to keep her virginity for Him. To escape the betrothal she fled from Volissos to a high place above the village called Katavasis, and there she began her struggle: she fasted and prayed. Her parents searched for her, found her, and persuaded her to return home. She returned and remained with them, obedient in all things — save one: she did not marry.

After her parents’ death, Mary divided the land she had inherited among her sisters and the orphans of the village community, left Volissos never to see it again, and went up once more to Katavasis. She remained there three years, in prayer and in the searching of her own soul; she ate little, and one of her sisters carried her food up to her.

The City and the Monastery

God did not, however, leave her a solitary. After those three years, Mary came down into the city of Chios, where there were then many convents of nuns; she went through them and chose the most secluded — a community of only three nuns, a mother with her two daughters. The nuns received her, saw her sincerity, and at her tonsure changed her name: from Mary she became Matrona.

Before long she surpassed them all in zeal, in watchfulness, and in understanding of spiritual things, and her life drew other virgins to the monastery. The community’s church was small, so the abbess agreed to Matrona’s plan: to enlarge the church and build cells for the nuns who were coming. The venerable one sold the land that remained to her and all her belongings, and with this money the community first built a public bath, for the poor and for travellers, as was the custom in the cities of that time. Only then did the renewal of the church begin, dedicated to Saint Artemius the Great Martyr. When the work was finished, the aged abbess reposed, and the nuns chose Matrona in her place.

Under her governance the monastery became known throughout the island. The venerable one gave alms to the poor, healed the sick, and counselled those who came up to the monastery gate, and the Chians honoured her as a saint already in her lifetime.

The Lightning That Guarded the Community

Chios was at that time under Genoese rule. With the rulers many foreigners entered the island, and some of them plundered the villages and monasteries. Matrona’s monastery came in its turn: one of the raiders rushed upon the nuns. The abbess had no weapon but prayer — and she prayed. Lightning fell from heaven and struck the assailant, and the rest, seeing the destruction, fled the island in terror.

The synaxarion preserves the event without embellishment, as a fact: God guarded His community through the prayer of the abbess. It does not present this as the saint’s revenge, but as God’s providence over nuns left with no human defence — the venerable one did not call down punishment on anyone, but help upon those she shepherded. In the age when Byzantium was going out and the islands passed from hand to hand, a convent of nuns stood firm because someone in its midst was praying.

Her Repose and Veneration

After these events, the venerable one saw her own end in a vision. She then fell ill and lay seven days, during which she counselled the nuns as a mother counsels her children, received the Holy Mysteries, and reposed. The synaxaria place her repose on October 20 — the very day of Saint Artemius the Great Martyr, protector of the church she had renewed. For this reason her principal commemoration was appointed on that day.

On the year of her repose the sources do not agree. The island’s tradition holds the year 1455; some later redactions give 1462. The most secure historical marker remains a codex dated 1455, which already contains the service to the venerable one, composed by Metropolitan Niketas of Rhodes — a sign that by that date Matrona had reposed and was honoured as a saint, with a service written for her. She reposed, therefore, no later than 1455.

She was buried in the church of the monastery where she had spent her life, and at her grave the healings began: the sick of every kind came and departed cured. At Katavasis, on the spot where she had begun her struggle, the villagers raised a church; the first, a small one, serves today as a cemetery chapel, and beside it a larger one was built, the parish church.

According to the island’s tradition, in 1470, only a few years after her repose, the venerable one built one more monastery — this time from heaven. The archon Roidis was planning to raise a tower near the village of Mesa Didyma; Matrona appeared to him in a dream and asked him to build, in place of the tower, a monastery dedicated to her. Roidis obeyed, and the first two nuns of the new community were his own sisters. In this monastery at Chalandra there lived, three centuries later, Saint Nikephoros of Chios, of the circle of the Kollyvades, who composed for the saint the twenty-four stanzas of her Lauds. The veneration of Matrona spread from Chios across the Aegean — to Samos, to Ikaria, to Santorini — and the finding of her honourable head added the second commemoration to the calendar, that of July 15.

How Many Saints Named Matrona the Church Honours

The name comes from the Latin matrona: the married woman, the mistress of the house; from this it took on the wider sense of a woman worthy of honour, a respected lady. It was borne by several saints, separated from one another by centuries and by thousands of miles, and the calendar keeps them distinct even when popular piety confuses them. The five most often commemorated are these.

Saint Matrona the Martyr of Thessalonica (third or fourth century, March 27)

The oldest of them was a servant in the house of a Jewish woman of Thessalonica, Pantilla, wife of a city official. Matrona went secretly to church; her mistress found out, beat her, and shut her up, and the saint died of the beatings, confessing faith in Christ to the very end. The Church commemorates her on March 27.

Saint Matrona of Perge, of Constantinople (fifth century, November 9)

She was born in Perge of Pamphylia and was married to a well-to-do man, Dometian, to whom she bore a daughter, Theodota. At Constantinople the longing for the monastic life was kindled in her. She entrusted her daughter to a pious old woman, cut her hair, and, dressed as a man, took the monastic name Babylas and entered the men’s monastery of Saint Bassian, that her husband might not find her. When the secret was discovered, she wandered to Jerusalem, to Sinai, and to Beirut, where a community of women gathered around her; returning to Constantinople after her husband’s death, she founded there, with the blessing of Saint Bassian, a convent famed for the severity of its rule. She reposed at a hundred years of age, after seventy-five years of monastic life. She is commemorated on November 9 (November 22 in the Churches that follow the old calendar).

This Matrona holds the key to the whole confusion of today: in her honour was baptized, at the close of the nineteenth century, the blind girl of the village of Sebino who would become Saint Matrona of Moscow.

Saint Matrona of Chios (fourteenth-fifteenth centuries, October 20 and July 15)

The venerable one whose life is recounted above: the virgin of Volissos who became abbess in the city of Chios, reposed before 1455, honoured throughout the Aegean.

Saint Matrona of Anemnyasevo, the Confessor (1864-1936, July 29)

Matrona Belyakova was born in 1864 in the village of Anemnyasevo in the Ryazan province, in the poorest family of the village. At seven she went blind from smallpox, left untreated; at about ten, after a terrible beating from her own mother, she was left bedridden and never rose again until her death. She lay for over fifty years — and from that bed she prayed, consoled, and healed. Dozens of people came to her each day, from all over Russia. Two priests, the brothers Nikolai and Vladimir Pravdolyubov, wrote her life while she was still living; for this manuscript they were sent to the camps, and the case opened against them took her in as well. Sick and dying, she was taken to a home for chronic invalids in Moscow, where she died on July 29, 1936 (July 16 old style). She was canonized at Ryazan in 1999, and in the year 2000 the Jubilee Council of the Russian Church numbered her among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. She is commemorated on July 29.

Saint Matrona of Moscow (1881-1952, May 2)

Matrona Nikonova was born in 1881 in the village of Sebino in the Tula province, blind from birth; at seventeen her legs were paralyzed. From 1925 she lived in Moscow, moving from house to house through the years of persecution, receiving daily dozens of people who asked her prayer and counsel. She reposed on May 2, 1952 (April 19 old style). The Russian Church canonized her in 1999 for local veneration at Moscow, then in 2004 for the whole Church; her relics are at the Protection Convent in Moscow. In 2018 the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church inscribed her in the Romanian calendar as well. At baptism she had received, as noted above, the name of Saint Matrona of Constantinople, commemorated on November 9. Neither is she to be confused with the other blessed Matrona of Russia, the one of Anemnyasevo, with whom popular piety most often mingles her — the likeness of their lives calls for a word apart.

The Two Blind Women of Russia

The most frequent confusion concerns these last two. Two blessed Matronas, both blind, both bedridden for years on end, lived in the same Russia of persecution and were canonized in the same year, 1999 — one at Ryazan, the other at Moscow. The likeness of their lives has led many pilgrims to merge them into a single person.

They are, however, clearly distinct. Matrona of Anemnyasevo died in 1936, in the full force of the terror, as a confessor with a criminal case against her, and is commemorated in summer, on July 29. Matrona of Moscow died in 1952 and is commemorated in spring, on May 2. And to the venerable one of Chios, whom we celebrate on July 15, neither is bound by any historical kinship: four and a half centuries separate the repose of the abbess of the Aegean from the death of the confessor of Ryazan. They are united by the name alone — and by the manner in which they understood how to bear it.

The Same Name, the Same Path

Whoever prays on July 15 to Saint Matrona of Chios prays to a nun who gave away all she had, built a bath for the poor and a church for her community, defended it with prayer when nothing else defended it, and died counselling her nuns. Whoever comes, on other days of the year, to the other saints of the same name finds the same movement of the soul in ever-different circumstances: the servant of Thessalonica dies under the beatings because she goes to church; the woman of Perge leaves her house for Christ; the blind peasant girl of Ryazan turns a bed of suffering into a place of prayer for a whole country.

The calendar keeps them carefully distinct, so that we may honour not a figment but living persons, each with her own name, her own day, and her own cross. Their lives show that holiness lies not in outward circumstances, but in a person’s response to the call of God. One was a virgin and abbess, another a servant killed for the faith, another a married woman who became a nun, and others bore for years on end the burden of blindness and the bed of suffering. Grace worked in each along a different path, but with the same end: union with Christ.

And above all the distinctions there remains what the synaxarion says of each in turn: that she loved Christ more than anything she had to lose.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is Saint Matrona of Chios commemorated?

Her principal commemoration is on October 20, the day of her repose. On July 15 the Church commemorates the finding of her honourable head.

Is Saint Matrona of Chios the same saint as Saint Matrona of Moscow?

No. Saint Matrona of Chios lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while Saint Matrona of Moscow lived from 1881 to 1952.

Which saints named Matrona are most often mentioned?

The most familiar are Matrona of Thessalonica, Matrona of Perge/Constantinople, Matrona of Chios, Matrona of Anemnyasevo, and Matrona of Moscow.