Euphemia of Chalcedon, Saint, Martyr

EUPHEMIA OF CHALCEDON, Saint, Martyr. - The acts that have come down to us are not authentic (BHG, 619 ff.; BHL, 2708-14). E. was a virgin consecrated to God; during the persecution of Diocletian her teeth were broken with a hammer and she was then thrown into the pyre. The Fasti Vindobonenses priores assign her martyrdom to 16 September of the year 303 (MGH, Auctores antiquissimi, IX, p. 290). Veneration of the martyr soon spread both in the East and in the West, as is attested several times by the Greek Synaxaria, by the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, by the calendars of Carthage and Naples, by the Sacramentaries, etc. In the East she had a basilica in Antioch (Moschus, Pratum, 88: PG 87, 2945).

In Constantinople several churches were dedicated to St. E. (R. Janin, Les églises de ste Euphémie à Constantinople, in Echos d'Orient, 37 [1934], pp. 270-75). In Egypt she is commemorated in the calendar of Oxyrhynchus (B. P. Grenfell-A. S. Hunt, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, part 9, no. 1337, pp. 19-43). In Africa, in the church of Kherbet-el-Ma-el-Abiad, between Constantine and Sétif, memoriae of St. E. were deposited in the year 474 (P. Monceaux, Enquête sur l'épigraphie chrétienne d'Afrique, in Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, XII, 1 [1907], p. 112). At Aquileia, on 3 September, the dedication of the Basilica to L'ingresso reliquiorum of a group of saints, among them St. E., was commemorated; under the same date the dedication of the basilica of St. E. built by the patriarch Elias was commemorated in Grado. In Milan, perhaps as early as the time of St. Ambrose, relics of St. E. were brought and her commemoration was held on 27 November. At Rouen the bishop Victricius placed relics of St. E. in veneration (De laude Sanctorum; PL 20, 448). At Ravenna there are as many as five churches dedicated to St. E. One in the city, built above an older church; a second at Classe called ad mare, that is the baptistery of the basilica Probi, transformed by the bishop Maximian into the church of St. E., but already demolished in the time of Agnellus; a third which Agnellus calls "in Calinico"; a fourth outside the Porta Aurea; a fifth outside the Porta S. Lorenzo. Also at Ravenna, in 550, the bishop Maximian deposited relics of St. E. in the church of St. Stephen. In Rome her cult was localized in a basilica situated in the IV urban region, that is in the Suburra; it is mentioned by Gregory of Tours (ca. 537-94) as a meeting point of the widows in the procession of the great sevenfold litany. The building was without a roof in the time of Sergius I (687-701), who restored it (Lib. pont., I, p. 375). It is not known when the basilica was erected, but it certainly must have been earlier than the one that Pope Gelasius had dedicated to St. E. in Tivoli between the years 492-96 (Lib. pont., I, p. 255). Near Albano a basilica in honor of St. E. was erected by Pope Donus (676-678). In Chalcedon, in the basilica erected over her tomb, precious fabrics were admired, on which, according to the testimony of Asterius of Amasea, the episodes of her martyrdom were represented (BHG 2, 623; Evagrius, Hist. eccl., II, 3; J. Pargoire, L'église Ste Euphémie et Rufinianes, in Echos d'Orient, 14 [1911], pp. 107-11).

The martyr was represented at Ravenna in one of the mosaic medallions in the chapel of St. Peter Chrysologus (CIL, XI, 261) and closes the procession of the martyrs in S. Martino in "Caelo Aureo"; today S. Apollinare Nuovo (CIL, XI, 281); in Parenzo in one of the mosaic medallions inside the triumphal arch of the basilica of the bishop Euphrasius (O. Marucchi, Le recenti scoperte nel duomo di Parenzo, in Nuovo bull. di arch. crist., 2 [1896], p. 16). She was also portrayed in a fresco of an apsidal niche in the ancient basilica of S. Clemente; the upper part of it survives, of youthful appearance, with a rich diadem of pearls on her head and the inscription SCÀ EUF [emia] (Wilpert, Moschus, pl. 213, 4, p. 1035); there is also the figure of St. E. in a fresco in S. Lorenzo fuori le mura of the 12th century.

Enrico Josi