PARASKEVE (PARASCEVE), Saint. - Sister of Euthymius, bishop of Madyta, born c. 1023 at Kallistria, Epivat and Mesembria (Thrace) on the Black Sea, died at Epivat c. 1050. At the age of fifteen she entered a monastery in Chalcedon, where she spent five years; after another five years spent in the desert of Jordan, she retired to Epivat. She was buried on the shore of the Black Sea. Later the inhabitants of the place found her remains intact and brought them back to Epivat.
The emperor of the Vlach-Bulgarians, John Asen (1219-41), took the sacred relics to Tirnovo, to the church of the Forty Martyrs. Bayezid I gave them to Mircea the Great, prince of Wallachia, but after the victory of Nicopolis (1396) he took them back and gave them to the princess Angelina of Serbia. Soliman II (1520-66), converting the central church of Belgrade into a mosque, had the relics sold, together with other sacred treasures, to the patriarch of Constantinople for 12,000 ducats. From there they were taken in 1641 by Basil Lupu, prince of Moldavia, who paid for them a total of 2,516,000 *aspre*, and deposited them in the church of the Three Hierarchs in Iași. The sacred relics were miraculously saved from a fire on the night of 26-27 December 1888. The feast of the Saint is on 14 October.
P. is the most popular saint of the Balkans and among the Romans and Slavs under the homonymous form of Piatnitz (die quinta, Friday). For the Greeks her popularity seems connected with devotion to Good Friday. Among the Romans she must have had contact with St. Vineri, an unknown saint who had ancient churches in the great cities, and with the "St. Vineri" of popular tales (Friday or Vineri), a kind of fairy, an ethnic goddess. The devotion to Good Friday seems to be connected, as far as can be seen, with the P. of Novgorod, it not being possible to identify her with other homonymous martyrs.