Great-martyr Euphemia of Chalcedon

Euphemia was a young woman of Chalcedon on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, born of a Christian senator named Philophronos and his wife Theodosia in the late third century. During the persecution of Diocletian, a great roundup of Christians was made at Chalcedon under the proconsul Priscus; Euphemia, hidden at first by her family, eventually came forward of her own accord to share the suffering of her fellow Christians.

Priscus attempted to break her by an extraordinary succession of torments — by the synaxarion's reckoning, more than a dozen separate forms of torture — and at last threw her to wild beasts in the amphitheater of Chalcedon. A she-bear bit her body and gave her the crown around the year 304. Her relics were honored at a great basilica raised over her tomb in the years following the peace of Constantine.

In 451 the Fourth Ecumenical Council assembled at her shrine. When the Fathers and the rival party of the Eutychians were unable to reach agreement, both sides — by the synaxarion's account — wrote their respective Christological confessions on parchment scrolls and placed them on the chest of Euphemia's reliquary; the next morning, the orthodox scroll was found in her hands and the heretical one beneath her feet. The Council took this as her ratification of its Definition. Her feast is kept on September 16.