St. Glyceria of Trajanopolis

Glyceria was a virgin of Trajanopolis in Thrace in the second century, the daughter of a Roman official of senatorial rank named Macarius, who had abandoned the pagan religion and was preparing to retire from public life to live as a Christian. Glyceria, raised in the secret faith of her father, came of age during the reign of the Emperor Antoninus Pius — a period when Christian witness in Thrace and Asia Minor was at constant risk.

The synaxarion records that the prefect of Trajanopolis, Sabinus, was holding a public festival in honor of Zeus when Glyceria, having signed her forehead with the cross beneath her veil, walked into the temple with the assembled crowd. When she was asked why she did not raise her hands in prayer to the idol, she stepped forward, made the sign of the Cross openly upon her brow, and declared herself a Christian. She approached the great statue of Zeus and — by the synaxarion's account — the idol trembled and crashed to the temple floor, shattering. The crowd cried out for her death. Sabinus, both furious and afraid, ordered her arrested and tortured.

She was beaten, scourged, hung up by her hair, and at last cast into prison without food or water. The bishop of the city, Theodotus, secretly visited her and brought her the Eucharist. After many days her tortures continued — burning, the rack, the breaking of the bones — until she was thrown to wild beasts in the amphitheater at Heraclea on the Sea of Marmora. There a lioness leaped upon her and, by a single bite to her throat, gave her the swift death the slow torments had not. Her body was found whole, and the bishop Philocrates of Heraclea buried it with honor.

Her feast is kept in the Orthodox Church on May 13.