7 Holy Women of the Orthodox Church

Above all the saints the Orthodox Church honors a woman, the Theotokos, and the first witness of the Resurrection was a woman too: St. Mary Magdalene, who carried the news to the apostles. The calendar is full of holy women - martyrs, ascetics, mothers, rulers and preachers. Here are seven to know, each with a life of her own on our saints pages.

1. St. Photini - the Samaritan woman

Feast: February 26 in the Greek tradition and March 20 in the Slavic, and on the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, the fifth Sunday of Pascha

She is the woman Christ met at Jacob's Well in the fourth chapter of St. John's Gospel, and the first to whom He said plainly that He is the Messiah. She ran back to her town crying, "Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did," and many believed. Tradition gives her the baptismal name Photini, "the enlightened one," and tells that she preached the Gospel as far as Rome, where she was martyred under Nero with her sons and sisters.

Read the life of St. Photini →

2. St. Catherine of Alexandria - the great martyr of wisdom

Feast: November 25

A young noblewoman of Alexandria famed for her learning, Catherine confronted the pagan emperor over his persecution of Christians in the early fourth century. Tradition tells that he set fifty philosophers to argue her out of her faith and that she converted them instead. The wheel on which she was to be tortured broke at her touch, and she was beheaded. Her relics rest at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the monastery that has borne her name for centuries - the same monastery whose abbot wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent.

Read the life of St. Catherine →

3. St. Barbara - the martyr of the tower

Feast: December 4

Barbara's pagan father kept her shut in a tower, away from the world. While he was away she became a Christian and had a third window cut into the bathhouse he was building, in honor of the Holy Trinity. When she would not deny Christ he handed her over to be tortured, and then beheaded her with his own hand. The faithful have long asked her prayers against sudden death. She shares her feast with St. John of Damascus, one of the saints whose books we still read.

Read the life of St. Barbara →

4. St. Christina of Tyre - the girl who broke the idols

Feast: July 24

The daughter of Urban, the governor of Tyre, Christina was raised among gold and silver idols that her father meant her to serve. She came to believe in Christ, broke the idols to pieces and gave the gold and silver to the poor. Her own father had her tortured, and after his death the governors who followed him tried again to break her. She was put to death in the third century, still very young.

Read the life of St. Christina →

5. St. Nina of Georgia - the enlightener of Georgia

Feast: January 14 (January 27 on the civil calendar for churches that keep the Old Calendar, the Church of Georgia among them)

Nina came to Iberia, in what is now Georgia, from Cappadocia early in the fourth century, carrying a cross of grapevine branches bound with strands of her own hair. She lived quietly in Mtskheta, the royal city, praying and healing the sick. When she healed Queen Nana, and King Mirian was delivered from sudden darkness after calling on "the God of Nina," the royal house was baptized and Georgia became one of the first Christian nations. Her grapevine cross is still the emblem of the Georgian Church, and two of the saints of the twentieth century on our lists are her countrymen.

Read the life of St. Nina →

6. St. Olga of Kiev - the forerunner of a Christian land

Feast: July 11

Widowed when the Drevlians killed her husband, Prince Igor, Olga ruled Kievan Rus' for her young son and avenged Igor without mercy. Later in life she traveled to Constantinople, was baptized and took the name Helen. She could not persuade her son to follow her, but her grandson, St. Vladimir, brought all of Rus' to baptism in 988. The old chronicle of Kiev calls her the forerunner of the Christian land, rising before it like the morning star before the sun. The Church honors her as Equal-to-the-Apostles.

Read the life of St. Olga →

7. St. Xenia of St. Petersburg - the fool for Christ

Feast: January 24

When her husband Andrei, a court singer, died suddenly without confession, the young widow Xenia gave away everything she owned, put on his clothes and answered only to his name, as if to live out the life he had lost. For some forty-five years she wandered St. Petersburg as a fool for Christ, praying in the open fields at night and secretly carrying bricks to the builders of the church at the Smolensk cemetery. She reposed around the turn of the nineteenth century and was buried there, and her chapel still draws pilgrims every day.

Read the life of St. Xenia →

More lists of the saints

• 7 Orthodox Saints Who Brought the Faith to America - from the monks of Kodiak to a wonderworker of San Francisco

• 8 Orthodox Saints of the Twentieth Century - elders of Athos, a holy fool of Tbilisi and a martyr of Auschwitz

• 8 Orthodox Saints Whose Books You Can Still Read - the Church Fathers behind On the Incarnation, the Ladder and the Philokalia

• 7 Orthodox Saints of the West Before the Great Schism - Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy in the undivided Church

Or browse every saint on our calendar, and read why the Church honors them in the role of saints in Orthodox Christianity.