The Nun Hieria
Commemorated on June 3
The Nun Hieria
was born into a pagan family, and became the wife of a Roman senator, but after
a mere 7 months was widowed. While in the Assyrian city of Seuapolis, she
learned that in the vicinity of the city of Niziba there was a women's
monastery, in which asceticised the young Monastic Febronia, distinguished for
her particularly strict life. Under the guise of a wanderer, Hieria visited her
and conversed with her all night, being instructed in the Christian faith, and
then having returned home, she was baptised and persuaded her parents to do
likewise.
During the time of
the persecution by Diocletian (284-305), the majority of the inhabitants of the
Niziba monastery left and hid away from the persecutors, but Saint Febronia was
brought to trial before the cruel official Selinus and for her confession of
Christ she was subjected to inhuman tortures. Saint Hieria intrepidly denounced
the cruelty of the torturers. The judge gave orders to arrest and torture her
also, but then he changed his mind, in learning that Saint Hieria – was the
widow of a Roman senator.
Bitterly bewailing
the martyr's death of Saint Febronia (+ c. 304, Comm. 25 June), Hieria grieved,
that she herself had not been vouchsafed to suffer for the faith in Christ.
With tears she besought the hegumeness Brienna to accept her in place of Febronia
at the monastery. Having bestown all her substance upon the monastery, the nun
Hieria spent there the remaining days of her life and peacefully reposed to God
in about the year 320.
© 1996-2001 by translator Fr. S. Janos.