medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Absent from the martyrologies of late antiquity and from the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, Heliconis (also Helconis) has a legendary Passio (BHG 742) from which various synaxary notices, etc. derive. According to this account, she was a Christian virgin of Thessalonica (now Thessaloniki) who during a persecution under an emperor Gordian proselytized among the inhabitants of Corinth, was arrested there, rejected the efforts of a Roman proconsul who, struck by her physical beauty, attempted to persuade her to sacrifice to pagan gods, emerged unscathed from several usually lethal tortures, was brought to a pagan temple, and there caused the collapse and destruction of its cult statue. With the assistance of Christ and the archangels Michael and Gabriel Heliconis emerged unscathed from further tortures. In the end she was decapitated, whereupon her corpse emitted milk rather than blood. Thus far her Passio.
Neither Gordian I nor Gordian II in their very brief joint reign (three weeks in 238) exercised power in Achaia; Gordian III (r. 238-244) seems to have tolerated Christianity. The attempts to arrive at a date for Heliconis based upon the Passio's name for the emperor under whom she is said to have suffered are more ingenious than convincing. Today is her feast day in the originally tenth-century Synaxary of Constantinople and in at least some modern Byzantine-rite churches. It is also her day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.
Heliconis as depicted (lower left; martyrdom) in a conspectus of saints of late May and very early June in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the narthex of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/36v6sc2
Best,
John Dillon
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