medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Menodora, Metrodora, and Nymphodora (d. early 4th cent., supposedly) are saints of Bithynia with a recorded cult at a place called Pythia Therma, probably today's Yalova hot springs some eleven kilometers southwest of the Turkish provincial capital of Yalova. There they presided over a healing spring and in that capacity are assumed to have succeeded a local cult of nymphs. According to their legendary Passio by St. Symeon Metaphrastes (BHG 1272x), they were sisters who suffered martyrdom under Maximian (Galerius). Menodora was tried first and died under torture. When her sisters were shown her corpse, instead of recanting they bravely affirmed their faith and shared her fate, one after the other. Thus far the Passio.
Menodora, Metrodora, and Nymphodora are entered under 10. September in the Synaxary of Constantinople and in the Metaphrastic Menologion (both originally tenth-century) and are commemorated today in churches using the Byzantine Rite. They entered the Roman Martyrology under cardinal Baronio in the late sixteenth century and left it in the revision of 2001.
Some period-pertinent images of Menodora, Metrodora, and Nymphodora:
a) as depicted (martyrdom) in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 26):
http://tinyurl.com/qe9cm2s
b) as depicted in an illuminated eleventh-century copy of the September portion of the Metaphrastic Menologion (London, BL, MS Add 11870, fol. 84r):
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_11870_f084r
c) as depicted in the September calendar portraits in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) of the nave of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/2wkmugk
d) as depicted (panel at upper left, lower register; martyrdom; upper register: St. Barypsabas?) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 9r):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/9r.jpg
e) as depicted (martyrdom) in a September calendar scene in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) of the narthex in the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/3ymvs7z
f) as depicted (martyrdom) in the earlier sixteenth-century frescoes (1546/47) by George / Tzortzis the Cretan in the Dionysiou monastery on Mt. Athos:
http://tinyurl.com/ol5a38a
Best,
John Dillon
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