Alla of Gothia

Holy Martyr Alla of Gothia was one of the twenty-⁠six Christians killed by the Goths around the year 375, in the time of King Athanaric, persecutor of the Christians. The Orthodox Church commemorates her by the old calendar on 26 March, together with the other Gothic martyrs.

The ancient synaxaria of the Gothic Church mention the martyrdom of twenty-⁠six Christians in the time of the emperors Valentinian, Valens and Gratian. The historian Sozomen, in his Ecclesiastical History, writes that King Athanaric was enraged because his subjects were embracing Christianity in great numbers, under the influence of the preaching of Bishop Ulfilas. By his command many were tortured and put to death, often without trial. Athanaric set a statue on a wagon and drove it before the tents of the Christians, which were used for church services. Those who agreed to bow to the idols and offer sacrifice were spared. The rest were burned alive in the church during the service. In that fire three hundred and eight people perished, of whom only twenty-⁠six are known by name, among them Saint Alla.

In the time of the emperors Valentinian and Theodosius, Gaatha, the widow of a Gothic king, an Orthodox Christian, and her daughter Duclida gathered the relics of the holy martyrs, among them those of Alla, and carried them to Syria. Gaatha later returned to her homeland, where she was stoned and received a martyr's death together with her son Agathon. Later Duclida carried the relics of the martyrs to the city of Cyzicus in Asia Minor and gave them to the newly built churches.

The Gothic calendar kept the memory of Saint Alla on 23 October. In the additions to the Menaia of Demetrius of Rostov, made apparently in the nineteenth century, Saint Alla is not among those burned but is the one who, in place of Gaatha, gathered the relics and was stoned. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, in the village of Staraya Potlovka in the Serdobsk district of the Saratov governorate, the landowner Nadezhda Mikhailovna Richter built a church dedicated to Saint Alla of Gothia.