Anna of Constantinople

Saint Anna of Constantinople is commemorated as the mother of a Saint John; the sources give two different accounts of her. The Church commemorates her on 29 October, and the Serbian Church on 13 June by the old calendar (26 June by the new).

According to the OCA, Anna and her son John lived in the ninth century. She was the daughter of a deacon of the Blachernae church in Constantinople. After her husband's death she dressed in men's clothing and called herself Euthymianus. With her son, Saint John, she practised asceticism in one of the Bithynian monasteries near Olympus. She died in Constantinople in the year 826.

According to the Serbian source, she is the mother of John the Confessor. An orphan, she was taken into the house of a great nobleman, where she grew up and was married to his son. When the old man died, the relatives asked the son to divorce his wife because of her low social standing and to marry another, more suitable in rank and wealth, but he feared God and would not. Learning what was happening, Anna secretly left him and fled far away to an uninhabited island, but soon realized she was pregnant and bore a son. On the island she lived thirty years, fasting and praying. According to Christian tradition, a hieromonk then landed on the island and baptized her son and named him John.