Aurelius and Natalia

The Holy Martyrs Aurelius and Natalia were a Christian couple of Córdoba, a city of Muslim-⁠ruled Spain, condemned to death by the Emir Abd ar-⁠Rahman II because they would not renounce their faith in Christ. They were beheaded on 27 July 852. They are venerated in the Roman Catholic Church, and a Russian encyclopedia also calls them holy martyrs, with their commemoration on 27 July. The sources consulted show no formal Orthodox canonization.

Their family

A life of Aurelius was left to us by Saint Eulogius of Córdoba. According to it, Aurelius was born into a wealthy family of Seville, of a Muslim Arab father and a Christian Spanish mother. He was orphaned as a child and was raised in secret in the faith of Christ by an aunt, at a time when Christians were persecuted by their Moorish rulers.

He married Sabigotho, a girl of a Muslim family, who after the wedding received the Christian faith and the name Natalia. They lived in secret as Christians in Córdoba. The sources disagree about their children: some speak of one daughter, the Spanish ones of two small daughters, left orphans.

The confession

One day Aurelius saw a Christian merchant publicly whipped for having confessed his faith. Shaken, he and Natalia resolved to hide their faith no more. They set aside means for their daughter or daughters, gave the rest to the poor, and began to confess Christ openly and to visit the Christians in prison.

Because they came from Muslim families, they were arrested as apostates from Islam, which the law of the time punished by death. They were given four days to change their minds and did not. On 27 July 852 they were beheaded, together with their friend George, a deacon and monk who had come from Jerusalem, in Palestine, and with another couple, Felix, a cousin of Aurelius, and his wife Liliosa. George, as a foreigner, could have escaped, but he denounced Islam and suffered with the others.

The martyrs of Córdoba

Their passion belongs to the movement of the martyrs of Córdoba, between 850 and 859, in which nearly fifty Christians were put to death for speaking publicly against Islam or, being born of Muslim parents, for confessing Christ. The priest Eulogius wrote of them, in the Memorial of the Saints and the Martyrial Document, before being martyred himself in 859. Historians today debate whether some of these martyrdoms were not sought voluntarily.

The relics

According to a Western tradition, the relics of George, Aurelius and Natalia were taken in 858 to the abbey of Saint-⁠Germain-⁠des-⁠Prés in Paris. The relics of Aurelius are kept today in an altar of the cathedral of Santa María la Antigua in Panama.