Fausta of Sirmium

Fausta of Sirmium is venerated as the mother of Saint Anastasia of Sirmium, regarded as a model of a mother who knew how to raise a holy daughter. The Catholic Church commemorates her on 19 December. The saint is depicted on one of the columns of the colonnade of Saint Peter's Square in Rome, among the one hundred and forty saints who adorn it. The sources give few reports, and some do not fit with one another.

According to the English and the Russian source, Fausta lived in the third century and was a model mother. Another source, the Serbian synaxarion, mentions her as a martyr who suffered in the time of the emperor Maximian, between 305 and 311, and calls her the mother of Saint Anastasia of Sirmium. According to this source, she amazed her tormentors and turned them to Christianity: the eighty-⁠year-⁠old pagan priest Evilasius and the eparch Maximus. When the judge threatened her with still more terrible torments, she asked him to make an icon with the likeness of all the torments with which he threatened her. When the icon was ready and shown to her, the saint said that, as this icon feels no pain, so her body feels no pain from his punishments, since her soul is made firm in the Lord. The judge threw her into a cauldron of boiling water, where this holy girl of thirteen gave up her soul with a prayer on her lips.

The story in the Serbian source, with a girl of thirteen, does not fit with a mother of a saint and seems mixed with the story of another martyr. The Serbian synaxarion commemorates her on 6 February by the old calendar, which is 19 February by the new.