Fusca of Ravenna

Saint Fusca of Ravenna was a child martyr, put to death about 250, in the persecution of Decius, together with her nurse, Maura. She is remembered on 13 February. Our sources do not agree on the place: one says Ravenna, in Italy, the other, by tradition, Sabratha, in Libya. The English source says they are honoured by the Roman Catholic Church, and our menaion data gives them the day of 13 February.

Her life in the two accounts

According to the English source, her father was a nobleman of Ravenna. She was raised by Maura, her father's slave. Both were baptized by the priest Ermolaus. The father denounced them to the local judge, who condemned them to death on 13 February 250. Fusca is said to have been fifteen years old at her martyrdom.

According to the Russian source, Fusca and her nurse lived in Sabratha, in Libya, in the third century, and by tradition Fusca was of Berber descent. Her life exists in several versions, among them some from the late Middle Ages, one of them in the Codex Carthusiae Coloniensis. Fusca, the daughter of pagan parents, heard of the Christian faith at fifteen. She told her wish to learn the mysteries of this faith first to her nurse, then to her mother. Without telling the father, the three women went to a hidden Christian priest, Ermolaus, who instructed them in the basics of the faith and baptized the two girls. Learning of the baptism, the father, called Siro, decided to punish his daughter: he shut her in a room for three days without food. Several times he tried to persuade her to renounce Christianity, but she stood firm.

When a new proconsul, Quintian, arrived in the town, the father handed the holy maidens over to him. The soldiers sent to seize Fusca and Maura found them with an angel and did not dare to use force. Both girls gave themselves up to the authorities of their own will. Since they would not renounce Christianity, they were subjected first to tortures, then, on 13 February, killed with a single sword thrust in the side.

Relics and veneration

When Libya was conquered by the Muslims, their remains were brought to Torcello, an island in the Venetian lagoon, by a sailor named Vitalis, by tradition. The relics of Saint Maura are now in the right transept of the church of Santa Maria di Lourdes in Milan. Saint Fusca's grave became a place of pilgrimage soon after her death, and during the barbarian invasions her body was hidden at Torcello. A church was raised on the place of their burial in the twelfth century. The Venetian liturgical calendar of the eleventh century remembers, on 3 November, the miraculous finding of Saint Fusca's relics by the sailor Vitalis, who carried them to Torcello.

Her veneration began to spread, according to the chronicles, from the twelfth century, when the Venetian Republic was strong in the Mediterranean, and its prestige as a centre of faith was strengthened by finding the relics of many martyrs. It may be that the names of the two martyrs were reconstructed from the place the relics came from, for Fusca means "dark" and Maura "from Mauretania". Saint Fusca is patron of several places in Italy and Croatia, where there are four churches in Istria, and in Croatian she is called Foška. A painting of her on a column of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has aroused the interest of scholars.