Juliana and Semproniana

Juliana and Semproniana are two young Christian women, martyrs, honoured as saints in the Catholic Church. According to tradition they were born at Iluro, today Mataró, in Catalonia, and were disciples of Saint Cucuphas (Cugat). In the year 304 they accompanied him to Castrum Octavianum, today Sant Cugat del Vallès, where the saint was beheaded. When the executioners left, they took his body and buried it in a Christian manner. The guards surprised them and, accused of being Christians too, they had their throats cut in the same place as their master. Their relics were venerated, with those of Cucuphas, at the monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès.

The link with Mataró appears only in the seventeenth century, in the work of the historian Joan Gaspar Roig i Jalpí in 1667, who relied on false sources. Historical criticism shows that neither the sources of that link nor the year of martyrdom can be trusted. On the other hand, it is known that they had long been venerated as martyrs and saints: in 1089 relics of theirs were placed at the consecration of an altar in the Benedictine monastery of Sant Esteve at Banyoles, in 1256 they were honoured together with Cucuphas in the monastery of the Vallès, and liturgical books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries contain prayers addressed to them.

In 1772 part of the relics reached Mataró, and in 1835, after the closing of the monastery, the remains still at Sant Cugat were also moved to Mataró. In 1852 Pope Pius IX proclaimed them patrons of the city. Their feast is on 25 July, but in Catalonia it is kept on 27 July so as not to coincide with the day of Saint James; at Mataró they are traditionally called the "Santes".