Olympia

Venerable Olympia was a nun and abbess. She suffered a martyr's death at the hands of pirates, on 11 May 1235, according to the Greek source. The Orthodox Church commemorates her on 11 May, together with Venerable Euphrosyne.

She was the daughter of a priest, and her mother too had been the daughter of a priest. The family left Constantinople and settled in the Peloponnese, for reasons that are unknown. When Olympia was ten years old her parents died, and her relatives sent her to the monastery now called Saint Raphael, where her mother's sister, Dorothea, was abbess.

At nineteen she was tonsured a nun, and after the death of her aunt, at twenty-⁠five, she became abbess.

On 11 May 1235 pirates invaded the monastery and tortured the nuns who had not fled. One of them, Euphrosyne, they hung from a tree and then burned. Olympia they burned with candles over her whole body, put a steel rod into her ears and finally nailed her with twenty nails to a board. Her tomb was found in 1962, at the end of August, with the nails and the board in place.

The sources at hand do not say more exactly where the monastery lies, so the location remains unclear.