Theoctiste of Lesbos

Venerable Theoktiste of Lesbos was born at Methymna, on the island of Lesbos, probably in the first quarter of the ninth century, and lived as a hermit on the island of Paros. She is honoured as a saint in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, on 9 November; Symeon Metaphrastes put her commemoration on 10 November. Our Greek source calls her a local saint of the island of Paros and of the village of Komi in Lesbos. Her death is placed around the 870s, by some data in 872 or 885.

Life

According to her life, she was born at Methymna and was orphaned young, and her relations brought her to a monastery, where she was raised. At Easter, in the eighteenth year of her life (perhaps 837), she went to see her sister in her village, but was seized, with her sister and other villagers, by Saracen raiders. A Greek source says that from the age of twenty she gave herself to monastic life and to charity and that she founded, in the monastery where she lived, a sewing and weaving workshop, where poor young women found work, and she gave the income to poor families. On the island of Paros she managed to escape her captors and lived there in solitude thirty-⁠five years, until she was found by a hunter (some time in the 870s). Theoktiste died soon after, in early autumn, and the hunter buried her.

The hunter cut off her hand as a relic, but then strong winds prevented him from leaving the island until he put the hand back in the grave, after which the body vanished. The story of her life was told by the hunter, thirty years later, to another hermit, named Symeon, who passed it on to the author of the life, Niketas Magistros. The people of Paros honoured her and dedicated to her a chapel of the Ekatontapyliani.

The written life and her image

Niketas Magistros composed the Life of Theoktiste about the year 920, on the model of the life of Saint Mary of Egypt, but changed to suit the events and circumstances of ninth-⁠century Byzantium, above all the ever-⁠present menace of Saracen pirates, after the founding of the Emirate of Crete in the 820s. Because of her link with Mary of Egypt she is shown on icons in a similar way: a thin woman with white hair, barefoot, in a torn cloak that covers barely half her body. The life was later slightly reworked by Symeon Metaphrastes. The Greek source says that the life was written by Symeon Metaphrastes himself, who lived between 886 and 912, which does not fit the others.