Three Virgins of Tuburga

The Three Virgins of Tuburga were three young girls put to death for being Christians, around the year 257, in a town of Roman Africa (today in Tunisia).

By tradition they were named Maxima, Donatilla and Secunda. Maxima, aged fourteen, and Donatilla lived at Tuburga, a Roman colony in Africa Proconsularis, six miles from Carthage. When an edict was issued forcing the inhabitants to sacrifice to the gods, they refused and were tried by the proconsul Anullinus. In prison they met Secunda, aged twelve, arrested separately. The two older girls tried to persuade her to recant, since she was young and the only daughter of an aged father, but she refused. According to their lives, the girls were tortured and given to wild beasts, which would not attack them. They were given gall and vinegar to drink, scourged, tormented on a gibbet, rubbed with lime and scorched on a gridiron; at the end the order was given to behead them.

They are venerated as saints in the Orthodox and the Catholic Church, commemorated on 30 July. They are sometimes mistaken for Perpetua and Felicitas, who came from another town, Thuburbo Majus. The persecution that killed them was either that of Valerian or, going by the years when Anullinus was proconsul, that of Diocletian.