Martyrdom
According to the synaxarion, the proconsul Priscus of Chalcedon decreed that all inhabitants of the city and surrounding region attend a pagan festival to worship and sacrifice to the idol of Ares, under threat of grave torments. A company of Christians, numbering about fifty and including the young Euphemia, were found worshipping the true God in hiding and refused to take part.
The accounts relate that the martyrs were subjected to various torments over a span of days, and that Euphemia endured a sequence of trials: she was bound to a wheel fitted with knives, cast into fire, and set over a concealed pit, surviving each. She was finally sentenced to be devoured by wild beasts in the arena. The tradition holds that the lions and bears would not attack her, and that she died when a she-bear wounded her foot. The sources place her martyrdom in 303 or 304.
The Council of Chalcedon
A church was raised over Euphemia's grave at Chalcedon, and it was there that the sessions of the Fourth Ecumenical Council took place in 451, which condemned the Monophysite teaching and affirmed that Christ is acknowledged in two natures. Orthodox tradition holds that the Orthodox and Monophysite parties laid their respective written confessions in the saint's tomb, and that when it was reopened the scroll bearing the Orthodox confession was found in her hand while the Monophysite scroll lay at her feet.
This account first appears in surviving literature in an eleventh-century synaxarium from Constantinople, and modern scholars regard the episode as a later legend rather than a contemporary record. The saint's connection with the Council nonetheless became central to her veneration, and her July 11 feast commemorates the miracle of her relics.
Relics & Shrines
After the persecution ended, Euphemia's relics were enshrined in a sarcophagus within a church dedicated to her at Chalcedon. Around 620, following the Persian capture of the city, the relics were transferred to Constantinople. During the iconoclast period the reliquary was lost to the sea and later recovered, being returned to Constantinople in 796.
The greater part of her relics rests today in the Patriarchal Church of Saint George in the Phanar quarter of Constantinople (Istanbul), with portions reported in Cyprus and Saint Petersburg.
