Natalia of Nicomedia

Saint Natalia of Nicomedia is venerated as a saint of the early Church and is known almost exclusively from the Greek and Latin martyr acts of her husband, Saint Adrian (also called Hadrian) of Nicomedia. The setting of the story is Nicomedia, the principal imperial residence in Bithynia in northwestern Asia Minor, at the time of the Great Persecution under Diocletian and Maximian, which began in 303. In the received narrative Natalia was already a Christian who kept her faith hidden, while Adrian held a military or administrative post at court and remained a pagan. They had been married for about thirteen months when a group of twenty-three Christians was arrested and tortured in the city. Their constancy under interrogation led Adrian to profess Christianity himself; he was at once imprisoned with them.

Natalia then revealed her own Christianity. The passio describes her going to the prison, embracing her husband’s bonds, and urging him not to weaken. She is said to have ministered to the confessors, washing their wounds and encouraging them. When Adrian was permitted a short leave from prison in order to put his affairs in order, some Christians supposed that he had recanted; Natalia met him in grief until she learned that he had come only to prepare for death, after which she accompanied him back toward his confinement with joy. The legend thus presents her as the type of the believing wife who strengthens her spouse for martyrdom rather than seeking to turn him from it.

Adrian and his companions were executed, according to the acts, by having their extremities crushed or cut off upon an anvil and by decapitation. Natalia recovered Adrian’s severed right hand and preserved it as a relic. After the martyrdom a man of rank, sometimes identified as a tribune, wished to marry her. Refusing this, she left Nicomedia by ship, taking the relic, and came to Argyropolis, a place near Byzantium on the Bosporus. There she is reported to have died a peaceful death and to have been buried. The Roman Martyrology notes that after serving the holy martyrs in prison she went to Byzantium and there rested in peace. Independent historical evidence for these episodes is lacking; they belong to the literature of late antique martyr passions, which commemorate the reality of persecution in Bithynia while shaping the story for edification. Precise years of birth and death are not securely attested: Adrian’s martyrdom is traditionally placed in the first years of the persecution (often given as about 304), while Natalia’s own death is described as later and peaceful, with some later notices offering dates such as 311 that cannot be verified.

Cult of Natalia has always been joined to that of Adrian. The Eastern Orthodox Church keeps their feast on 26 August. In the West the Roman Martyrology records Adrian, with twenty-three companions, and Natalia on 8 September. Relics attributed to Adrian were later claimed at sites including Rome and Geraardsbergen in present-day Belgium, which fostered a medieval Western cult of the pair. Natalia is honored as a faithful Christian wife and as a companion of the Nicomedian martyrs. Because the traditional accounts describe her own end as a natural death in exile rather than execution, she is not uniformly styled a martyr, though popular devotion often groups her with the martyrs of Nicomedia. Little can be established about her life beyond this hagiographical tradition.