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Biography

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Saint Xenia the Righteous of Rome, called Eusebia in the world, belongs to the fifth-century layer of Christian hagiography and is known almost exclusively from Eastern liturgical and synaxarial tradition rather than from contemporary documents. She was born in Rome, the only daughter of an eminent senator, and grew up in a household of senatorial rank and considerable wealth. The sources present her as a devout Christian from an early age who wished to remain unmarried and to devote her life to God. When her parents arranged a marriage with a man of distinguished standing, she chose flight rather than the wedding. With the help of two of her maidservants she left her father’s house in secret, taking enough means to support a new life, and embarked on a ship that carried her away from Italy.

Their first landfall was the island of Kos in the Aegean Sea. There she laid aside her former identity, taking the name Xenia, which in Greek means stranger or foreigner, as a sign that she had become a stranger both to her homeland and to her previous social condition. Traditional accounts add that she and her companions adopted a manner of dress that would conceal their origin during travel, a motif familiar in other early lives of holy women. On Kos they encountered a monastic elder associated with a monastery of the holy Apostle Andrew; he was bound for the region of Mylasa (also spelled Milasa) in Caria, on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor, then under the Eastern Roman Empire. Xenia and her two servants accompanied him to that city.

At Mylasa she purchased a plot of land, built a church in honor of the Protomartyr Stephen, and gathered a small community of women living in ascetic discipline. Bishop Paul of Mylasa received her, tonsured her as a nun, and in time ordained her a deaconess, an office that in the early Church involved liturgical and charitable service. As superior of the house she was remembered for strict fasting, continual prayer, humility, and generosity to the poor. The community remained modest in size; her two original companions continued with her as fellow nuns. Nothing in the surviving tradition suggests that she ever married or had children; her life is presented throughout as that of a consecrated virgin and monastic foundress.

According to the same tradition she died at prayer, kneeling before the Cross. The year commonly assigned to her death is about 450, though that figure is conventional rather than independently documented from non-hagiographical evidence. Hagiographers relate that during her funeral a crown or wreath of light appeared above the monastery and remained until the burial was finished, and that her relics were thereafter associated with miracles. She was buried at the church of Saint Stephen which she had founded; her two companions were later laid to rest near her. Veneration spread in the Christian East, and she entered Orthodox calendars on 24 January, a date also found in some Western martyrologies. She is often called Xenia the Righteous of Rome in order to distinguish her from later saints of the same name, especially Blessed Xenia of Saint Petersburg. No formal act of canonization by a named pope or patriarch is recorded; her cult is of the ancient, pre-congregational type. Precise dates of birth, of her departure from Rome, and of the founding of the Mylasa community are unknown, and the narrative of her life cannot be confirmed from sources outside the hagiographical tradition. What that tradition consistently preserves is the figure of a Roman woman of high birth who abandoned an arranged marriage, lived as a monastic stranger in Caria, founded a church and a convent, served as a deaconess, and died in the mid-fifth century in the reputation of holiness.

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