Margaret of Antioch

Saint Margaret of Antioch Saint Marina the Great Martyr
Saint Marina the Great Martyr. An illustration in her hagiography printed in Greece depicting her beating a demon with a hammer. Date on the picture: 1858.
Virgin-Martyr and Vanquisher of Demons
Born	289 Antioch, Pisidia
Died	304 (aged 15)
Feast	July 20 in Roman Catholic Church, July 20 in Anglican Church-, July 20 in Western Rite Orthodoxy; July 17 in the Eastern Orthodox Church
Attributes	slain dragon (Western depictions); hammer, defeated demon (Eastern Orthodox depictions)
Patronage	childbirth, pregnant women, dying people, kidney disease, peasants, exiles, falsely accused people; Lowestoft, England; Queens' College, Cambridge; nurses; Sannat and Bormla, Malta
Catholic cult suppressed	1969 by Pope Paul VI

Margaret, known as Margaret of Antioch in the West, and as Saint Marina the Great Martyr (Greek: Ἁγία Μαρίνα, Hagía Marína) in the East, is celebrated as a saint by the Eastern-Rite Orthodox Church on July 17 and on July 20 in the Western Rite Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. Her historical existence has been questioned by Rome. She was declared apocryphal by Pope Gelasius I in 494, but devotion to her revived in the West with the Crusades. She was reputed to have promised very powerful indulgences to those who wrote or read her life, or invoked her intercessions; these no doubt helped the spread of her cultus.

According to the version of the story in Golden Legend, she was a native of "Antioch" and the daughter of a pagan priest named Aedesius. Her mother having died soon after her birth, Margaret was nursed by a Christian woman five or six leagues (15-18 miles) from Antioch. Having embraced Christianity and consecrated her virginity to God, Margaret was disowned by her father, adopted by her nurse, and lived in the country keeping sheep with her foster mother (in what is now Turkey). Olybrius, Governor of the Roman Diocese of the East, asked to marry her, but with the demand that she renounce Christianity. Upon her refusal, she was cruelly tortured, during which various miraculous incidents occurred. One of these involved being swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon, from which she escaped alive when the cross she carried irritated the dragon's innards. The Golden Legend describes this last incident as "apocryphal and not to be taken seriously" (trans. Ryan, 1.369). She was put to death in AD 304.