Martyr Julitta of Tarsus (Iconium)

Martyr Julitta was a noble young widow from the city of Iconium. During the persecution of Emperor Diocletian (early 4th century) she fled with her three-year-old son Cyricus and two maidservants, hiding from her persecutors first in Seleucia, then in Tarsus in Cilicia, where she lived in extreme poverty, wandering as a beggar.

In Tarsus she was seized by the governor Alexander. Seeing his mother tortured, the infant Cyricus cried out loudly that he too was a Christian; according to one tradition, the enraged governor threw the child down from the height of the judgment seat, while according to another the infant himself, struggling to break free, kicked the governor and was thrown down, dying of the fall. Julitta was then further tortured — her flesh torn with iron hooks, boiling pitch poured on her wounds — and finally beheaded for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods. Her death occurred around 305, during Diocletian's Great Persecution.

Her feast is kept on July 15/28, together with her son, the Martyr Cyricus.

IMPORTANT CORRECTIONS: category righteous→martyr — Julitta suffered a martyr's death for refusing an idolatrous sacrifice, a classic case of martyrdom rather than righteous lay life. category_gender m→f. The designation has been refined: sources uniformly call her "of Tarsus/Iconium" rather than "of Caesarea" — the original "of Caesarea" designation has been kept in the aka list in case she is searched for under that established, though not fully accurate, Russian-language tradition.