The life of St Barbara
Alone there with only her view of the hills and the night sky, she began to wonder about the maker of so much beauty, and in time, through Christians she met in secret, came to faith in the Triune God. When her father discovered what she had done, cutting a third window into her bath as a sign of the Trinity, he flew into a rage and tried to kill her himself. She fled, and tradition holds that a hillside opened to hide her from him, though she was eventually found and handed over to the city's magistrate for torture.
She endured this with the help, her Life says, of a vision of Christ who healed her wounds in the night, and a woman named Juliana who witnessed it was moved to confess Christ alongside her. Both women were beheaded, Dioscorus carrying out the sentence on his own daughter. Her relics were later carried to Constantinople and then, centuries afterward, to Kiev, where they remain venerated to this day.
