The life of St Kassiani the Hymnographer
When Theophilos, taken with her looks, remarked to her that sin had first entered through a woman, meaning Eve, Kassia answered without hesitation that redemption too had come through a woman, the Theotokos who bore Christ. The quickness of that reply stung rather than charmed him, and he set her aside for Theodora instead.
What might have ended as a footnote to another woman's story became instead the start of Kassia's own. Around 843 she founded a monastery near the Constantinian Walls and became its first abbess, and her close ties to the nearby Stoudios monastery, itself central to preserving Byzantine liturgical books through the ninth and tenth centuries, helped keep her own hymns from being lost. Something near fifty survive today, chief among them the Hymn of Kassiani, still sung every Holy Tuesday evening on the sinful woman who anointed Christ's feet before His Passion, the work of the only woman whose compositions hold a settled place in the Byzantine liturgy to this day.
