The life of St Paraskeve
Brought before the emperor Antoninus Pius as a Christian, she withstood torture by a red-hot helmet and by a cauldron of boiling oil and pitch. When the emperor drew near to examine her unharmed, tradition says she flung a drop of the burning liquid toward him and then, at his plea, healed the injury it caused, moving him to set her free. She continued her preaching journeys and was arrested twice more: first by a governor named Asclepius, who released her after she caused a serpent to die by the sign of the cross, and finally by one named Tarasius, who had her beheaded. Her earliest commemorations give the year of her death as 140, though other accounts stretch the events toward later decades and do not fully agree among themselves. Paraskeve has long been invoked for the healing of the eyes, and her memory is kept with particular devotion among Orthodox Christians of Greek and Slavic lands.
