The life of St Philothea of Athens
Rather than remarry, she turned to monastic life and in time founded a convent of her own, becoming a genuine mother to the women who gathered around her, and later established a second community at Patisia, outside the city, where she opened shelters, cared for the sick and elderly, and ran schools for the children of Athens.
Among the most dangerous of her labors was her work ransoming Greek women and girls who had been taken into slavery by the Ottomans, some of them held in harems; she sheltered those she could free and helped many of them escape in secret to the islands. This work made her enemies. On the third of October, 1588, a group of armed Ottoman men forced their way into the Patisia monastery during an evening vigil, seized her, and beat her so severely that she never recovered, remaining bedridden until she died of those injuries the following February. She was recognized as a saint only a few years afterward, and is honored today, together with Hierotheus and Dionysius the Areopagite, as a patron of the city she had spent her life serving.
