10 Works, Today, April 1st, is Saint Mary of Egypt’s Day, With Footnotes — #89
1 min readApr 1, 2020
Kuopio Orthodox Church Museum
Mary of Egypt (is revered as the patron saint of penitents, most particularly in the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Churches, and Oriental Orthodox Churches.
Saint Mary, also known as Maria Aegyptiaca, was born somewhere in the Province of Egypt, and at the age of twelve she ran away from her parents to the city of Alexandria. Here she lived an extremely dissolute life. In her Vita it states that she often refused the money offered for her sexual favors, as she was driven “by an insatiable and an irrepressible passion,” and that she mainly lived by begging, supplemented by spinning flax…