Number DOI: http://doi.org/10.33209/2519-4348-2707-9627-2020-8-84

VB. – № 8, 2020. – P. 263-270.

Summary

The historically obscure elements in St. Catherine’s martyrologies, as well as her characteristic of an exceptionally wise woman, were the triggers for a theory of being a Christianized version of the atrociously murdered philosopher Hypatia. Even her peculiar name was a subject of several hypotheses concerning the etymology and the meaning of it. In any case, the compelling conception that St. Catherine was definitively Hypatia was exposed in a book by Vasileios Myrislides which has been published in 1926. In that book the author claims that in 1897, being a headmaster of a Greek school in the Turkish town Denizli, he discovered that in 25th of November the Greek minority there instead of celebrating the memory of St. Catherine, just as the rest of the Greeks Christians Orthodox, the community was rendering honor to the holy martyr Hypatia. The writer attests the existence of a manuscript containing a Mass about Hypatia, as well as a letter confessing her desire to die as a Christian. Additionally, Myrsilides shares his witness about an ancient temple dedicated to Hypatia with a respective inscription that discovered to the ruined city of Laodicea. About thirty years later the theologian Chrestos Enisleides propagates all these findings and indeed many were the scholars in the Greek scientific milieu who, bona fide, attached much credence to this theory. Finally the theory of an absolute identification of St. Catherine and Hypatia enjoyed a revival through the work of Annemarie Maeger who in 2002 published a full translation of Myrsilides’ book in German. This paper surveys the endurance that this theory developed in a time frame of 76 years and examines its problematic core.

Key words: St. Catherine, Hypatia, Synesius, Laodicea, Alexandria, Denizli, Myrsilides, Enisleides, Annemarie Maeger, 25th November, John Capgrave, Mount Sinai.