Svetlana: Name Day and Patron Saint

St Photini is the Samaritan woman who met Christ at Jacob’s well, as the Gospel of John tells. He asked her for a drink and spoke to her of the living water; she recognised Him as the Messiah and ran to bring her whole town to hear Him. The Church knows her as Photini, and in Russian as Svetlana. In the reign of Nero she preached the Gospel boldly in Carthage with her younger son Joses, while her elder son Victor, a Roman army commander, also confessed Christ. She went with her sons and her five sisters to Rome, where they were imprisoned and tortured. Placed at the imperial court, Photini brought Nero’s daughter Domnina and her servants to faith. When she refused to offer sacrifice to idols, she was thrown into a well, and there she gave her soul to God around the year 66, with her sons and sisters dying as martyrs too. The Church keeps her memory on 20 March (2 April on the Old Calendar); the Greek Church keeps her on 26 February. Her head is kept at Grigoriou Monastery on Mount Athos, and many healings of eye disease were reported at the churches built in her honour in Constantinople. The faithful ask her prayers to come to the light of Christ and to speak of Him without fear.

What the faithful pray for

• repentance and a new beginning in Christ
• courage to tell others about Christ
• those who suffer from diseases of the eyes
• families, that they may come to faith together
• women who preach the Gospel by their lives