Great Martyr Barbara

Barbara was the daughter of a wealthy pagan named Dioscorus, traditionally at Heliopolis in Phoenicia, who shut his beautiful daughter in a tower to keep her from the world. Contemplating the creation from her tower, she reasoned her way to the one Creator and secretly became a Christian. While a bath-house was being built for her, she had the workmen add a third window in honor of the Holy Trinity, and by this her faith was discovered. Her enraged father denounced her to the governor; she was stripped, beaten, and tortured, her wounds tended in prison by Christ Himself in a vision. The pious woman Juliana, who protested, suffered beside her. Dioscorus himself beheaded his daughter, and tradition says he was immediately struck dead by lightning. St Barbara is invoked for protection against sudden and unprepared death, and her relics were long treasured in Kiev.