Martyr Tryphaena of Cyzicus

Tryphaena (also rendered Tryphaina or Tryphaine) was an early martyr of Cyzicus, a city on the Hellespont in Asia Minor. By tradition she was the daughter of a senator and was raised in the Christian faith by her mother. The synaxarion presents her not as a passive victim of persecution but as one who openly confessed Christ and worked to turn her neighbors away from idolatry. She is commemorated in the Orthodox Church on January 31.

According to the tradition recorded in the synaxarion, Tryphaena was subjected to a series of tortures, each of which she survived by what the sources describe as the grace of Christ: she was cast into a fiery furnace and emerged unharmed, thrown from a height onto a bed of iron nails, and exposed to wild beasts that did not devour her. She finally died after being gored by a maddened bull.

Her veneration is closely tied to a spring of water that, by tradition, welled up at the place where her blood was shed. The synaxarion relates that women who had difficulty nursing were able to produce milk after drinking from it, and for this reason she came to be invoked by nursing mothers.