Golinduc was a sixth-century convert from Persia, commemorated as a martyr and confessor on July 12. According to her hagiographers she was the wife of the chief magician of the Persian empire and was raised in the Zoroastrian religion of the Sasanian court. The tradition relates that, dissatisfied with the pagan wisdom of her surroundings, she sought knowledge of the true faith, and that an angel showed her in a vision the place of torment for sinners and the paradise prepared for those who believe in Christ. Directed to a Christian priest, she received baptism and was given the name Mary.
Her conversion is set during the reign of Chosroes I (Khosrau I). After her baptism she left her magician husband, who denounced her to the emperor; for her refusal to return to him she was condemned to lifelong imprisonment. The synaxarion relates that she endured eighteen years of confinement, during which a Byzantine ambassador named Aristobulus, who visited her in prison, taught her to sing the Psalms of David. Under a later ruler, named Ormisdas in the Greek tradition, she was brought out and subjected to prolonged torture.
By tradition Golinduc was repeatedly preserved from death: when she was given over to be defiled her assailants are said to have been unable to see her, and a sentence of beheading was likewise frustrated. After the persecution of Christians eased she preached openly, and she undertook a pilgrimage to the holy places of Jerusalem. On her return journey she died in 591 in the church dedicated to the Martyr Sergius at Nisibis, in Roman Mesopotamia.
Golinduc is among the better-documented Persian saints of the period. Her acts were recorded in a Greek Passion attributed to Eustratios, a presbyter of the Great Church of Constantinople, and a Syriac Life was composed by Stephen of Hierapolis shortly after her death; she is also discussed by the historian Theophylact Simocatta and mentioned by Evagrius Scholasticus in his Ecclesiastical History.
