Santa Eulalia and Santa Quiteria

 

Santa Eulalia

 


There are two Eulalias, one from Barcelona and the other from Merida.  Perhaps they were the same person and most likely they never existed.  The following is adapted from the Catholic Online Saints Index.

 

   
 Eulalia of Merida was born in Spain in the last decade of the third century. It is believed that she suffered martyrdom for her faith.  What little else is known of her to date is based mostly on legend. It is believed that Eulalia, as a twelve year-old girl, tried to remonstrate with Judge Dacian of Merida for forcing Christians to worship false gods in accord with the edict of Diocletian. Even though Dacian was at first amused and tried to flatter her, Eulalia would not deny Christ. Finally, Dacian ordered that her body be torn by iron hooks. Fire was applied to her wounds to increase her sufferings, and in the process her hair caught fire. She was asphyxiated by the smoke and flames, gaining the crown of martyrdom around the year 304.

Saint Eulalia is represented in art as a maiden with a cross, stake, and dove. She is venerated in France and Spain. For more information see links below.  

 

Along the Beira coast and in Extremadura there is almost no popular worship of saints, except for Santa Isabel in the region of Coimbra.  The Catholic saints end up by getting confused with The Virgin Mary, who is the center of popular worship.  In the hinterland we find certain feminine personages that are common in the Minho, in the north, and have the particularity of having all been rebels against the Roman Empire.  They are saints because they resisted the religion of the Roman Emperor.   

This is an important point.  We should not let ourselves be deceived by the religious language when this refers to resistance to the foreigner.  Even today, political conflicts with foreign powers are expressed in religious language.  The conflicts of the Middle East, Ireland, etc. are examples of this.  Patriotism gets mixed up, among the people, with the religion of the community.  Religious language is more persuasive for the resistance against the foreigner than profane language.  Maybe there is no political language among the people to express the conflicts.    

 

There is a tendency to forget that the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Rome was not easy.  At least two centuries were necessary for the Roman army to dominate the Iberian people.  Spanish Galicia and Portuguese Minho were only conquered later, after Rome had sent its best general to do it.  This resistance supposes—and many archeological elements demonstrate it—that the Iberian people had a high technical, military, and economic level. 

 

Based on the biographical or mythical elements that have survived, we can’t help verifying that the resistance was especially hard and continued for several centuries, above all in the third and fourth centuries, and especially under Diocletian (284-305).  The resistance, or its memory, lasted through the following centuries, after Constantine.  The parishes were created under the tutorship of certain Christian personages, mythical or historical, who had suffered persecutions under the Emperor.  

Santa Eulalia is patroness of a great number of parishes and place names in the interior Beira and in the Minho, but she does not exist on the coastal Beira.  What has happened to Santa Eulalia has happened to most of these nationalist saints.  There are two tombs, both authenticated.  For some she was born in Merida, for others, in Barcelona.  

 

The resistance of Eulalia and the punishment she was subjected to for refusing to “worship the gods of the Empire” are expressed, with great realism, in a hymn dedicated to her cult.  

Her Greek name, Eu-lalia, means “the good word,” or “good news.”  In place names she is confused with Santa Euphemia, who has a strong cult in the district of Viseu, and whose name also means “good news,” and with the nine twin sisters, who we will discuss below.  

Links to Santa Eulalia of Barcelona and Santa Eulalia of Merida—some scholars think they refer to the same person.

Saint Eulalia of Barcelona

  • Catholic Encyclopedia - St. Eulalia of Barcelona, martyred 12 February, 304, patron saint of sailors. "There is no reason to doubt the existence of two distinct saints of this name, despite the over-hasty and hypercritical doubts of some."
  • For All the Saints - Brief article is inclined to think that St. Eulalia of Barcelona is the same person as St. Eulalia of Mérida

Saint Eulalia of Mérida

Two sites in Spanish

The Punic Wars of Santa Quiteria

The following is adapted from Catholic Online Saints Index.

Many churches in southern France and northern Spain have been dedicated under the name of the virgin martyr St. Quiteria, who still enjoys a wide following, especially at Aire in Gascony, France, where her relics were preserved until they were scattered by the Huguenots.  On the other hand, though her name appears in the Roman Martyrology, no mention of her is made in any of the ancient calendars.  She is popularly supposed to have been the daughter of a Galician prince, who fled from her home because her father wished to force her to marry and to abjure the Christian religion.  She was tracked to Aire by emissaries sent by her father, on whose orders she was beheaded.  Most of the details of the story, in the form in which it was most widely circulated, are fabulous, having been borrowed from the well known legend of King Catillius and Queen Calsia, and nothing is certain about Quiteria except her name and her cultus.  Because she is invoked against the bite of mad dogs, she is always depicted with a dog on a lead.  It seems that Portugal is especially devout to St. Quiteria, but tells a different story of her martyrdom and claims to possess her relics.  Her feast day is Mary 22nd.

Santa Quiteria is the leader of the “Nine Twin Sisters”, a popular Iberian myth, spread by the Jesuits, and well known in all the hagiographic literature.   

The people from Minho claim that these sisters were born there, defending that their father was a high military official in the Roman army, who was responsible for Galicia and the Minho.  Behind this myth we discover the resistance of the Gallic and Cantabrian people to Roman rule.  Kuteria is the name of the “Astarte warrior” of the Phoenicians.  But let us first look at the myth.  

The Iberian myth says that the military officer’s wife had given birth to nine daughters in one birth, and that, ashamed with this phenomenon (which associated the Roman noblewoman to a vulgar peasant) she had a maid take them to the river to drown them.  The father, apparently, was not aware of this birth.  The maid disobeyed her mistress and handed over the girls to some other neighbor women who brought them up.  They were called:  Quiteria, Eumelia or Euphemia, Liberata or Virgeforte, Gema or Marinha or Margarida, Genebra, Germana, Basilissa, Marica and Vitoria.  When they reached an adult age, they became known for the campaign they made against the gods of the Empire.  They were called before the high Roman official who, “thanks to his link of blood” recognized them as his daughters.  When the daughters refused to obey their father, who wanted to force them to marry Roman officers or other suitors who were interested, the war between them and their father began.  They were held prisoner in a tower, from which they organized the escape of all the prisoners and they began, said some, a guerrilla war in the mountains.  At this point of the story it is impossible to follow the careers of the nine sisters in their war against the Empire.  We have stories of guerrilla warfare in Portugal, in Galicia, in the south of Spain, in the Pyrenees and in North Africa.  Finally Quiteria was caught and beheaded, but even so, she continued to fight against her father and against Rome:  “Her body rose up, grabbed her head with her hands, climbed the mountain and stopped in the place where she wanted to be buried.”  Euphemia, unable to escape from the soldiers who pursued her, threw herself from a cliff that is called today Penedo da Santa (Cliff of the Saint) in Gerês, and a rock opened up and swallowed her (to protect her), and there sprang up a spring that is called today Termas.  

In Chaves there is a legend, called Maria Mantela,, in which there are some startling similarities at least to the first part of the Quiteria story.  The father was also a Roman officer, but in this version the mother gave birth to seven sons, all of who later became priests in seven villages near Chaves.  

The names of Quiteria’s “eight sisters” are only adjectives that are repeated:  Euphemia, “she of the good news”; Liberata, the “free or liberator,” or strong Virgin; Marinha, Gema, Genievra or Genivera, “she who generates”; Basilissa, the “saint”; Marcia, “the warrior”; Vitoria, the “victorious”.  These are attributes or qualities of the same female character.  They are often shown in the same painting—Quiteria above and the sisters on the lower level, in smaller size; they are shown in the same way, in the same position, with no difference between them, except for the name.  

Comba, Eulalia, the Nine Twin Sisters, and Our Lady of the Good Tidings refer to the same person and to the same cult.  In the district of Viseu, in Tras-os-Montes, and in the Minho, place names like Ovoa, Oveiro, Santa Ovaia, Santa Comba, or Columba, Our Lady of the Tidings, Mount Pombeiro, Pombal, Santa Eulalia, etc., are generally near shrines of Santa Euphemia and of Santa Quiteria.  On the far horizon we have the cult of Astarte, Ishtar, Anat, or Anta, and the later name of the Syrian goddess represented by a dove, and which the Roman poets, impressed by the clouds of doves that made their homes in her shrines on mountain tops, called Santa Coloma of Syria.  

In reality the name Quiteria was the title that the Phoenicians gave to Astarte, while she was protector or stimulator of war:  Kythere, Kyteria, or Kuteria, which means “the red one”, also associated with the Hebrew word Qatar “split from top to bottom”, a title which goes along with a warrior.