Saint Elizabeth the Wonderworker of Constantinople

Elizabeth the Wonderworker was a monastic of Constantinople who, according to tradition, was set apart for the service of God from her birth and was sent by her parents to a monastery while still a child. Raised in an atmosphere of fasting and unceasing prayer, she grew into a life of severe asceticism, and the sisters of her community later chose her as abbess of the Monastery of Saints Cosmas and Damian. She is commemorated on April 24, the day after the feast of Saint George, and in some icons she is depicted having triumphed over a dragon, which gave rise to her secondary title, Elizabeth the Dragon-slayer.

The precise period in which she lived is not known. Synaxarial tradition places her somewhere between the sixth and ninth centuries; some sources assign her repose to the year 540, while others hold that any date across that span is possible. For this reason the database records her era as Byzantine and leaves her century unassigned. The accounts of her life that survive emphasize her ascetic discipline and her reputation as a wonderworker rather than a fixed chronology.

Elizabeth's asceticism is remembered as exceptionally strict. By tradition she wore a coarse hairshirt throughout the year and for long periods abstained from bread, wine, and oil, sustaining herself only on uncooked plants and vegetables; she is said often to have eaten nothing at all during the forty days of Great Lent. In her humility, the tradition relates, she did not lift up her eyes to heaven for three years. Through such struggle she was held to have received the gift of healing both bodily and spiritual infirmities.