Argyra was a young married woman of Proussa (Bursa) in Bithynia, Asia Minor, who suffered a prolonged martyrdom in the early eighteenth century after refusing to abandon her Christian faith and marriage. According to the synaxarion, she came of a pious family, was noted for her beauty and virtue, and married a pious Christian at the age of eighteen. The couple settled in a neighborhood inhabited largely by Muslims, where her trial would begin.
Soon after her marriage, a Turkish neighbor, said to be the son of the local Cadi (magistrate), pressed his attentions upon her and sought to draw her to Islam. Argyra refused him, declaring that she would sooner die than forsake Christ and her husband. In revenge he denounced her before the court of Proussa, falsely testifying that she had agreed to his advances and to conversion and had then laughed it off as a jest. His accusation was upheld by false witnesses, and she was condemned to prison.
Her imprisonment, the sources relate, lasted some seventeen years, during which she was repeatedly brought from her cell, interrogated, and beaten, then returned to confinement, yet she would not deny her faith. She died in prison, by tradition on April 5, in the year 1721 (some accounts give 1725). Her endurance amid this long captivity is the central feature of her commemoration.
After her death her body was later exhumed and, by tradition, found whole and incorrupt, giving off a sweet fragrance. With the permission of Patriarch Paisius II, pious clergy and laity translated her relics to the church of Saint Paraskeve on April 30, 1735 — the event on which her principal commemoration falls. Her name derives from the Greek word for silver (argyros).
