Saint Lucy

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint Lucy, also called Lucia of Syracuse, has given her name to a county in Florida, an estuary in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and a place in Queensland, Australia. Her name also marks a hill in Santiago, Chile, known as Cerro Huelen, and a day school for blind and visually impaired students in Philadelphia.

  Few people who pass these signs know the woman behind them. She was a Christian from Sicily, and the evidence for her life is thinner than her fame suggests. This documentary asks what can truly be traced to her and what later centuries added.

  It asks why her story became tied to eyesight. It asks why a winter feast day turned into a festival of light. It also asks how one body came to be claimed by so many cities.

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• 2. Thin Evidence

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  The oldest record of Lucy comes from the fourth century, and it blends archaeology with the later Acts of the Martyrs. The earliest physical evidence is a set of Greek inscriptions from the Catacombs of St. John in Syracuse. The most ancient traces of her cult turned up in Sicily, especially in Syracuse, and the city's archaeological museums preserve them.

  Only one fact unites the various accounts. A disappointed suitor accused Lucy of being a Christian, and she was executed in Syracuse in 304 AD, during the Diocletianic Persecution. Every other detail of her life is a conventional one, matching what was told of female martyrs of the early fourth century.

  Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea was the most widely read version of the Lucy legend in the Middle Ages. Its pages carry the story that the rest of this documentary unpacks.

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• 3. Dowry and Denunciation

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  In 283, according to the traditional story, a girl was born in Syracuse to rich and noble parents. Her father was of Roman origin, and he died when she was five years old. That left Lucy and her mother without a protective guardian. Her mother's name, Eutychia, seems to point to a Greek background.

  Like many early martyrs, Lucy had consecrated her virginity to God, and she hoped to give her dowry to the poor. Eutychia knew nothing of this promise. She suffered from a bleeding disorder and feared for her daughter's future, so she arranged a marriage to a young man from a wealthy pagan family.

  Fifty-two years earlier, Saint Agatha had been martyred during the Decian persecution. Her shrine at Catania, less than 50 miles from Syracuse, drew pilgrims, and many miracles were reported through her intercession. Hoping for a cure, Eutychia agreed to make the pilgrimage. At Catania, Agatha came to Lucy in a dream. She said that because of Lucy's faith, her mother would be healed, and that Lucy would be the glory of Syracuse, just as she was of Catania.

  With her mother cured, Lucy seized the moment to ask permission to give away a great part of her riches. Eutychia suggested the money would make a good bequest. Lucy answered: "whatever you give away at death for the Lord's sake you give because you cannot take it with you. Give now to the true Savior, while you are healthy, whatever you intended to give away at your death."

  News that her patrimony and jewels were being handed out soon reached Lucy's betrothed. He denounced her to Paschasius, the Governor of Syracuse. Paschasius ordered her to burn a sacrifice before the emperor's image, and when she refused, he sentenced her to be defiled in a brothel.

  A team of oxen figures in the Christian tradition of what happened next. When the guards came to take her away, they could not move her, even after hitching her to the animals. Bundles of wood were then heaped around her and set on fire, yet they would not burn. She finally met her death when a sword was thrust into her throat.

  Later tellings add a sequel to this scene, and it involves her eyes.

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• 4. The Missing Eyes

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  Until the fifteenth century at least, the early narratives and traditions say nothing about Lucy's eyes being taken. Later accounts add a new episode. Before she died, they say, she foretold the punishment of Paschasius and the swift end of the persecution. She added that Diocletian would reign no more and that Maximian would meet his end.

  This prediction so angered Paschasius that he ordered the guards to remove her eyes. Another version has Lucy taking out her own eyes to discourage a persistent suitor who admired them. In both versions the ending is the same. When her body was prepared for burial in the family mausoleum, the eyes were found miraculously restored.

  This legend, together with her name, made Lucy the patroness saint of people with eye illnesses and of the blind. Ophthalmologists claim her too. So do authors, cutlers, glaziers, laborers, martyrs, peasants, saddlers, salesmen, stained glass workers, practitioners of photogrammetry, and the city of Perugia in Italy. People invoke her against hemorrhages, dysentery, diseases of the eye and throat infections.

  Painters made the legend visible. In paintings, Lucy is often shown holding her eyes on a golden plate, and Gothic art gave her a dish bearing two eyes. The emblem of eyes on a cup or plate apparently reflects popular devotion to her as protector of sight. She also holds the palm branch, symbol of martyrdom and victory over evil. Other emblems include a dagger, a sword and two oxen.

  Of all her emblems, the lamp ties most directly to what her name means in Latin.

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• 5. A Cult Takes Root

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  A grave stele for a 25-year-old woman named Euskia is the earliest evidence that anyone venerated Lucy. It was found in the catacombs of Syracuse and now sits in the Museo archeologico regionale Paolo Orsi. Euskia died on St Lucy's Day, in the late 300s or early 400s.

  By the sixth century, Lucy's story was widespread enough that she appears in the procession of virgins in the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. She is also named in the Sacramentary of Pope Gregory I and in the ancient Roman Martyrology.

  The English writers St. Aldhelm, who died in 709, and the Venerable Bede, who died in 735, attest that her popularity had already reached England. There her festival was kept as a holy day of the second rank, when no work but tillage or the like was allowed. This lasted until the Protestant Reformation.

  Today the Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Episcopal Church and the Lutheran Church all honor her on the 13th of December. Catholics also name her explicitly in the Canon of the Mass, where she is one of eight women, including the Virgin Mary. She belongs to the best known virgin martyrs, alongside Agatha of Sicily, Agnes of Rome, Cecilia of Rome and Catherine of Alexandria.

  For a time, the General Roman Calendar also marked Saints Lucy and Geminianus on the 16th of September. That entry was removed in 1969. It duplicated the feast of her dies natalis on the 13th of December. Moreover, the Geminianus named in her Passio seems to be a fictitious figure, unrelated to the Geminianus whose feast falls on the 31st of January.

  The monk Sigebert of Gembloux, who lived from 1030 to 1112, wrote a passio of Lucy in the mid-eleventh century to support a local cult at Metz. That same Sigebert also recorded what became of her body.

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• 6. A Body on the Move

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  According to Sigebert's sermon on Saint Lucy, her body lay undisturbed in Sicily for 400 years. Then Faroald II, Duke of Spoleto, captured the island and carried the body to Corfinium in Abruzzo, Italy.

  In 972, the Emperor Otho I had the relics removed from Corfinium to Metz and placed in the church of St. Vincent. From that shrine, an arm was taken to the monastery of Luitburg in the Diocese of Speyer. Sigebert celebrated that episode in verse.

  Umberto Benigni gives a different route for the relics. He says that Stephen II, in 768, sent them to Constantinople for safety against Saracen incursions. When the French captured Constantinople in 1204, they found relics attributed to Saint Lucy there. Enrico Dandolo, Doge of Venice, secured them for the monastery of St. George at Venice.

  In 1513, the Venetians presented Louis XII of France with the saint's head, and he deposited it in the cathedral church of Bourges. Another account says the head reached Bourges from Rome, where it had been taken while the relics rested in Corfinium.

  Parts of the body are in Syracuse, which has kept them since antiquity. Other parts have found their way to Rome, Naples, Verona, Lisbon and Milan, and to Germany and France.

  The remainder rests in Venice. In 1861, the church of Santa Lucia was demolished to make way for the new railway terminus, and the relics were moved to the church of San Geremia. A century later, on the 7th of November 1981, thieves stole all her bones except the head. Police recovered them five weeks later, on her feast day.

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• 7. Bearer of Light

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  The Latin name Lucia shares the root luc- with lux, the word for light. Because her feast falls on the 13th of December, several traditions read her as a bearer of light in the darkness of winter.

  In Canto 2 of Inferno, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy introduces Lucy as a messenger. "The blessed Dame," the Virgin Mary, sends her to Beatrice, so that Beatrice will send Virgil to Dante's aid. Henry Fanshawe Tozer reads Lucia as representing "illuminative grace." Robert Pogue Harrison and Rachel Jacoff argue that her role reinforces the scene in which Virgil strengthens Dante's courage for the journey through the inferno.

  In Purgatorio 9.52-63, Lucy carries a sleeping Dante to the entrance of purgatory. Her appearance there mirrors her role in Inferno 2, since both times she carries him out of darkness. Light symbolism also explains why Dante tells this evening scene through the lens of the dawn. In Paradiso 32, he places her opposite Adam within the Mystic Rose. Readers have seen her as Illuminating Grace, Mercy or even Justice.

  In the Late Middle Ages, the shortest day of the year usually fell on her feast day, and the two became linked. John Donne's 1627 poem "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucie's Day, being the shortest day" begins: "'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's." The Julian Calendar was inaccurate, so in Donne's own time the shortest day actually fell a day or two earlier.

  Agneta Sjödin made Lucia the protagonist of a Swedish novel, Ett ljus i mörkret, which means A light in the darkness.

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• 8. Feast Day Traditions

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  Caravaggio's painting Burial of St. Lucy once hung in the church of Santa Lucia alla Badia on the Piazza Duomo in Syracuse, where she is patroness. It is now housed in the church of Santa Lucia al Sepolcro in the same city. On the 13th of December, a silver statue of Lucy containing her relics is paraded through the streets before returning to the Cathedral of Syracuse.

  Sicilians recall a legend that a famine ended on her feast day, when ships loaded with grain entered the harbor. So on that day it is traditional to eat whole grains instead of bread. The usual dish is cuccìa, boiled wheat berries often mixed with ricotta and honey, or sometimes served as a savory soup with beans. Another recipe uses wheatberries with butter, sugar, chocolate and milk. There the large soft grains are said to represent her eyes.

  The coastal town of Olón in Ecuador, which also claims her as patroness, holds a week-long festival that peaks on the 13th of December. The town of Guane, in Santander, Colombia, claims her as well. The Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles, is named after her.

  In northern Italy, Saint Lucy brings gifts to children between the 12th and the 13th of December. Families put out a bouquet of hay for Lucy's donkey and leave food inside the house for Lucy herself, to refresh them after a long night. In small towns, a parade on the evening of the 12th follows her through the main streets as she munches sweets and candy from her cart, with the donkey beside her. A special devotion to her also thrives in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige, Sicily, Calabria and the Croatian coastal region of Dalmatia.

  A Hungarian custom plants wheat in a small pot on her feast. By Christmas, green sprouts appear, signs of life coming from death. The wheat is then carried to the manger scene as a symbol of Christ in the Eucharist.

  In Barangay Sta. Lucia in Magarao, Camarines Sur, in the Philippines, villagers hold a novena nine days before her feast. Each morning a procession of the saint's image passes through the village center, drawing devotees from the Bicol Region. During the dawn procession, people chant hymns called the Gozos, along with the Spanish version of the Ave Maria, and a Mass follows. In Barangay Sta. Lucia in Asturias, Cebu, devotees hope her holy water brings protection, purification and healing, especially for eye disorders. In Barangay Sucad in Apalit, Pampanga, the day ends with an evening procession of her religious sculpture before the evening Mass.

  The American horror film The Nun II, released in 2023, draws on her story. Its main protagonist, revealed to be a descendant of her family, uses the power of her eye relics, hidden in a deconsecrated chapel at Tarascon in France, to defeat a demon nun. In the video game Persona 3, from 2006, Saint Lucy is an ability for the character Fuuka Yamagishi.

  In Denmark, Norway, Sweden and parts of Finland, a young girl dressed in a white dress and a red sash, the sash standing for martyrdom, wears a crown or wreath of candles. Girls and boys dressed as Lucy or as other figures of Christmastide, including gingerbread men, walk in procession while songs are sung. Schools, churches, offices and hospitals hold these celebrations, usually with saffron buns and gingerbread cookies. It is said that celebrating Saint Lucy's Day vividly will help one live through the long winter days with enough light.

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