Eid il-Burbara December 4

Barbe would have lived from the second half of the III^e at the beginning of IV^e century in Bithynia or Phoenicia according to the sources, under the reign of the emperor Diocletian, and would have died a martyr under the emperor Maximian. His father, Dioscorus, is said to have been a wealthy pagan aedile of Phoenician origin.

According to legend, her father decides to marry her to a man of his choice; she refuses and decides to devote herself to Christ. To punish her, her father locks her in a tower with two windows. But a Christian priest, disguised as a doctor, enters the tower and baptizes her. When her father returns from a trip, Barbe tells him that she has pierced a third window in the wall of the tower to represent the Holy Trinity and that she is a Christian. Furious, the father sets fire to the tower. Barbe manages to escape but a shepherd discovers her hiding place and warns her father.

The latter drags her before the Roman governor of the province, who condemns her to torture. As the young girl refuses to renounce her faith, the governor orders the father to cut off his daughter's head himself. She is first tortured: parts of her body are burned and her breasts are torn off. But she still refuses to renounce her faith. Dioscorus decapitates her but is immediately punished by Heaven: he dies struck by lightning. As for the shepherd who denounced her, he is turned to stone and his sheep into locusts.

When the Christians came to ask for the body of the young martyr, not wanting to use her pagan first name or reveal themselves by using her Christian baptismal name, they could only speak of her as "the young barbarian woman", hence the name Saint Barbara which was given to her.

The Byzantine emperors particularly venerated his relics, which they had transferred to the VI^e century in Constantinople. Part of it was taken to Italy by the Venetians, and another part to the XI^e century by the daughter of Alexis Comnenus in kyiv, where they are still in St. Vladimir's Cathedral in kyiv.