Saints Fosca and Maura

Nothing certain is known about the life of Saint Fosca, and her story comes down to us in medieval manuscripts in versions that differ from one another. What the tradition tells, though, is a story of two women, and of how a choice can be made together. Fosca is said to have lived in Sabratha, in Libya, in the third century. The daughter of pagan parents, she heard about Christianity for the first time at fifteen. The first person she told was not her mother: it was **Maura, her nurse** — the woman who had raised her. Then she told her mother, and the three women went in secret to a Christian priest named Hermolaus, who baptized Fosca and Maura. When her father found out, he locked her in a room for three days without food and tried again and again to make her turn back. He didn’t succeed. In the end he handed his daughter and her nurse over to the new proconsul, Quintianus. The story says that the soldiers sent to arrest them found them at home in the company of an angel and didn’t dare touch them; then the two women gave themselves up. They were tortured and killed with a sword thrust to the side, on February 13. Centuries later, when Libya was conquered, a sailor named Vitale carried their remains to Torcello, in the Venetian lagoon. If your name is Fosca or Maura, today is your name day: two rare names that go well together, just as the two of them did. A young girl and the woman who had raised her, deciding the same thing on the same day. Her father had the power; they had everything else.