Saint Apollonia

Apollonia’s story has reached us by a route worth as much as the story itself: Eusebius of Caesarea tells it, quoting a letter from Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, who had witnessed those events. It isn’t a late legend: it’s the account of someone who was there. Between 248 and 249, in Alexandria in Egypt, a riot broke out against the Christians, stirred up by a pagan soothsayer. Apollonia was an elderly, unmarried woman who had helped the city’s Christians. They seized her along with the others and beat her until her teeth fell out — popular tradition would later say they pulled them out with pincers. Then they built a great fire: either she blasphemed, or they would burn her alive. And here the story takes a turn that has been debated for centuries. Apollonia slipped out of the crowd’s hands with a trick and **threw herself into the flames**. Dionysius, writing about it, doesn’t condemn her: he understands that in that situation a woman alone feared violence, and feared above all giving in under further tortures. It’s a very hard page, and the early Church kept it without softening it. Because of her teeth, Apollonia is today the patron saint of dentists, dental hygienists and dental technicians — and if you’ve ever seen her image with pincers in her hand, now you know why. If your name is Apollonia, today is your name day: an old, rare name that those who carry it remember well. An elderly woman no one would have noticed, and whom we still talk about eighteen hundred years later.