Conversion and Ascetic Life
The accounts of Eudokia's life recount that she was a Samaritan by background and had grown wealthy through a worldly and immoral manner of living. The decisive turn came through a monk named Germanus, who instructed her in the Christian faith; tradition relates that she spent a period in solitude, fasting and praying, before her baptism by Theodotus, the bishop of Heliopolis, who is said to have baptized her after she experienced a heavenly vision.
Having been baptized, she renounced her former life and distributed much of her wealth to the poor and to charitable works. She entered the monastic life near Heliopolis, in the region of Baalbek, where by tradition she founded or joined a monastic community and aided those who came seeking her help.
Miracles and Traditional Accounts
Her vita relates that a persistent suitor named Philostratus pursued her and was struck down; at her prayer he was restored, and he afterward became a Christian. Such accounts are transmitted as part of the traditional narrative of her life rather than as independently documented events.
In the wider hagiographical tradition Eudokia is associated with wonders following her conversion, including, by some accounts, the raising of the dead. These are related as traditional material in the synaxaria.
Martyrdom and Veneration
The hostility of the civil authorities, provoked by her Christian witness and the conversions attributed to her, led to her arrest and execution by beheading. The tradition names a governor, given as Vincentius, as her persecutor, and dates her death to the year 107.
Eudokia is venerated as a venerable-martyr, a title combining her monastic asceticism with her death for the faith. As a saint of the early, ante-Nicene Church, she is commemorated on March 1.
