Martiniano de Atenas

Who they were

Martinian was born at Caesarea in Palestine and at eighteen became a hermit on a mountain, where he lived for twenty-five years. Butler says his life is full of stories of more than doubtful truth: in one, when a woman came to tempt him, he thrust his feet into a fire, and she repented and went to St Paula's convent at Bethlehem.

He is then said to have lived six years on a rock in the sea, left it to a shipwrecked girl he had saved, swum to the mainland and travelled to Athens, where he died at about fifty. He was greatly honoured in the East.

The miracles

There was never a formal cause: he has been honoured as a saint since before the Church's formal processes began.

Why that counted as sanctity

A hermit of Palestine who, by tradition, died at Athens.