Santa Marina di Bitinia. La memoria riscoperta della santa “travestita”
Article by Raffaele Alberto Ventura (writer) published in the Newspaper tomorrow 12 august 2021, p.14
"Every woman who will become male will enter the kingdom of heaven." These are words attributed to Jesus Christ in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. And many, in late antiquity, took it in question. There are numerous testimonies of women masked by monks or Romite to whom the breast disappears following the long fasts; Often they crossed them to command their troops as a general, or praised the male qualities of heroines.
It is difficult to argue that these are emancipatone narratives, since in them you can see an attempt to diminish the female and enhance the male model; However, similar archaic traces of "Gender Trouble" invite you to look to our vituped past with less prejudices. Before the needs of modern life began to demand a classification of feelings, inclinations and individual identities in rigid social, legal or product categories, sexual diversity was expressed in other ways, however suffered, for example in religious life.
A too large desire could be vented in phantasmagoric theological machinations - God would be able to return the virginity to a woman who lost her? - While an attraction too weak for the other sex allowed to fully enjoy the secret pleasures of monastic sociability.
The dress “Fa” the monk
As for the "Sante disguises", it is a more marginal yet fascinating reality, well embodied by the figure of santa Marina di Bitinia - Today still one of the protectors of the city of Venice, which holds its relics and worship. Everything is well told in an article by Cristina Crippa published in 2012 in the specialized magazine Porphyra. We are around the fifth century in Fenicia, a region of the current Türkiye. When the saint was still a child his father Eugenio, Pio and Christianissimo, remained so upset by the death of his wife Teodora who wanted to retire to a male monastery in Lebanon. Marina followed him, someone says for his firm will while others attribute the decision to his father, but before he had to solve the problem of his sex.
So his hair razed and hid every sign of femininity under the tunic. Marina took the name of Marino, and maintained it also following the death of the adored father. The confreres believes it an eunuch, shy and reserved, devoted, pious and Christian. On the other hand, as he had given up being female, they had given up being fully male - they met halfway. The sins that the church condemns have a corresponding virtue, identical only in appearance, which sublime and exalts them: to lust corresponds to mystical love for Christ, to the androgynia of the sodomites that of the consecrated ones. Marina made itself without sex, like angels.
Never as in this case it is right to say that the dress "does" the monk, also starting from a female body. Then one day the monk became a parent: technically mother, but for his confreres undoubtedly father. And therefore a sinner, moreover accused of rape by the daughter of a host. Marino did not confess his innocence, did not show his body without the attributes of virility. For his crime he was driven out of the monastery and hidden outside the door he raised the child. He spilled milk from the breast, the marine monk. And finally he died, leaving a female body to testimony to his innocence. Miraculously mummifying his remains, and Marino-Marina began to perform wonders.
For his unhappy lie, the devil had made the daughter of the Osa crazy. For his very happy lie, the Lord made Marina Santa. The second healed the first, the caste marina healed her dissolved from madness, and here is already the second miracle. The son became monk, third in a row of the dynasty: very rare family sequence. But how much rare, who can say it? There is more diversity in the history of theology than our philosophy can conceive.
The arrival in Venice
After death, the story of his cult begins. His body arrived in Venice on 17 July 1213, after having rested somewhere in the current Romania, and to escape the Saracens to have been transferred to Constantinople. From there Giovanni da Bora, Venetian, corrupt the custodians with prayers and money, had kidnapped his body one last time. Then he hid it in a chest, and embarked her pretending to be filled with spices. But the ship found itself in the middle of a storm and the case broke, revealing the content and cards that attested it. Terrified, the crew prayed and lit Ceri, until the waters calmed down. The captain attributed to the saint the fortune of having escaped his death, instead of attributing the misfortune of having risked it.
Because the name could not lie: Marina had to be the saint of the sea, the sailors and the maritime republics. Before modern science taught the causes and effects, the word games revealed the secret harmonies of the cosmos. The signs and similarities prescribed care for every evil: Santa Lucia could return the light to the blind; San Cornelio protected animals with horns, and perhaps betrayed husbands. Only centuries later, at our time, Santa Marina has still become another thing, that is, a holy queer, often evoked as an ante litteram fluidity model.
Between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age, Santa Marina was a pile of bones with a very precious name. The map of his cult follows the coasts: Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata, Cyprus. For some time Venice had been waiting for his relics, and to welcome them he had used a church over a century in advance. There he resumed to tack. The military glories of the Lagunare Republic are linked to her influence, and on the day consecrated to her, on July 17, two historical victories against Padua, in 1405 and 1517, were remembered. Marina deserved to be appointed compatona, and remains today together with Marco, Teodoro and fifteen other saints. But it is only a formality, because its cult belongs to the past now. His church was closed to worship in 1806 and destroyed in 1820.
There is still a field with its name, where a votive newsstand survives with a small painted ceramic statue, which represents it together with the adopted son. Perhaps one wanted to prevent the saint from operating his benefits influences on the city: the Republic had fallen in 1797 and the invader to definitively neutralize his power had transformed the church into the tavern. Venice was like castrated: the secret of his military glory had been discovered and dismantled. In what had once been a sacred place, Marina became the saint of the beons and dissolute, which were now the only ones to invoke her: "For Santa Marina, a beer!".
The preserved body
Abandoned by his faithful, Marina still lies dressed as a monk in the church of Santa Maria Formosa, together with the relics of other saints. Under the dress it appears as a female body of adulthood, of minute stature; his well preserved head, joined to the body with a wooden axis; the nose in Rostro, the pelvis mounted on the reverse, and the dentition falling in full except three molars; The skeleton without one arm while the other retains one part. But who really belonged to that body?
Nobody can say it for sure. The Sante Marina, in number of five, sometimes end up not distinguishing each other, because hagiographies are compositions of memories, legends, misunderstandings. Miracles recycle themselves, and so iconographies. The names deform, overlap, and the homonyms end up sharing stories and devotions, sometimes even bones. There are enough hands of Santa Marina to compose a Kalì goddess, but at least one of these must be returned to another Saint Marina, lived in Antioch. This perhaps holds a rib of Santa Pelagia hostage, and the sternum of Santa Eugenia. They all put themselves together for a good time, their bones and their stories, their lives and their dead, their arms of the legs and skulls hands, one would certainly get something enormous, fascinating and suddenly holy, more impressive than the dinosaurs.
Nobody, in all this, has ever taken care of establishing if Marina would not have preferred to Be called marino, if behind her disguise there was no deeper feeling of the simple desire to lock up in a Monastery. was He Really "disguised", or Simply "dressed" By Marino? the apparent falsification is perhaps, in other respects, the realization of a deeper Truth. fifteen centuries later, what do we know? Of the lives of the saints, everyone makes the use they believe best, adapting them to the Political emergencies of their time. and if almost no One most celebrates the saint in venice for His military merits, His "genus transition" has found new admirers within the lGBT Culture.
Since the seventies, historians such as Évelyne Patlagean or Sylvie Steinberg investigate the theme of female disguiseism, and although anachronism is always around the corner the differences between a monk of Asia Minor and a drag queen jump to the eye - the attraction that these historical models can exercise, both as an iconographic archive and as a contribution to a less unidimensional reading of our past, is undeniable. The alleged dominance of the standard has actually been exedly undermined by the existence of marginal phenomena, often forgotten, which it is only a matter of rediscovering.
Sometimes instead they are under everyone's eyes: wasn't Giovanna D'Arco, one of the most famous medieval figures, a woman dressed as a man, engaged in activities considered male? In 2010 in Lille a statue of the Saint, however myth of the French right, had been painted in Rosa to raise the question of his ambiguity. Anachronism against anachronism, this manifestation and the reactions that has aroused show us that in our world disenchanted the memory of the saints still matters something, and that we continue to need stories to tell and icons to be celebrated.
