Εἰς Ἔφεσον προσκυνῆσαι: Notes on the Martyr Cult of Hermione at Ephesos (and Beyond)

Most information about the life of Hermione comes from the liturgical tradition of the Byzantine church. She travelled, as a pilgrim, to Ephesus with her sister Eutychis to pay a visit to John the Theologian, who passed away just before her arrival. In order to reconstruct the biography of Hermione, scholars have so far used the Synaxarium of Constantinople, as published by Hippolyte Delehaye at the beginning of the 20th century. While this edition constitutes an invaluable tool of study and offers an extraordinary wealth of information, nevertheless it is representative of only one of the manuscript classes of the Constantinopolitan liturgical book. New glimpses on Hermione’s profile emerge from the latest and largely unpublished version of the Synaxarium (class M* of the handwritten tradition), which contains hagiographic and topographic details so far neglect- ed in scholarly debates. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to showcase the informative contribution of the vita Hermionis in the recensio M* of the Synaxarium and strive to determine whether and to what extent these new fragments of information are useful to shed fresh light on the history and topography of late antique Ephesus.