Ten Virgin-Martyrs of Nicomedia

The Ten Virgin-Martyrs of Nicomedia were a company of ten Christian women who, by tradition, preserved their virginity and were put to death for their faith at Nicomedia during the persecutions of the late third and early fourth centuries. They are commemorated together on December 31, the Leavetaking (Apodosis) of the Feast of the Nativity; on the Old (Julian) Calendar their commemoration falls on January 13.

The synaxaria assign their martyrdom to the reign of Diocletian, roughly the years 286–305, when Nicomedia—then a principal imperial residence and administrative center of the Roman East—was an early and severe focus of anti-Christian enforcement. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, the persecution there began in 303 with the destruction of the city's chief church and the burning of the Christian scriptures, and imperial edicts required Christians to sacrifice to the Roman gods on pain of imprisonment, torture, or death. The ten virgins are numbered among the many believers of that city who refused and were killed.

They are remembered as a single named group rather than for distinct individual histories, and the lists of their names vary from one source to another; several of the synaxaria preserve the names Agape, Theophila, Domna, and Theotima among them. No connected account of their individual sufferings survives, and the tradition transmits them chiefly as a collective witness of consecrated virginity offered up in martyrdom.