Sant’Eufemia da Calcedonia: migrazione e ideologizzazioni del culto, produzione di sosia, genesi di luoghi sacri

In the first part, the essay follows the routes of early-medieval migrations of martyr Euphemia’s cult and relics through eastern Mediterranean sea, from Calcedonia-Constantinople to the patriarchal area (Aquileia-Grado, with branches into the Friulian inland, to Venice-Padua, Ravenna and Trieste-Parenzo-Rovigno), focusing on the phenomena triggered by the diffusion of Euphemian devotion, which assured its lasting fortune: its increasing ideologization and repeated political use in an antiheretical-antischismatic and identitary key, the multiplication of the reference figure (with the ‘invention’ of homonymous martyrs in Aquileia, Ravenna and Trieste), the genesis and characterization of sacred places, the modification of natural and urban topography itself in some of the sites affected by that flow. In the second part we recall the late-medieval vicissitudes of the original saint’s main relics and consider a specific case: the attempt to revitalize her cult and church in Padua, which were in a state of deep crisis and neglect. The failure of that attempt and the general impoliticalness of Euphemian cult in the Venetian area in the mid 15th c. brought eventually to reunify some of the ideological and material branches it had divided up and to ‘parachute’ it (with a cold-blood operation, devoid of local precedents and with a strong commercial taste) in Montepeloso (nowadays Irsina MT). This in turn generated a new pole of Euphemian devotion – promptly declined, also from the viewpoint of sacred spaces, in both religious and civic-identitary versions and mildly radiating over the territory – and started an important and lasting flow of Venetian works of art among churches and convents in the Apulo-Lucanian area.