Biography
Theodore Trichinas
About Theodore Trichinas
Theodore’s unusual epithet, Trichinas, recalls the rough hair garment he wore. The church notice places his origins in a wealthy, devout family at Constantinople and says that he abandoned that comfortable setting while young to enter a monastery in Thrace. There he adopted a deliberately austere life, including sleeping on stone.
His reputation rests on that ascetic practice and on a tradition of healing associated with his relics. The notice reports that fragrant myrrh flowed from them and that people seeking his intercession received healing. These are claims of the devotional tradition. It places his death around the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century without supplying an exact year. Joseph the Hymnographer later composed a canon in his honor. No fuller sequence of personal events is supplied by this surviving notice.
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