Saint Kassia

Kassia, Cassia, Kassiane, or Kassiani was a Byzantine-Greek composer, hymnographer and poet. She holds a unique place in Byzantine music as the only known woman whose music appears in the Byzantine liturgy. Approximately fifty of her hymns are extant, most of which are stichera, though at least 26 have uncertain attribution. The authenticity issues are due to many hymns being anonymous, and others ascribed to different authors in different manuscripts. She was an abbess of a convent in the west of Constantinople. Additionally, many epigrams and gnomic verses are attributed to her, at least 261. Kassia is notable as one of at least two women in the middle Byzantine period known to have written in their own names, the other being Anna Comnena. Like her predecessors Romanos the Melodist and Andrew of Crete, the earliest surviving manuscripts of her works are dated centuries after her lifetime. Her name is a feminine Greek form of the Latin name Cassius. It is variously spelled Κασσιανή (contemporary pronunciation [kaˈsçani]), Κασ(σ)ία (Kasia), Εικασία (Eikasia), Ικασία (Ikasia), Kassiani, Casia, Cassiane, Kassiana. Modern English-language references to her as a composer generally use the name "Kassia," while references to her religious life tend to use Kassia or Kassiani. Kassia was born between 805 and 810 in Constantinople into a wealthy family and grew to be exceptionally beautiful and intelligent. Three Byzantine chroniclers, Pseudo-Symeon the Logothete, George the Monk (a.k.a. George the Sinner) and Leo the Grammarian, claim that she was a participant in a "bride show"—the means by which Byzantine princes/emperors sometimes chose a bride, by giving a golden apple to his choice—organized for the young bachelor Theophilos by his stepmother, the Empress Dowager Euphrosyne.