SerbianOrthodoxChurch.net
A patrician, she was a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Emperor Justinian. When she was widowed, and saw that the Empress Theodora could not abide her, she suddenly disappeared from Con-stantinople and took herself off to the Egyptian desert. A famous spiritual guide, Abba Daniel, tonsured her and presented her as the castrated monk Anastasius, by her wish, so that she might, as a woman under a man's name, more easily evade the imperial search-ers. Anastasia shut herself in a narrow cell, where she spent 28 years and where she entered into rest in the year 563. Before her death, the elder Daniel saw her face shining like the sun.
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