Late antiquity (4th century)
Feast: August 18
The innkeeper's daughter who became empress, was discarded by her husband, and then — at nearly eighty — traveled to Jerusalem and dug up the cross.
Helena was probably the daughter of an innkeeper in Bithynia. She married the Roman officer Constantius Chlorus, bore him a son named Constantine, and was then set aside when Constantius needed a more politically useful wife. For twenty years she lived in obscurity. When Constantine became emperor and converted to Christianity, he brought his mother back to court, gave her the title Augusta, and handed her unlimited access to the imperial treasury. She was about seventy-five. Most people would have retired. Helena went to Palestine. Between 326 and 328 AD, she traveled through the Holy Land, visiting the sites of Christ's life and commissioning churches on a scale no one had attempted. She built the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and a church on the Mount of Olives. At the site of Calvary in Jerusalem, she ordered excavations and — according to tradition — discovered the True Cross buried beneath a Roman temple. The story says she identified it by touching it to a sick woman, who was healed. Historians debate the discovery; the Church has never wavered on it. Helena gave lavishly to the poor along her route and freed prisoners. She died around 330 AD, back in Rome, her son at her side. Archaeologists claim her as patron because she was, in a real sense, the first Christian archaeologist — an old woman with a shovel and a hunch.