Pride Month 2025: Words of the Day

A Flame Between Us: Lament in the Poetry of Kassia

“You meet your friend, your face
Brightens – you have struck gold.”
— Hymn and epigrammatic poetry by Kassia (Kassiani), 9th century Byzantium

Kassia (Kassiani) was a Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and intellectual who lived in Constantinople in the 9th century. Renowned as both a hymnographer and epigrammatist, she is one of the very few women from the Byzantine Empire whose writing survives under her own name. Her body of work includes devotional texts, political commentary, and lyric fragments — some of which suggest deep emotional ties between women.

In some of her works, Kassia writes with longing for female companionships and emotions going beyond generalized grief; it is personal, physical, and rooted in sensory memory. While Byzantine court culture often celebrated friendship between women in elevated, spiritualized terms — and flame and wound imagery are common poetic metaphors for longing and separation in Byzantine and medieval literature — Kassia’s phrasing is often highly intimate. As an abbess, Kassia had access to a literary and theological tradition that allowed women to express deep bonds with one another, especially within monastic life. Her compositions for Holy Week, still sung in Orthodox churches today, are celebrated for their emotional intensity and dramatic voice — often writing as women seeking closeness with the divine through very human, sensual imagery.