Saint Agatha’s burial in Catania: new discoveries

Saint Agatha was buried in a suburban space not because of her age or gender: Agatha was buried outside the city walls because that was where the largest and most commonly used cemetery of the ancient city lay. In the following centuries, two places of worship would be built in that suburban space, a trichora in the fifth and a much bigger basilica in the sixth, but the sacralisation of that place began in the third century AD precisely with the burials of the martyrs, Agatha in primis. In that century the border between city and suburbs was not so clearly defined in Catania, especially in the northern part, and this area was disputed between “the city of the living” and “the city of the dead”. Thanks to Agatha and the other Christian martyrs, this entire area on the border between the city and the suburbs became the place where the dead lived in Christ and where special protection from God could be claimed for the benefit of the entire city.