To avoid his forceful advances and to maintain her chastity, Hripsime, her fellow nuns and their leader Gayane, fled Rome. After traveling to Alexandria, they finally arrived in the vicinity of Vagharshapat in Armenia, where it is said they found an old building of an abandoned wine press and settled there.
The Roman emperor continued his pursuit of Hripsime and the nuns. He asked the pagan Armenian King Drtad to help return them to Rome. However, when King Drtad’s soldiers discovered where the nuns were hiding and King Drtad saw the beautiful Hripsime, he too fell in love with her and commanded her to marry him. When Hripsime was brought before the King, she refused to renounce her Christian faith and accept the King’s marriage proposal. She chose the love of Christ over the title of queen with all of its pagan trappings. The King then pressured Gayane, the leader of the sisterhood, to convince Hripsime to marry him. However, instead of advising Hripsime to submit to the King’s demands, Gayane told her to resist and stand firm in her faith. Hripsime and Gayane then escaped from the palace and returned to the winery. Because of her refusal, the King’s forces inflicted fiendish tortures upon Hripsime, Gayane and the other sisters. According to various accounts, the soldiers cut out their tongues, pierced their eyes, chopped up their bodies and then burned them.
The martyrdom of these women took place in the last year of St. Gregory the Illuminator’s imprisonment in the pit. Upon his delivery from the pit, in the early 4th century St. Gregory built chapels over the relics of the nuns. Later, during the time of St. Sahag Bartev, these chapels were rebuilt, and during the pontificate of Catholicos Gomidas in the 7th century, two beautiful cathedrals were erected; one of these, the Cathedral of St. Hripsime, remains a monument of Armenian architecture.
St. Hripsime, along with her companions in martyrdom, are venerated as the first martyrs in the history of Armenian Christianity. In 1979, His Holiness Vasken I, the Catholicos of All Armenians, reported joyously to His Holiness Khoren I, the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, that as a result of recent archaeological excavations, firmly sealed graves thought to be those of Hripsime and her companions had been found. His Holiness Vasken I wrote: “It is with deep emotion that we wish to inform you that the ancient tomb discovered during the past year under the walls of the St. Hripsime monastery has disclosed graves of interred bodies without heads. It is highly probable that those remains are those of some of the maidens.” Because of the manner in which these bodies had been severed, the direction in which they were buried and the absence of pagan-like burial practices, the archaeologists were able to confirm the authenticity of Hripsime and her followers’ remains.