August 17 keeps the second feast of St. Agatha at Catania — Sant'Agata d'Agosto, the summer feast of the city. The February feast is the feast of her martyrdom. This one belongs to her relics, and to the day they came home.
The relics left Sicily in 1040, taken to Constantinople by the Byzantine commander George Maniaces during the campaign against the Saracens. They were away for eighty-six years. On 17 August 1126 two young Catanians brought them back across the sea, and the city carried them in procession from the shore. The medieval Historia Translationis fixes the day in the Roman reckoning — kal. XVI septembris, the sixteenth kalends of September — which falls on 17 August.
Both feasts are kept at the Cathedral of St. Agatha, where the relics rest, and where the silver reliquary bust that holds her skull is guarded. February fills the streets of Catania with the great civic festival; August marks the quieter anniversary of the translation. From Catania her cult reached Palermo, where she is co-patron of the city, and spread through the whole of Sicily.
