Macrina was the eldest of ten children of the noble Christian family of St. Basil the Elder and St. Emmelia at Caesarea in Cappadocia. Three of her brothers became bishops and saints (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Peter of Sebaste); the family produced five canonized saints across two generations.
Betrothed at twelve, she lost her fiancé before the wedding and declared herself thereafter a 'widow' in mourning, embracing virginity for Christ. She educated and formed her younger brothers — Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina records that she taught Basil, on his return from sophistic studies, to give up his pride and embrace the simple Christian life that made him the founder of the Greek monastic Rule.
She founded with her mother a community of women on the family estate at Annisa, on the river Iris in Pontus — one of the first formal Christian women's communities. Gregory of Nyssa's De Anima et Resurrectione ('On the Soul and the Resurrection'), a Socratic dialogue in which Macrina expounds Christian theology of resurrection on her deathbed, gives her a voice in the philosophical-theological canon of the Greek Church.