Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic tradition commemorates on 15 August the Dormition of the Theotokos, the God-bearer, using a term meaning falling asleep to describe Mary's death, understood within this tradition as a natural death from which her body was subsequently taken up into heavenly glory rather than left to ordinary decay. Tradition holds that the apostles, scattered across the known world in their missionary work, were miraculously gathered together at Mary's deathbed in Jerusalem to witness her passing, with Thomas arriving late and, in a detail echoing his role in the Gospel resurrection narratives, being shown Mary's empty tomb as evidence of what had occurred.
No account of Mary's death appears in the New Testament itself, and the earliest detailed narratives describing the Dormition emerge in apocryphal texts composed centuries after the events they describe, texts that circulated in multiple, sometimes conflicting versions across different regions of the early Christian world before the broad narrative outline became widely accepted within both Eastern and, eventually, Western tradition.
Byzantine iconography developed an especially rich visual tradition around the Dormition, typically depicting Mary lying on a bier surrounded by the apostles, with Christ standing behind holding a small figure representing her soul, an image that became one of the most widely reproduced scenes in Orthodox devotional art.