Cyriacus the Anchorite

Cyriacus the Anchorite, also called Cyriacus the Hermit and, in Greek sources, Kyriakos the Anchorite, was a Christian monk and hermit of the Judean desert in the fifth and sixth centuries. The principal source for his life is the biography written by Cyril of Scythopolis, a monk of the same wilderness who had visited him and who composed the Life within a generation of his death. According to that account, Cyriacus was born in 448 in Corinth, in the Eastern Roman province of Achaea. His father, John, was a priest of the church of Corinth, and his mother was named Eudoxia; the family was related to Peter, bishop of Corinth. Cyriacus was tonsured as a reader in the cathedral. At the age of eighteen he left home without his parents' knowledge and went to Jerusalem in order to take up the monastic life in the Holy Land.

Arriving in Palestine about 466, he venerated the holy places and then sought admission to the lavra of Euthymius the Great, in the desert east of Jerusalem. Euthymius, who as a rule did not receive beardless youths into his own lavra, sent him to the monastery of Gerasimus on the Jordan. There Cyriacus received the monastic habit and spent several years in obedience, including service during Gerasimus's periods of solitude. After Gerasimus died in 475, Cyriacus returned to the Euthymian community. Euthymius himself had died in 473. Cyriacus lived for a time in the coenobium attached to the lavra and, according to the hagiographical tradition, was ordained to the priesthood before withdrawing into stricter solitude.

Over the following decades he moved among a succession of cells, caves, and remote sites in the wilderness of Judah, including places named Natoufa, Rouba, and Sousakim in the country toward the Dead Sea. The sources describe an extremely austere way of life: long fasts, a diet of wild plants, night-long prayer, and manual labor. Cyril of Scythopolis and later synaxaria attribute to him gifts of healing and foreknowledge, and they preserve the well-known story that a lion lived with him and kept animals from his garden. In the Origenist controversies that divided Palestinian monasteries in the mid-sixth century, Cyriacus stood with the anti-Origenist monks and was remembered as a defender of the doctrinal position those communities regarded as orthodox.

In old age he settled at the lavra of Souka, also called the Old Lavra of Saint Chariton, near Tekoa south of Bethlehem. He died there on 29 September, in 557 according to the chronology most often given in modern reference works (some Orthodox synaxaria give 556), at a reported age of more than one hundred years, and he was buried at that monastery. He was never a bishop, patriarch, or pope. The sources present him as a celibate monk from his youth, with no spouse or children. His principal feast is kept on 29 September in the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic calendars. Many of the miracle stories belong to the conventions of desert hagiography and cannot be confirmed independently, but the outline of a Corinthian origin, formation under Gerasimus and the Euthymian circle, a long eremitical career in the Judean desert, and death at Souka rests on a relatively early Palestinian monastic source.