Suggest an Edit — Cyril

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Name & Status

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Biography

Short Description

The personal name Cyril (Greek Kyrillos) has been borne by many Christian bishops, monks, missionaries, and later patriarchs, and the request gives no Wikidata identifier, see, century, companion name, or other disambiguator. A single verified birth year, death year, city, office, feast, or patronage therefore cannot be assigned without guessing which historical person is meant. The biographical fields in this record are left blank for that reason. What follows is not a composite life, but a cautious survey of the figures most often intended in English-language hagiography when the name stands alone.

The most frequently meant patristic saint is Cyril of Alexandria, who became bishop of Alexandria in 412 and died in 444. Contemporary sources do not preserve a documented year of birth; later estimates in the 370s are modern inferences and are not treated here as verified fact. He succeeded his uncle Theophilus, was a central actor at the Council of Ephesus in 431 in the controversy with Nestorius of Constantinople, and left a large Greek corpus of biblical commentary and christological writing. In the Coptic Church he is counted among the Popes of Alexandria; Chalcedonian churches later numbered him among the Doctors of the Church. His Roman feast has been kept on 27 June in the modern general calendar (formerly 9 February); Eastern calendars vary (commonly 18 January or 9 June). Those dates and titles apply only if this Alexandrian patriarch is the intended subject.

A second major namesake is Cyril of Jerusalem, bishop of Jerusalem in the mid-fourth century and author of the Catechetical Lectures, who died about 386 or 387. His year of birth is not recorded in surviving contemporary evidence. A third is Constantine, later Cyril, the Thessalonian missionary and brother of Methodius, associated with the Glagolitic alphabet and the mission to Great Moravia; he died in Rome in 869 and was buried at the basilica of San Clemente. Later bearers of the name include several Coptic popes titled Cyril, the seventeenth-century patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople, and East Slavic monastic saints such as Kirill of Beloozero (Cyril of White Lake), who died in 1427. Each of these men had a different see, century, burial, and cult.

Because these careers cannot be collapsed into one biography, no single feast day, list of patronages, religious order, or marital status can be verified for an unspecified “Cyril.” Episcopal and monastic Cyrils of late antiquity are generally presented in the sources as celibate clergy or monks, but that is a pattern across many individuals, not a documented fact about an unidentified person. To produce a complete, source-based record, the see, century, or a stable catalogue identifier must be supplied.

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