Saint Myron

Saint Myron, called the Wonderworker in Eastern Christian tradition, was a bishop on the island of Crete in the fourth century. Synaxarion accounts state that he was born in the village of Raucia, near Knossos, into a Christian family during the reign of Constantine the Great. Before his ordination he worked as a farmer. No writings of his survive, and he is not mentioned in the ecclesiastical historians of the fourth and fifth centuries; what is known of him comes from later liturgical biographies, which mix moral exempla with miracle stories and cannot be independently verified.

Those accounts portray him as exceptionally charitable. In the most frequently repeated episode, thieves came by night to steal grain from his threshing floor. Myron discovered them but, instead of seeking their arrest, helped them carry off the grain, loaded it on their beasts, and sent them away with a warning against further theft. The men were said to have been converted by this treatment. His reputation for holiness led to his being made a priest and afterward a bishop. Hagiographical sources speak of him as bishop of Crete; they do not always specify the see. In the fourth century the principal episcopal center of the island was Gortyna, while Knossos also had an early Christian community. Crete had been evangelized in the apostolic age, and the Epistle to Titus already presupposes an organized church there.

During his episcopate Myron was credited with miracles, whence the title Wonderworker. One story, closely parallel to the wedding at Cana in the Gospel of John, relates that wine ran short at a marriage feast and that after his prayer the water in the vessels became wine. Other wonders of healing are attributed to him in general terms. Tradition holds that he died in peace at an advanced age, a date often given as 350. He is distinct from Saint Myron of Cyzicus, a priest from Achaea who was martyred at Cyzicus under the emperor Decius in the mid-third century and is commemorated on 17 August.

The Orthodox Church keeps the feast of Myron of Crete on 8 August. His cult is strongest on Crete itself, where the village of Agios Myronas in the Heraklion region is named for him. There is no record of a formal canonization or beatification of the kind later used in the Latin Church; like other saints of the Constantinian era, he entered the calendar through local veneration and liturgical reception. Specific patronages, a precise place of death, and a documented burial site are not preserved in the available sources.