Epictetus

Holy Hierarch Epictetus the Wonderworker was one of the three hundred Holy Alamanni who came to Cyprus in the twelfth century, Greeks who lived in Germany and took part in the Second Crusade (1147 to 1149); instead of fighting the Muslims to retake the Holy Land, they went to Jerusalem, venerated the holy places and went off to live as ascetics in the Jordan region. Because of threats from Muslims and Catholics, they decided to go to Cyprus, where they would live separately. On the way their ship met a storm, but they reached Paphos and bade each other farewell.

The chronicler Leontios Machairas, in his fifteenth-⁠century history of Cyprus, speaks of 67 of the three hundred. Of Epictetus he says that, going from place to place, he came to the north of Cyprus and settled at Kazafani, about four miles from Kyrenia. There he found a cave where he lived as an ascetic, pleasing to God, and fell asleep in peace. In the cave one can still see his stone bed, a stone resembling a human head that he used as a pillow, and his tomb in a corner. Above the cave the community church in his name was built around the end of the twelfth century, to which his body was moved, and in 1856 his icon was placed there. Today the church and the cave, in Turkish-⁠occupied territory, are hard to visit, and the church has been turned into a mosque.

Epictetus is known as a wonderworker. A story is told of a blind young man from Paphos to whom the saint appeared in a vision and told him to go to his house and wash his face with the water there; when he kissed the saint's icon, he saw. A fifteen-⁠year-⁠old boy from Kakopetria, possessed by a demon, was healed in the cave, where the priest made the sign of the cross three times over him with the saint's pillow stone. A paralysed child from Peristerona was also healed at Saint Epictetus, after his mother saw in a vision the old man who told her to bring him on Sunday. He is commemorated on 12 October, in the calendar of the Church of Greece (new style).