Karas

Venerable Karas, also called Cyrus the Anchorite or Apa Kyros, was a saint of the Coptic Orthodox Church who lived in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. According to his life, written by the Coptic monk Pambo and translated from the manuscripts of the Syrian Monastery by Archdeacon Aziz Nashed, he spent fifty-⁠seven years in solitude in the Scetis desert (Wadi Natrun), in communion with God, Who visited him each day in his cave.

Before becoming a hermit he is said by tradition to have been a prince in the Roman lands, a believing man who treated his servants as friends. One story tells that a servant was accused of stealing a jewel of the empress and condemned to beheading; Prince Karas found the jewel in the empress's chamber but arrived too late to stop the execution, and he carried that grief to the end of his life. He is included in the Arabic Jacobite Synaxarion.