The Holy Alamanni

The Holy Alamanni are a group of saints, in an uncertain number, who came from different places and were martyred in Cyprus. The main sources on them are the Cypriot chroniclers and historians and their Services. The first mention is by Leontios Machairas (fifteenth century), who says that after the siege of Jerusalem by the Arabs, in 638, three hundred clergy and laity fled to Cyprus, where they split into smaller groups.

The term "Alamanni" was introduced by Latin Cypriot scholars, Florio Bustron and Stephen Lusignan, for whom they were men of note from France and Germany who came to Cyprus to become monks after the failed attempt, toward the end of the thirteenth century, to free the Holy Land. Synaxaria of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries repeated the view of a German origin. Constantine Sathas placed their arrival between 690 and 697, after the Arab conquest of the island.

Research has not settled their number, origin or time of arrival. More recent studies have seen in them a group of venerable men centred on Saint Heliophotos and placed their time in the fifth century. For the historian of the Church of Cyprus J. Hackett, they were a group of soldiers, since the name "Alamanos" meant a soldier in the East at that time. For Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, the name is linked to Mount Amanos, on which stands the city of Germanikeia.