Varus

Saint Varus the Martyr, in Greek Ouaros, was a soldier of Egypt who received martyrdom for the Christian faith around 307, at the beginning of the fourth century. The Church remembers him on 19 October, that is 1 November by the civil calendar. In the Coptic Church he is commemorated on 15 Paopi.

According to his Acts, regarded as reliable, he was a soldier in Upper Egypt, assigned to guard seven hermits awaiting execution. He was a secret Christian but weak in faith. After seeing one of the hermits die, his faith was revived, and he joined the monks. So as not to leave them alone he spent a whole night with them in spiritual conversation and afterward brought them food in prison. When one of the seven died, Varus offered himself in his place. For this he was tortured and his body hung from a tree. His body, thrown out to be eaten by beasts or on a refuse heap, was taken by a pious widow, Cleopatra, and kept in her house. At the end of the persecution, in 312, she carried the relics to Palestine, to the family tomb cut in the rock in the village of Edra near Tabor, and built a church in his honour. Her son, when he died, was buried beside the saint's tomb, and she distributed her wealth to the poor and lived until death in fasting and prayer at the saint's church.

He was greatly venerated in Russia as a martyr and intercessor, above all through the stories of Blessed Cleopatra and her son, and at the court of Ivan the Terrible his name was significant, since it is held to be the baptismal name of one of the princes Dimitri. A canon to the saint, read for the dead who were unbaptized, is regarded by some as unreliable: it did not exist in the old Orthodox Menaia, and the Church does not allow public prayers for the unbaptized. The original Life does not mention salvation of the unbaptized, but only that he appeared to Cleopatra and said he had prayed for her relatives.