St. Spyridon of Trimythous

Spyridon was born around the year 270 in a village in Cyprus. He was the son of shepherds, married a quiet wife, and lived as a shepherd himself for the first part of his life. After his wife reposed he was given to the priesthood; in the years before the Edict of Milan he was consecrated bishop of the small see of Trimythous in Cyprus and was a Confessor in the great persecution: he lost his right eye and bore the scars on his face.

At the First Ecumenical Council in 325, Spyridon appeared in his shepherd's clothing and was looked at askance by some of the more learned Fathers, who thought him unfit to dispute with the philosophical Arian party. The tradition gives him the great demonstration of the Holy Trinity to the assembled bishops: he took a brick into his hand, made the sign of the Cross, and from the one brick fire shot upward, water dripped downward, and clay remained in his palm. Three natures, held in one substance.

He returned from Nicaea to his small see in Cyprus and to the life of a country bishop. The traditions of his pastorate are full of wonders: the conversion of a thief by his quiet mercy; a flood that he turned aside with the sign of the Cross; the raising of his own daughter Irene from sleep to answer a question and laying her down again; the appearance of an icon-painter who was warned in a vision and turned back from defrauding a poor woman.

He reposed around the year 348 and was buried in his small see. When the Arab raids on Cyprus in the seventh and eighth centuries threatened the island, his relics were translated to Constantinople; at the fall of the City in 1453 they were carried west to Corfu, where they remain in the church of St. Spyridon to this day, incorrupt and warm to the touch, with shoes upon his feet that the keepers of his shrine say wear out every year and must be replaced.

He is one of the most-loved of the early Fathers in the Greek-speaking and Cypriot Orthodox world. The faithful keep his feast on December 12, and the islanders of Corfu carry his relics in procession four times a year in thanksgiving for the wonders he has worked for them.