Kira: Name Day and Patron Saint

Saint Kyra and her sister Saint Marana were born in Beroea in Syria to a rich and noble family in the fourth century. When they came of age, they left their home and their standing in the world and settled on a small plot of ground outside the city. They walled up the entrance with stones and clay and lived in the open air, with no roof over their heads, leaving only a small window through which food was passed to them. Some of their former maidservants wished to share their life, and the sisters gave them a small house nearby and guided them in prayer and fasting through the window. The two sisters wore heavy iron chains, so heavy that Kyra was bent toward the ground. They kept long and hard fasts, and for one period of three years they ate only once in forty days. Only Marana spoke with visitors; no one had heard Kyra speak. Bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus knew them, wrote of them in his history of the monks of Syria, and once persuaded them to take off the chains, but they put them on again when he had gone. They left their enclosure only for pilgrimages, to Jerusalem and to the shrine of Saint Thekla in Isauria, fasting along the way. They lived this way for some forty years and reposed around the year 450. The Church remembers them on 28 February (13 March on the Old Calendar).

What the faithful pray for

• perseverance in prayer and fasting
• the gift of holy silence
• sisters and the love between them
• nuns and all who live in seclusion
• pilgrims on their way