Myron of Crete
Our Father among the Saints Myron the Wonderworker, Bishop of Crete
Bishop · Wonderworker · b. c. 250, at Raucos in Crete — d. c. 350
Commemorated 8 August — Repose of the wonderworking bishop of Crete
Myron (c. 250–c. 350) is the great wonderworker of Crete: a farmer of the village of Raucos near Knossos, married and working his own land, who became famous first for a generosity so extravagant that it converted the men who came to rob him, and only afterwards, and by the island's insistence, a priest and then its bishop. The tradition credits him with the gift of miracles from his youth — the vineyard stripped for the poor and refilled from three grapes — and above all with the stilling of the flooded river Triton, which he crossed dry-shod and then sent his staff back to release. He reposed about the year 350, a hundred years old. His birthplace bears his name to this day, Agios Myronas, and he is the patron of the whole island's memory of its fourth-century Church.
Raucos: the farmer
Myron was born about the year 250 at Raucos (Ῥαῦκος), a village in the hills south-west of Knossos in central Crete — the place now called Agios Myronas, after him. His parents were farmers and so was he; and he remained one, working his vineyard and his threshing-floor, for most of the years the tradition gives him. He married. It is one of the marks of his life that the Church of Crete raised to the episcopate a man who had spent his working life on the land and had been a husband, and that his hagiography makes no apology for it.
Two stories carry the whole picture of him, and both are about property.
The first belongs to his youth. He gave away the entire grape harvest of his parents' vineyard to the poor, so that when the season came there was nothing to press. His mother reproached him: they had laboured all year and had no wine. Myron answered that God had kept some for them too, went out to the vineyard, and found a single small bunch of three grapes. He brought it home and set it in a vessel — and it filled, and went on filling, until there was wine enough not only for the household but for the whole village.
The second belongs to his manhood. Thieves broke in upon his threshing-floor at night to carry off his grain — twelve of them, in the fuller Greek accounts. Finding that they could not hoist the loaded sacks, Myron came out and helped them lift the sacks onto their own shoulders, and when the work was done said only, "God forgive you; go, and steal no more." The shame of it did what no prosecution would have done: the men left off thieving and lived honestly from that day.
Priest and bishop
His wife died not long after their marriage. The Cretans, who had watched him, pressed him to accept ordination to the priesthood in his own town of Raucos; and afterwards — the accounts place this after a persecution had passed — they elected him bishop, the chief hierarch of the island. He governed the Church of Crete with the same plain practical charity he had shown on his own land, and there was added to him the gift of wonderworking.
The river Triton
The miracle by which he is chiefly remembered is the stilling of the Triton. The river was in flood and impassable, and Myron, needing to cross, commanded the water; it stood still, and he walked over the bed as upon dry ground. On the far side he remembered that the river had its own work to do, and sent a man back — a deacon, in the Greek telling — carrying his episcopal staff, with orders to strike the water and bid it resume its course; and it did. The Cretan tradition adds to this the killing of a destroying dragon or serpent that was ravaging the countryside, and it is this pair of deeds — the river halted, the dragon slain — that the island's proper apolytikion names.
He fell asleep in the Lord at the age of one hundred, about the year 350.
Feast and commemoration
August 8 (church date; New Calendar civil August 8, Old Calendar civil August 21), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. He stands second in the Greek synaxarion of the day, after Emilian of Cyzicus, and his commemoration is universal — Greek, Antiochian, Slavic and OCA calendars all carry him. In Crete he is kept with particular solemnity, and the village of Agios Myronas west of Herakleion, built on ancient Raucos, keeps him as its patron; a great basilica there stands over the site associated with him, and the uncovering of relics identified as his is reported from the church in modern times.
The Greek synaxarion gives him the couplet: Myron the divine, breathing out the myrrh of virtue, goes up to the Lord as a fragrance of sweet savour — a play on his name (myron, ointment) that the hymns of the day return to repeatedly.
A proper apolytikion in Tone 3 is sung in Crete, hailing him as a great sun seen over the island, flashing with miracles, who stopped the streams of the Triton and slew the destroying dragon; there are also a proper kontakion in the Plagal of the Fourth Tone and a megalynarion. These proper texts are current in English only in modern copyrighted versions and are therefore not reproduced here; the common of a hierarch is given below in their place, per the repository's hymn policy.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
The truth of things revealed thee to thy flock as a rule of faith, an icon of meekness, and a teacher of abstinence; therefore thou hast attained the heights by humility, and riches by poverty. O father and hierarch Myron, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst till thine own field and give away its fruit, and the thieves that came to rob thee went away made honest men; and being set as a shepherd over the island, thou didst stay the flooded river with a word. O Myron, fragrance of virtue, pray that our hearts also may be made generous.
Iconography
Myron is painted as an aged hierarch: white-haired and with a long white beard, in the phelonion and the crossed omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel-book in the left, in the standard type of the bishop-confessor. What distinguishes him in Cretan work is the narrative: beside or below the figure are shown the river Triton standing still with the saint walking on its bed, the staff sent back in a deacon's hand to release the water, and — in the fuller cycles — the dragon transfixed. Sometimes the threshing-floor with the thieves and their sacks is included, an unusually domestic scene for an episcopal icon and the one his own people love best.
No pre-1900 image of him has been stored. Two candidates on Wikimedia Commons were examined and both rejected: File:Myron of Crete.jpg is a photograph of a modern American icon print (comeandseeicons.com), whose underlying painting is a living artist's copyrighted work regardless of the uploader's public-domain tag; and File:Myron of Krete Icon.jpg is dated by its own description only as "19th–20th century," an ambiguity straddling the repository's pre-1900 line, with no provenance beyond a blog reproduction. The Menologion of Basil II cannot help, since it covers September to February only. A wanted icon is recorded.
Disputed questions
- Which see? The sources do not agree on the city of his throne. The older manuscripts make him bishop of Gortyna, which in the fourth century was the metropolis of Crete and the seat of its first hierarch — and this is the likelier reading, since the calendars call him simply "bishop of Crete," which in that period means Gortyna. Later manuscripts make him bishop of Knossos; the change is most easily explained by the fact that in later Byzantine times the diocese of Knossos was transferred to Raucos, Myron's own town, so that his name and the Knossian see came to be attached to one another. He should not on that account be confused with Eumenes of Gortyna (September 18), a distinct wonderworking bishop of the same island and metropolis in a later century.
- Dates. The century-long life (c. 250 to c. 350) is the tradition's own figure and is transmitted uniformly; it puts his birth under the persecutions and his episcopate in the peace of the Church after Constantine, which is consistent with the notice that he was chosen bishop only "after the persecution." No independent documentation of him survives from the fourth century itself.
- Not to be confused with Myron of Tamassos, the deacon and successor of Herakleides in Cyprus (September 17), nor with the hieromartyr Myron of Cyzicus, the presbyter of Achaia (August 17, just nine days later in the same month), martyred under Decius. The three Myrons are separate persons of separate centuries; only the Cretan bears the title the Wonderworker.