Photeine of Cyprus
Our Venerable Mother Photeine of Cyprus, the Wonderworker
Venerable · Virgin · Wonderworker
Commemorated 2 August — Commemoration of the ascetic of the cave at Agios Andronikos
Photeine — known throughout the Karpasia peninsula by the affectionate diminutive Agia Photou — was a village girl of Rizokarpaso in north-eastern Cyprus who left her home for a cave near the village of Agios Andronikos and spent the rest of her life there in fasting, prayer and silence. Her hermitage, reached by twenty-three stone steps cut down into the rock like an early Christian catacomb, has a spring of water at its floor which the faithful use for healing, and Photeine is invoked especially for diseases of the eyes — a patronage her name (phōs, light) made inevitable. Her relics were found between 1718 and 1732 with an inscription naming her a bride of Christ, and a portion is kept at the Monastery of Kykkos. Her dates are not transmitted.
Rizokarpaso
The Cypriot tradition makes Photeine a native of Rizokarpaso, the principal village of the long Karpasia peninsula that reaches north-east from Cyprus toward Syria — a region thick with hermitages and cave-churches, and one of the oldest continuously Christian landscapes in the Mediterranean. Her parents were poor and devout. She is described from childhood as unusually merciful, giving away what she had, tending the sick and the old of the village, and drawn to the church; at the village school she learned her letters in the ordinary Cypriot way of the time, by memorising the Psalter and the hymns of the Church, so that the services were the whole of her literacy and the whole of her learning.
The cave at Agios Andronikos
Reaching an age at which she would have been expected to marry, she left home instead and went out to the desert-places of the Karpasia. She settled in a cave near the village of Agios Andronikos, and there she remained for the rest of her life: in unbroken prayer, in strict abstinence, in the labour of patience, seeing no one, or seeing only those who found her out. Nothing of the shape of her ascetic day is recorded — no rule, no disciples, no correspondence. Cyprus has many such: hermits who left a cave, a spring and a name.
The cave survives and is visited. Twenty-three steps cut in the rock descend to a chamber that those who see it compare to the catacombs of the early Church; a spring of water rises at the bottom, and the faithful take it away for the healing of the sick, and above all for the eyes.
Wonderworking and the finding of the relics
She was already famous for healings in her lifetime, the tradition says: sight to the blind, health to the sick, and consolation to the afflicted. After her repose the cave became a place of pilgrimage, and the spring the instrument of most of the cures reported.
Her relics were uncovered in the period 1718–1732 — the tradition does not give a single date — and were identified by an inscription calling her the virgin, the bride of Christ. A portion of the relics is preserved at the great Monastery of Kykkos in the Troodos, which secured them and has maintained her commemoration; other portions remained in the Karpasia. Since 1974 the region has lain in the occupied north of the island, and access to the cave and to the local shrines has been intermittent, which has driven her veneration outward to Kykkos and to the Karpasiot diaspora.
Feast and commemoration
August 2 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 15), within the Dormition fast (August 1–14). Her commemoration is local to Cyprus — the Church of Cyprus and the Greek-speaking tradition that follows it — and is kept with especial solemnity in the Karpasia and at Kykkos, where her relics are. She does not appear on the Antiochian, Russian or universal Byzantine calendars for this day, on which the office belongs to the translation of the relics of the Protomartyr Stephen. Panegyris and the blessing of the water of her cave belong to her day where the shrine is accessible.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
Thou didst forsake thy father's house for a cleft in the rock, O venerable Photeine, and there, keeping vigil in the darkness, thou wast filled with the Light whose name thou bearest; wherefore the spring at thy feet gives healing, and the blind receive their sight. Entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Photeine is painted as a woman ascetic in the dark monastic mantle and veil, thin-faced, holding a cross in the right hand and often a scroll; in the Cypriot type she stands before the mouth of her cave, with the steps or the spring indicated below, and in some versions she holds or gestures toward a pair of eyes, or a votive plaque of eyes hangs beside her — the sign of her patronage and a usage familiar in Cypriot and Aegean shrines. Because she is a purely local saint, the images are Cypriot, chiefly modern, and mostly attached to the shrine and to Kykkos. No pre-1900 icon of her has been identified for this collection, and the modern Cypriot icons of her are in copyright and were not stored.
Disputed questions
- Her dates are unknown. No century is transmitted for her life. The finding of the relics in the early eighteenth century gives only a terminus ante quem, and the tradition offers nothing more; this entry therefore carries no century and indexes under unknown. Guesses in local literature range from the early Byzantine centuries to the period of Latin rule.
- Not to be confused with Photini the Samaritan Woman, the great-martyr of the well of Sychar, whose name Photeine shares and whose feast (February 26 and the movable Sunday of the Samaritan Woman) is quite distinct; nor with the several other Photeines of the calendar. The Cypriot saint is a local ascetic of the Karpasia and nothing in her account connects her to the Samaritan.
- The scale of the record. Everything above rests on Cypriot local tradition and on the shrine itself. There is no early written Life.