medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Marana and Cyra of Berea (d. ca. 455?). We know about Marana and Cyra from chapter 29 of the _Historia religiosa_ of fifth-century ecclesiastical historian Theodoret of Cyr(rh)us. They were holy women of Berea in Syria (today's Aleppo / Halab) who acquired a small house outside of town and immured themselves in it, living a life of extreme asceticism and self-mortification. They received food and wake-up calls from devoted maidservants for whom they erected a smaller, attached house and with whom they conversed through a communicating window. Theodoret's portrait of these hermits presents them as still living at the time of his writing (early 440s).
Bl. Cesare Baronio entered Marana and Cyra in the Roman Martyrology under 3. August. In its revision of 2001 the RM moved them to 28. February, which is where they appear in the Synaxary of Constantinople (theirs is the ninth feast listed under this date).
Some medieval images of Marana and Cyra:
a) Marana and Cyra as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Cittą del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 429):
http://tinyurl.com/k7vokc4
b) Marana and Cyra as depicted (lower register, panel at lower right) in an earlier fourteenth-century set of miniatures from Thessaloniki for the Great Feasts (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 28v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/28v.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
(matter from an older post revised)
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