medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
We know about Marana and Cyra (or Cirra) from chapter 29 of the _Historia religiosa_ of Theodoret of Cyr(r)hus. They were holy women of Beroea 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 Marana conversed through a communicating window (Cyra was never heard to speak). From Beroea Marana and Cyra undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and another to the tomb of St. Thecla in Isaurian Seleucia (today's Silifke in Turkey), going entirely without eating while en route and breaking their fast only when they had reached their destinations. Thus far Theodoret, whose portrait of these hermits presents them as still living at the time of his writing (early 440s).
Some period-pertinent images of Sts. Marana and Cyra:
a) as depicted in the later 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/zbu92ql
A closer view:
http://tinyurl.com/hu5a6qn
b) as depicted (lower register in panel at lower right) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (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
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