St. Neophytos the Recluse

A farmer’s son from Lefkara in Cyprus who ran from an arranged marriage to the monastery, learned to read there as a young man, and went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land but found no place there for the hermit’s life. In 1159 he cut a cell for himself into a cliff above Paphos, the Enkleistra, had it painted, and lived in it for sixty years, while a monastery grew below him. He wrote a rule, homilies and commentaries, and a bitter account of the calamities of Cyprus when Richard the Lionheart took the island in 1191 and sold it to the Templars and then to the Lusignans: the first voice of Cypriot Orthodoxy under Latin rule, which lasted nearly four hundred years. His cell and its frescoes survive. Feast: January 24.