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In Honor of My Barber

My barber for two full decades now is a good man, a Greek-American named Kiriakos. He has easily cut my weight in my hair, and he has cut it as well as anyone could cut such a Mediterranean mop. I would be remiss if I skipped out on his name day, just because of overwhelming deadlines.

The name is Latinized as Cyriacus, and today’s saint was indeed a Latin. In fact, he was a Roman nobleman who converted to Christianity in adulthood, giving all his wealth to the poor. He lived during the reign of Diocletian, which (as we have seen ) was a dangerous time for Christians. Yet rumors abounded that the emperor’s own wife and daughter were themselves closet Christians. Legend has it that it was Cyriacus who converted them, first by exorcising a demon from the young girl, Artemisia. (The mother, Serena, is venerated as a saint in some places.)

A deacon of the Roman Church, Cyriacus spent much of his time ministering to the Christian slaves who labored to build and run the baths of Diocletian. It’s for that work that he’s best known. In devotion he is “St. Cyriacus of the Baths.”

He himself was washed clean in the blood of martyrdom. In 303, in the persecution of Maximian, he was tortured and killed with St. Largus, St. Smaragdus, and twenty companions whose names are lost. Cyriacus’s beating heart was ripped from his chest before he was beheaded.

Check out his graduation photo here.