Saint Judas Cyriacus

Judas Cyriacus (Cyriacus of Ancona, Cyriacus of Jerusalem, Quiriacus, Quiricus, Kyriakos); Spanish: Quirico, Italian: Ciriaco), d. ca. AD 360, is the patron saint of Ancona, Italy. His feast day is celebrated in the Catholic Church on 4 May. Judas Cyriacus was the bishop of Ancona who was killed during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. His feast is celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox Church on 14 April. (Judas Cyriacus of Ancona is often confused with the legendary Bishop Judah Kyriakos of Jerusalem (Saint Cyriacus of Jerusalem), who was killed during a disturbance there, in 133 AD. The 2nd century Bishop Judah Kyriakos of Jerusalem is said to the last in the desposynic line for that post, some of his predecessors being descendants from the family of Jesus.) The local tradition of Ancona has identified this saint with the Jew named Judas Quiriacus or Kyriakos. According to legend, a Jew Judas Kyriakos aided the Empress Helena in finding the True Cross, which had been buried at Golgotha after the crucifixion. The oldest extant Syriac text of the legend of the discovery of the True Cross by Judas Kyriakos dates from c. 500 AD. Its recent editor and translator says that the manuscript is "of great value for the history of the legend of the inventio crucis". Sozomen (died c. 450 AD), in his Ecclesiastical History states that it was said (by whom he does not say) that the location of the Holy Sepulchre was "disclosed by a Hebrew who dwelt in the East, and who derived his information from some documents which had come to him by paternal inheritance" (although Sozomen himself disputes this account) and that a dead person was also revived by the touch of the Cross. Later, popular versions of this story state that a Jew who assisted Helena was named Jude or Judas, but later converted to Christianity and took the name Kyriakos (kyriakos means "lordly" or "lord-like" in Greek).