Ayios Phokas, Ayios Iakovos, Kition and AmathusAlfred Westholm

Prayer.O, Holy Phocas, you Grey-beard, who have been allowed to witness the suffering of the Most High and Christ's disappointment with the world, how can you have the heart to see our distress without coming to our aid! Our gloomy hopelessness is unjust and unnecessary, our reverses drive us to bitter and blasphemous defiance. O, help us in our distress, you who know all the most hidden secrets of your holy field! Show us a place where archaic statues, finer than all others in Cyprus, lie packed close together, like bundled wax candles in your Holy church, and your praise shall then quickly go out over all the world! What - could you perhaps no longer have any power, has your holy testimony perhaps been found false, so that God, now angered, turns away from you, when you speak? Do you not understand, foolish Saint, that we wish also your best at the same time as our own, that we here wish to gather strangers from all the lands of the earth to marvel at the glory of your field already in the time of the ancients. Monetary offerings and forests of burning wax candles they shall daily bring to your altar … continues