Venerable Pyrrhus (Piros) of Breti

NAME CORRECTION: the variant "Piruz" is unsupported by any authoritative source and appears to be a mistaken conflation with the Persian royal name Peroz/Piruz; the correct form is "Pyrrhus" (in some transliterations "Piros"), retained here as the primary form.

DATE ADDED: previously no date was recorded — filled in as May 7/20, the shared feast of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers.

Venerable Pyrrhus of Breti was one of the Thirteen Syrian (Assyrian) Fathers who came to Georgia in the mid-6th century under the leadership of St. John of Zedazeni to establish and spread monastic life and combat remnants of paganism and Monophysitism. With his teacher's blessing, each of the Thirteen Fathers withdrew to a separate region of Georgia for ascetic labor and monastery-founding.

Pyrrhus chose the village of Breti in the Shida Kartli region, near the city of Gori, where he founded a monastery dedicated to the Great Martyr George, which became one of the centers of Georgian monasticism. No individual details of his birth or death survive, typical for most of the Thirteen Fathers — only their shared collective feast day is firmly attested.