ABSTRACT
Cyril’s long episcopate was a period of perhaps unique liturgical creativity, due to historical circumstances as well as his own inventiveness. He must have been born within a few years of the Church’s emergence from the shadows of persecution; as a boy he shared in the excitement of the discovery of Christ’s cross and his tomb, and he was ordained priest in Constantine’s great basilica a very few years after its dedication in 335. By the end of his episcopate in 387 a colourful and moving liturgy had developed in Jerusalem; and, although we have no way of discovering precisely how much of the credit for it belongs to him, his sermons show that he knew how to exploit to the full the liturgical possibilities of the most sacred site in Christendom.1
