Alexander of Cyprus or Alexander Cyprius, perhaps also known as Alexander the Monk or Alexander Monachus, was apparently a 6th-century Cypriot

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

 monk active in the cloister near the sanctuary of St. Barnabas in Salaminia

Salaminia

The Salaminia was the messenger trireme of the Athenian navy during the late 5th century BC. It played a notable role in several episodes of the Peloponnesian War...

 or Constantina

Constantina

Constantina , and later known as Saint Constance, was the eldest daughter of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great and his second wife Fausta, daughter of Emperor Maximian...

. He also had as one of his aims the authentication of the ecclesiastical independence of Cyprus.

Date and Work

Alexander seems to have lived any time between the mid-6th century and the 9th century. The Byzantinist Alexander Kazhdan

Alexander Kazhdan

- Soviet :Born in Moscow, Kazhdan was educated at the Pedagogical Institute of Ufa and the University of Moscow, where he studied with the historian of medieval England, Evgenii Kosminskii...

 roundly argued that the traditional view of placing him in the mid-6th century was not necessarily valid . Cyril Mango

Cyril Mango

Cyril Alexander Mango is a British scholar in the history, art, and architecture of the Byzantine Empire. He is a former King's College London and Oxford professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature. He is the brother of Andrew Mango.One of his major works The Mosaics of St...

 and John W. Nesbitt maintain that he was a 6th-century author, according to his literary interests.
He composed a treatise called "on the finding of the cross" (de inventatione sanctae crucis), covering the history of Christianity from the emperor Tiberius to the discovery of the cross by Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. There is also a Georgian version of this work.

Identification

Nothing is known about the life of Alexander. Some scholars identify him with Alexander the Monk, the author of an enkomion of the apostle Barnabas

Barnabas

Barnabas , born Joseph, was an Early Christian, one of the earliest Christian disciples in Jerusalem. In terms of culture and background, he was a Hellenised Jew, specifically a Levite. Named an apostle in , he and Saint Paul undertook missionary journeys together and defended Gentile converts...

: but Kazhdan views this identification as arbitrary.