St Andrew, brother of Simon-Peter, was a fisherman and a follower of John the Baptist who was called by Jesus to be one of the 12 Apostles.

As St. Andrews Church, Kyrenia, is located just above the harbour of Kyrenia, the principle original reason for the town's existence, it is particularly appropriate that we should have a fisherman as our patronal saint.

As one of the first two disciples of Jesus (John Ch I, v 35-40) he immediately went off and did missionary work, bringing his brother to Jesus. Because of this, the festival of St Andrew on November 30th has, from early days, been associated with prayers for missionaries and Churches overseas; another reason why we, as part of the world wide Anglican Communion yet with most of our congregation not native Cypriots, should have him as our patronal saint.

Legend also associates St Andrew with Cyprus. It is said that on a visit to the island St Andrew summoned up a spring with miraculous powers. The monastery of Apóstolos Andhréas was built above the spot on the Karpaz Peninsular, Cyprus' "panhandle".

Tradition maintains that St Andrew continued his missionary work in later years, carrying the Gospel to Scythia, the area north of the Black Sea, between the Carpathian Mountains and the Don River, in what is now Moldova, Ukraine, eastern Russia and the mountains of Turkistan. However, the story of St. Andrew is a complex one, with different versions and it is now impossible to know what is the "true" story. Another tradition has it that after Christ's crucifixion, St Andrew went to Greece to preach Christianity, where he was crucified for his beliefs at a place called Patras, on a cross in the form of an X. However, the X-shaped cross played little part in early legends of St. Andrew and indeed in early versions of the tale, Andrew was nailed to an olive tree, not a cross. Whatever the case, by the middle ages, in iconography, the X-shaped cross had become indelibly associated with St Andrew.

St Andrew is best known to British people as the patron saint of Scotland, the association being marked in the Scottish flag, the Saint Andrew's Cross or saltire. One legend says that a man who later became St. Regulus (or Rule) carried the bones of St. Andrew to Scotland. His ship was wrecked on the Fife coast, and the spot at which the ship landed became the site of the town of St Andrews. A cathedral was built there which was started in 1160 and took 158 years to build (the ruins can still be seen today) and the town became an important site of Christian pilgrimage.

Another legend has it that two monks from the North of England went to Rome and brought back the relics of St. Andrew. One of the monks passed the relics on to the Scottish king, Angus McFergus, who became king in 731. St Andrew's relics disappeared during the Reformation of the Scottish churches, when the Protestant Church came into being and broke away from the Roman Catholic church. Now there are few relics of St Andrew in Scotland. A fragment is in St. Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh.

Other countries have St. Andrew as their patron saint, among them Romania, Greece and Russia.