Saint Methodius, Patriarch of Constantinople

Methodius came from Syracuse in Sicily and became a monk young. As an envoy of Patriarch Nicephorus he was in Rome when Leo V restored Iconoclasm, and stayed there. On his return he was flogged and, under the emperor Theophilus, shut up with two robbers in a dark tomb on an island, where a fisherman brought him barely enough food. The branded confessors Theodore and Theophanes, passing on their way to exile, exchanged greetings with him by letter: «to one buried before death», from «those with written faces».

Freed after Theophilus died in 842, Methodius was made patriarch by the empress Theodora. In 843 he restored the veneration of icons, the event the Church keeps as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. He died in 847.