The life of St Nicetas the Confessor
He grew up under her care and first sought guidance from a hermit named Stephanos before going on to the monastery of Medikion, near Triglia on the Sea of Marmara, where the abbot Nicephorus formed him further in the ascetic life; after seven years there Niketas was ordained priest, and when Nicephorus's own health began to fail, he entrusted the community's governance to his younger disciple. Under the emperor Leo the Armenian, the persecution of those who venerated icons intensified, and Niketas was imprisoned along with other abbots for holding to the older practice. At one low point he accepted communion from a bishop installed by the iconoclast party, a compromise he came to regret once he saw the persecution continuing unabated; he returned to Constantinople and spoke out against the heresy without concealment, for which he was imprisoned for six years, until Leo's death in 820 finally ended the worst of the persecution. He reposed in 824, under the following emperor Michael, remembered less for that one moment of compromise than for the six years of imprisonment that followed his repentance of it. This Niketas, abbot of Medikion, is a distinct person from the later Saint Niketas the Confessor, Bishop of Chalcedon, a confessor of the same general era kept on a different day.
