The life of St Polychronius
With this money Polychronius built a church.
He was serving as a reader at the time of the Council of Nicaea in the year 325, and showed such zeal in defending Orthodoxy against the Arian heresy that he was soon ordained to the priesthood. Some years later the Arians, still resentful of his opposition, fell upon him while he stood serving the Divine Liturgy at the altar and cut him down with the sword, mingling his blood with the offering he had just consecrated. A later Cypriot tradition, stemming from the writings of Saint Neophytos the Recluse, mistakenly named him a bishop of Cyprus and confused him with a different Polychronius, a bishop of Babylon martyred generations earlier under a Roman persecution. The two are distinct men: this Polychronius was a priest of Constantinople and never a bishop, and it is through that later confusion, rather than through any office he held, that his memory came to be honored on Cyprus.
