The life of St Theophylactus of Nicomedia
Patriarch Tarasius consecrated the two as bishops in the same period, sending Michael to Synnada and Theophylactus to Nicomedia, where he spent years building hospices and churches, giving alms freely, and caring personally for the sick, including those with leprosy whose wounds he is remembered as having washed with his own hands. That settled life ended when Leo the Armenian took the throne in 813 and revived the ban on icons that the Council of Nicaea had lifted a generation before. Meeting with the emperor directly, Theophylactus warned him plainly that great ruin awaited him and that no one would be able to save him from it. For that warning he was stripped of his see and exiled to the remote fortress of Strobilos, where he lived out thirty hard years, dying there around 845, not long before the veneration of icons was finally restored under the regency of Theodora. Two years after his death, in 847, his relics were carried back to Nicomedia and returned to the people he had once served.
