St. Methodius the Confessor

A monk from Syracuse in Sicily who carried a letter from the Pope defending the icons to the iconoclast emperor Michael II, and was flogged and shut for years in a tomb on an island with two thieves. Freed, he went on defending the icons. In 843, after the death of the last iconoclast emperor, the Empress Theodora had him made Patriarch, and on the first Sunday of Lent that year they carried the icons back into Hagia Sophia: the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which the Church keeps on that Sunday every year and for which the Synodikon was drawn up. He died in 847. Feast: June 14.