Righteous Theodore Graptos (the Branded), Confessor

Saint Theodore Graptos (Theodore the Branded), a confessor, was born in the second half of the 8th century in Jerusalem to the pious priest Jonah. Together with his younger brother Theophanes — later Bishop of Nicaea and a renowned hymnographer — he was educated at the Lavra of Saint Sabas, where he was tonsured a monk and ordained a priest. At the direction of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the brothers went to Constantinople to defend the veneration of icons during the reign of the iconoclast emperor Leo V. For more than twenty years, under three successive iconoclast emperors, they endured imprisonment, exile, and torture for their unwavering confession of Orthodoxy. Under the fiercest of these persecutors, Emperor Theophilos (829–842), the brothers suffered their cruelest punishment: twelve mocking verses were branded into their foreheads with hot needles, giving rise to their epithet "Graptoi" ("the Inscribed"). Theodore died in captivity in the city of Apamea around 840, not living to see the restoration of icon veneration in 843. His brother Theophanes survived and later became Bishop of Nicaea.