St. Emilian the Confessor, Bishop of Cyzicus

Emilian was bishop of Cyzicus on the Sea of Marmara in the early ninth century, in the years following the Seventh Ecumenical Council that had restored the holy icons. He was one of the bishops summoned to Constantinople in 815 by the new Emperor Leo V the Armenian, who had decided to revive the iconoclast policy of his predecessors and demanded that the assembled hierarchy sign a document repudiating the veneration of icons.

Emilian, with the Patriarch Nicephorus and the other iconodule bishops, refused. He was deposed from his see, exiled from Cyzicus, and passed from prison to prison through Asia Minor in the years that followed — under Leo V, Michael II, and finally Theophilus. He bore the privations of these exiles with the same firmness as the better-known confessors of the period (Nicephorus, Theodore the Studite, Michael of Synnada), refusing every offer of restoration that came at the cost of his confession.

He died in exile, by some accounts around 820, before the restoration of the icons under Theodora in 843. The Church honors him among the great line of ninth-century confessors. His feast falls on August 8.