St. Nicetas the Confessor, Bishop of Chalcedon

Nicetas was born in the late eighth century in Bithynia, took monastic vows in one of the great monasteries of the region, and was eventually elected bishop of Chalcedon — the city on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus across from Constantinople, the site of the Fourth Ecumenical Council in 451. He served as bishop in the brief restoration of the holy icons that followed the Seventh Council of 787, and his episcopate stretched into the second iconoclast period that began under Leo V in 815.

Like Michael of Synnada and the other iconodule bishops, Nicetas refused to subscribe to the new iconoclast edicts. He was deposed, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled — sent from monastery to monastery and from one barren place to another to break his resolve. He endured these miseries for many years without recanting. The synaxarion records that during one such exile he was permitted to live in a small cell with only the necessities, and that the local people came to him secretly for spiritual counsel even under the watch of the imperial guards.

He died in exile around the year 838, a few years before the restoration of the icons under the Empress Theodora in 843. The Church honors him among the great line of ninth-century confessors. His feast is kept on May 28.