Theophanes the Branded

Saint Theophanes
the Branded (Graptus)
Born	775 Palestine, Bilad al-Sham (Abbasid Caliphate)
Died	845 Nicaea
Venerated in	Eastern Orthodox Church
Feast	October 11
Attributes	Hymnographer

Theophanes the Branded also called Theophanes Graptus or Theophanes of Nicaea (775 - 845) was a Byzantine monk and hymnographer.

Next to Joseph the Hymnographer, Theophanes is the major contributor to the Orthodox liturgical book called the Parakletike.

His Vita prima was recorded in the Life of Michael the Synkellos. Theophanes and his brother Theodore were born in Palestine near the end of the eighth century, sons of the Venerable Jonah the Presbyter. Both grew up in Jerusalem, entered the Monastery of Mar Sabba near Bethlehem together, and became disciples of St. Michael the Synkellos. In 813 Michael and his two disciples left Jerusalem originally on a journey to Rome. They had been sent by the Patriarch of Jerusalem to support the Pope in his stand against the Franks over the question of the filioque, which some Benedictines from the West had recently introduced to Jerusalem.

In the course of their journey, they landed in Constantinople. Known for their support of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which had condemned Iconoclasm as a heresy, they were detained, interrogated, beaten and imprisoned by order of the Emperor Leo V (the Armenian) in 815. During the whole of the second iconoclast period—nearly thirty years—they suffered at various times exile, imprisonment and torture. The Emperor Theophilus beat them with his own hand and ordered that they be branded on their faces with twelve lines of ‘badly composed’— the emperor’s own words —, if metrically correct, quantitative iambic verses. The ordeal took two days.

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