Nicaea Icon of the Mother of God

Kept 28 May — Commemoration of the icon and of the sacrilege punished at Nicaea

The Nicaea Icon is commemorated on May 28 for a single incident: in the year 304, while the city of Nicaea in Bithynia was under siege, a soldier named Constantine found an icon of the Mother of God, threw a stone at it and then trampled it underfoot; that night the Theotokos appeared to him in a dream and told him that the insult he had offered her would cost him his life, and the next day, in the fighting, he was struck in the head by a stone and killed. The tradition adds that the fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, meeting at Nicaea in 325, remembered the event and appointed that a particular hymn — "Thy womb has become a holy table, holding the heavenly Bread…" — should be sung before the icon. The commemoration is a Russian one, kept in the Slavonic icon-calendars and in the OCA; the icon itself is described as close in type to the "Inexhaustible Chalice."

The city and the year

Nicaea (Νίκαια, modern İznik) was the chief city of Bithynia, thirty miles from the imperial road to Constantinople, and by the end of the third century it had a substantial Christian community. The year given for the incident, 304, falls in the fiercest phase of the persecution of Diocletian, and the notice sets the story in a siege — the walls of Nicaea, still standing today, were among the strongest in Asia Minor. The tradition does not say who was besieging the city, and the historical record for a siege of Nicaea in 304 is silent; what the account preserves is the memory of a Christian icon publicly available in a Bithynian city in the last age of the persecutions, and of the reaction it provoked.

The sacrilege of the soldier Constantine

A soldier named Constantine — the name is the tradition's, and the coincidence with the emperor who would convoke the Council of Nicaea twenty-one years later is not lost on the Slavonic notices — came upon the icon of the Theotokos. He cast a stone at it, and then trod upon it: the two acts are always given in that order, and together they constitute not an accident but a deliberate contempt.

The same night the Mother of God appeared to him in his sleep, and said that he had insulted her grievously and that his death would follow. In the fighting of the following day he was hit in the head by a stone — the very instrument of his sacrilege — and died on the spot. The moral shape of the story is exact and is the reason it was remembered: the stone returns.

The hymn and the Council

The tradition then makes a large claim. It says that the fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, assembled at Nicaea in 325, took notice of what had happened in their city and ordained that a hymn should be sung before the icon:

Thy womb has become a holy table, holding the heavenly Bread, Christ; of which whoever eats does not die, as the Nourisher of all has said, O Theotokos.

The hymn is a genuine and beautiful theotokion, and it does stand in the Byzantine service books — as Ode 5 of the second canon of Mid-Pentecost, in Tone 8, ascribed to St Andrew of Crete (c. 660–740). In some Orthodox prayer books it also appears among the prayers after the evening meal, where its eucharistic sense ("whoever eats of it does not die," from the Lord's discourse at Capernaum, John 6:50–51) is directly to the point. But Andrew of Crete lived more than three centuries after the Council of Nicaea, and the Council can therefore not have appointed his hymn. The tradition preserves an authentic liturgical association — this text is the text sung before the Nicaea icon — and has clothed it, as such traditions do, in the authority of the Council that met in the same city.

Feast and commemoration

May 28 (church date; New Calendar civil May 28, Old Calendar civil June 10), always within the Pentecostarion. The commemoration is Russian and is carried in the Slavonic icon-calendars and by the OCA; it is not in Greek or Antiochian usage. In the Russian day-lists for May 28 / June 10 it stands with the Galich (Chukhloma) "Tenderness" icon and the icon called "the Unbreakable Wall." There is no proper akolouthia; the icon is served from the common of an icon of the Theotokos, with the theotokion of Mid-Pentecost sung before it. The date has no evident connection with the events narrated, and no tradition of a translation or a manifestation is attached to it.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 4 (common of an icon of the Theotokos)

O Lady, we thy servants have thine icon as a rampart and a shield, and by it we are delivered from every affliction; for thou dost swiftly avenge the honour of thy image and swiftly hear those who honour it. Wherefore we cry to thee: O Mother of God, save thy people.

Original translation from the Slavonic

Theotokion

Thy womb has become a holy table, holding the heavenly Bread, Christ; of which whoever eats does not die, as the Nourisher of all has said, O Theotokos.

Original translation from the Greek

Appointed readings

Epistle — Philippians 2:5–11

⁵Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: ⁶Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: ⁷But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: ⁸And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. ⁹Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: ¹⁰That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; ¹¹And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Gospel — Luke 10:38–42; 11:27–28

³⁸Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. ³⁹And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word. ⁴⁰But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. ⁴¹And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: ⁴²But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. ²⁷And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. ²⁸But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.

Iconography

The Nicaea icon is described in the Russian sources as showing the Mother of God with the Christ-child in a eucharistic setting, close to the type of the "Inexhaustible Chalice": the Theotokos with her hands raised in the orant gesture and the Child standing before her breast within a chalice, so that the image says visually what the hymn sung before it says in words — that her womb became the holy table which held the heavenly Bread. Some reproductions instead show the Theotokos enthroned with the Child on her knee and a chalice or paten before them. Where the story is illustrated rather than the icon reproduced, the subject is the soldier struck down before the walls with the icon standing unharmed above him.

No image has been stored for this feast. Wikimedia Commons returns no results at all for the Nicaea icon under the Russian name (Никейская икона Божией Матери) or any English form of it, and the Menologion of Basil II — the usual first resort for pre-modern illustration — covers only September to February and so contains no May material. Care is needed here: images of the "Inexhaustible Chalice" must not be borrowed for this commemoration, since that type is documented only from 1878 and is a separate feast (May 5), and neither must images of the Iveron icon, whose Nicaean story is a different one.

Disputed questions

The hymn cannot be conciliar. The theotokion is by Andrew of Crete, whose life falls in the late seventh and early eighth centuries; the attribution of its appointment to the fathers of 325 is a pious anachronism and is recorded here as such. The hymn's use before this icon is real.
The siege of 304 is unattested. No siege of Nicaea in that year is known to history. Either the incident belongs to some local disturbance of the persecution years, or the date is a later approximation supplied to fix a floating story.
What kind of icon? The notices describe the Nicaea icon as very similar in appearance to the "Inexhaustible Chalice" (May 5), that is, to the type in which the Mother of God stands with hands raised in prayer and the Christ-child appears before her in a chalice — an image whose whole content is eucharistic, and which therefore matches the hymn sung before it. The "Inexhaustible Chalice" type, however, is documented only from 1878, more than fifteen hundred years later, so the resemblance runs the other way: what the Russian tradition possessed by the nineteenth century was an icon of the Nicaea commemoration painted in a eucharistic manner, and it is that image, not a fourth-century panel, which the description fits.
A different Nicaea, a different icon. The story of the Nicaea icon should not be confused with the celebrated tradition attached to the Iveron Icon, which also begins at Nicaea — the widow whose icon was struck by an iconoclast soldier's spear and bled, and which she committed to the sea. Both are Nicaean, both involve a soldier's violence against an image of the Theotokos, and both end in the vindication of the icon; but the Iveron story belongs to the ninth-century iconoclasm and ends on Mount Athos, while this one belongs to the age of Diocletian and ends with the soldier's death. They are distinct commemorations and distinct images.
The name "Constantine." That the offender bears the name of the emperor who summoned the Council of Nicaea is either coincidence or, more probably, part of the story's rhetorical construction; no source treats the two as related.