George of Mitylene
Our Father among the Saints George the Confessor, Bishop of Mitylene
Bishop · Confessor · d. c. 842, at Mitylene on Lesbos
Commemorated 16 May — Repose at Mitylene
George the Confessor was bishop of Mitylene on Lesbos in the last phase of the iconoclast struggle, holding the see in the years around 820–829 — that is, through the renewal of the persecution of the holy icons under Leo V the Armenian and Michael II — and suffering for the icons before dying in peace at Mitylene about 842, in the very year the images were restored. He is the second of three bishops of Mitylene named George whom the calendar honours, and the least well documented of them; his relics were still shown at Mitylene in the twelfth century, when the Russian abbot Daniel saw them on his pilgrimage to the East and wrote them down among the wonders of his journey.
Lesbos in the eighth and ninth centuries was a stronghold of the party of the icons and a place of exile for its confessors, and it gave the Church a succession of hierarchs of the same name: George I, bishop of Mitylene, a confessor under the first iconoclasm; George the subject of this entry; and a third George after him. The transmitted record does not keep them cleanly apart (see Disputed questions).
Of this George the synaxaria say that he held the see of Mitylene in the years 820–829, under the emperors Leo V and Michael II — the second iconoclasm, renewed in 815, in which the confessors of the icons were deposed, imprisoned and driven into exile. He is styled Confessor (ὁμολογητής) for what he endured in that cause: deprivation of his see and banishment, as the office of a hierarch-confessor implies, without the crown of martyrdom. He returned, and reposed at Mitylene about the year 842 — the year in which Theophilus died and the restoration of the icons under the empress Theodora and the patriarch Methodius became possible.
His relics remained on Lesbos and were held in honour there. The clearest later notice of them is not Greek but Russian: Daniel, an abbot of the Chernigov country, who made the pilgrimage to Constantinople and the Holy Land early in the twelfth century and left the oldest Russian travel account of the East, records that he was shown the relics of St George, bishop of Mitylene, in the island. It is a small notice, but it is evidence of a continuous local cult four centuries after his death.
Feast and commemoration
May 16 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 29). The commemoration is carried by the Greek synaxaria and by the OCA calendar; there is no proper office, and the service is taken from the common of a hierarch. He is honoured locally on Lesbos, which keeps a large company of its own saints, among them the confessors of the second iconoclasm.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to thy gentleness: take not away thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of thy hierarch George direct our life in peace.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
George is painted as a bishop of the middle Byzantine period: in the phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left, with a short or middling grey beard; as a confessor for the icons he is sometimes given a small icon or a scroll to hold, the sign by which the iconophile confessors are distinguished in later painting. On Lesbos he appears in the composite icons of the saints of the island. No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection, and the difficulty of telling him from the other two bishops of Mitylene named George would in any case make identification of an uninscribed image unsafe.
Disputed questions
- Which George. Mitylene had at least three holy bishops of this name in the iconoclast period, and the synaxaria assign them among April 7 (George, bishop of Mitylene, with his brothers Symeon and David of Lesbos in some reckonings), February 7, and May 16. Their acts are thin and partly interchangeable, and modern hagiography does not agree on which feast belongs to which man. This entry follows the calendars that place the Confessor of 820–829, †c. 842, at May 16, and records the uncertainty rather than resolving it.
- The dates. "Served 820–829" and "died 842" come to us through the synaxarial tradition as transmitted by the modern jurisdictional calendars; there is no independent documentary confirmation. The thirteen-year gap between the end of his episcopate and his death is usually taken to be the period of his deposition and exile, which would be the ground of the title Confessor, but the sources do not say so in as many words.
- Not to be confused with George of Amastris (February 21), the wonderworking bishop of Paphlagonia, nor with the great martyr George, nor with George the New of Sofia.