medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Thursday, April 22, 2010, at 1:04 pm, I wrote:
> 6) Theodore the Sykeote (d. 613). We know about T. from his
> impressive Bios by his disciple George Eleusius (BHG 1748). He was
> born out of wedlock to a prostitute in the town of Sykeon near
> Anastasiopolis in Galatia (the latter is now Beypazarı in Turkey's
> Ankara province), was given good schooling, and at the age of ten
> began to eat sparingly in imitation of an ascetic cook in his mother's
> household (which latter in the interim had become a legitimate
> hostel). At about the age of twelve he survived an epidemic of
> bubonic plague and at the age of fourteen he became a hermit, living
> increasingly close to starvation in a cave he had dug for himself
> under the altar of a local oratory dedicated to St. John the Baptist.
> By the age of eighteen T. was a priest, ordained uncanonically by the
> bishop of Anastasiopolis in response to his evident holiness and out
> of a desire that he not further endanger his health through excessive
> privation.
>
> After establishing a new residence at an oratory dedicated to his
> lifelong patron, the megalomartyr George, T. soon said goodbye to his
> family and began a period of itinerant preaching that led him to
> Palestine. After making his monastic profession there in the lavra of
> Chuziba he returned to his oratory at Sykeon, this time living as a
> hermit monk and attracting disciples. T. developed a reputation as a
> thaumaturge and in time was chosen to be bishop of Anastasiopolis,
> where he operated further miracles, mostly of the healing variety, as
> he also did at Constantinople during two trips there. An encomium of
> T. by Nicephorus the Scevophylax (BHG 1749) relates how shortly after
> his death his relics were removed to Constantinople on the order of
> the emperor Heraclius.
>
> An eleventh-century judge (krites of the velon) of one of the
> Anatolian themes (Armeniakon) named Theodore Spanopoulos had this T.
> and not the military homonym as his patron. See this transcription
> and translation of his seal:
> http://tinyurl.com/3z24kh
T. (at far left) in the April calendar in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335-1350) in the church of the Pantocrator at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of recent events, the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's Kosovo province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/24mqaez
(The others, from left to right, are Sts. Sabas the General, Mark the Evangelist, and Basil of Amasea).
Best again,
John Dillon
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