medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
We know about Eutychius chiefly from his Bios by his student the priest Eustratius (BHG 657 [the form printed in the _Patrologia Graeca_] and 657b [with Miracles]). A Phrygian from a well-placed military family, he was educated at Constantinople, became a monk, and rose at Amasea in Pontus to be supervisor of all its monks. In 552 Eutychius succeeded St. Menas as patriarch of Constantinople and in 553 he presided at the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Second Council of Constantinople). Doctrinal disagreements and, it is said, his father's connection with Belisarius led to a falling out with the latter's intermittent backer the emperor Justinian I. In January 565 Justinian had Eutychius deposed and exiled internally (first to one of the islands in the Propontis; later, back to Amasea). Justin II restored Eutychius in 577 upon the death of the incumbent appointed by Justinian, St. John Scholasticus.
Eutychius died in 582. Today is his feast day in the Synaxary of Constantinople and in the latter's modern descendants in Byzantine-rite churches. It is also his day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.
Some period-pertinent images of St. Eutychius of Constantinople:
a) as depicted (at left; at right, St. Paul of Constantinople) by Eutychios and Michael Astrapas in their late thirteenth-century frescoes (ca. 1295) in the church of the Peribleptos (now Sv. Kliment Ohridski) in Ohrid:
http://tinyurl.com/3hxksap
b) as depicted (in the panel at lower left) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 34v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/34v.jpg
c) as depicted (second from left; in an image of the Fifth Ecumenical Council) in the earlier fourteenth-century (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the narthex of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/zk4tutr
Detail view:
http://tinyurl.com/h39ebpe
d) as probably depicted (upper register, second from left; in an image of the Fifth Ecumenical Council) by Dionisy and sons in their early sixteenth-century frescoes (1502) in the Virgin Nativity cathedral of the St. Ferapont Belozero (Ferapontov Belozersky) monastery at Ferapontovo in Russia's Vologda oblast:
http://www.dionisy.com/eng/museum/124/349/index.shtml
Best,
John Dillon
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