Nikephoros the Confessor was Patriarch of Constantinople from 806 until his deposition in 815, and one of the foremost defenders of the veneration of icons during the second period of Byzantine iconoclasm. Born in Constantinople around 758 into a strictly Orthodox family that had already suffered for the icons — his father, a secretary of the iconoclast emperor Constantine V, was scourged and banished for upholding their veneration — he served at the imperial court before withdrawing to the monastic life. He is commemorated on June 2, with the translation of his relics kept on March 13.
Trained as an imperial secretary, Nikephoros took part in the Second Council of Nicaea (the Seventh Ecumenical Council) of 787, which restored the icons, attending as an imperial commissioner. He afterward retired to monasteries he had founded along the Thracian Bosphorus, devoting himself to ascetic practice and study, and around 802 was placed in charge of one of the capital's largest charitable hospices for the poor. Though still a layman, he was chosen patriarch and consecrated at Easter, on 12 April 806.
His elevation was controversial: the strict monastic party associated with the Stoudios monastery objected to the rapid ordination of a layman, and the friction deepened over his reinstatement, at the emperor's wish, of a priest who had been excommunicated — the dispute remembered as the Moechian controversy. These tensions notwithstanding, Nikephoros is honored above all for his steadfastness when iconoclasm was revived under the emperor Leo V the Armenian. Refusing to abandon the icons, he was forced from his see in 815 and sent into exile.
Nikephoros spent the rest of his life in exile near the Bosphorus, where he composed several treatises in defense of the holy images. He died in 828 at a monastery he had founded. In 846 his relics were brought back to Constantinople with great ceremony; according to the synaxarion they rested for a day in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia before being enshrined in the Church of the Holy Apostles — the event commemorated each year on March 13.
