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| St. Niketas the Confessor (Feast Day - March 20) |
Verses
On behalf of Your image Niketas bore suffering,
Now he sees Your face O Christ in the heavens.
Our Holy and God-bearing Father and Confessor Nikitas lived during the time of iconoclasm, and he was made Bishop of Apolloniada, a city of Bithynia, which is also called Apollonia, and was once under the Metropolitan of Nicomedia. Not only was he faithful, pious and most Orthodox, but also merciful and compassionate, and very learned in his studies of Scripture, more so in his words and speech.
Because he was urged by the iconoclasts to not venerate the all-revered icon of our Lord Jesus Christ, and His all-immaculate Mother, and the sacred and divine Angels and all the Saints, and was not persuaded by them, for this reason he was exiled, and the renowned one was tried by unbearable temptations, the difficulties of which brought him to sickness, and he delivered his soul into the hands of God, receiving from Him the unfading crown of confession.