George

Saint George the Hierarch was bishop of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos and was born in the year 763. Together with his brothers, Saint David the monk and Saint Symeon the Stylite, he is commemorated on 1 February (new style, the calendar of the Church of Greece). Their parents, Adrian and Constantina, had seven children, of whom five became monastics.

David, the eldest, born in 717 or 718, left at the age of sixteen for Mount Ida in Asia Minor, lived for thirty years in a cave, was ordained deacon and priest, and founded a monastery there. Symeon, the youngest, born in 765 or 766, came to David as a child, learned his letters in the monastery, and became a monk and priest. After David's repose, Symeon returned to Mytilene and climbed a pillar, after the example of Saint Symeon the Stylite. George also came to Mytilene and was ordained priest; with Symeon and with their sister Hilaria, also a nun, he built a monastery to which many of the faithful came.

In the time of the emperor Leo V the Armenian, the persecution against the holy icons flared up again. George was driven out, and an iconoclast bishop, also named Leo, was set on the throne of Mytilene; he seized the monastery and sold it. George withdrew with his monks to a poor village called Myrsina, where he taught the people and, according to the synaxarion, worked miracles. Symeon was condemned to death by fire but escaped by a miracle; he was later exiled to a deserted island, then to Constantinople, and under the emperor Theophilus he was beaten with one hundred and fifty blows and sent into exile on the island of Aphousia in the Propontis.

After the death of Theophilus, in 842, the empress Theodora called the two brothers back from exile and asked their counsel. In 843 George, who was eighty years old, accepted at her urging ordination as bishop of Mytilene and was enthroned on 14 September in the church of Saint Theodora. A year later, in 844, Symeon reposed and was buried in the monastery of the Mother of God. George shepherded his flock a little longer, with almsgiving, teaching and miracles; after a journey to Smyrna, where an angel announced his end, he returned to Mytilene, spent Great Lent there and served the Liturgy of Great Thursday. He passed to the Lord on the evening of Great Saturday, in the year 845 or 846, and was buried in the tomb of his brother Symeon.