St. Germanus of Constantinople

J. M. Neale writes that Germanus was born in Constantinople about 634 (his heading prints 631), the son of a patrician, Justinian, whom the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus put to death. Germanus became a clergyman of the Great Church, was Bishop of Cyzicus, and was translated to the throne of Constantinople in 715. When the Emperor Leo the Isaurian moved against Icons his letters of opposition gave the first warning to the Church; he refused to sign the decrees of the synod of 730, was driven from his see and withdrew to his house at Platanias. Neale's heading gives 734 for his death.

Neale says the poetical compositions of Germanus are few: stanzas on S. Simeon Stylites, on the Prophet Elias and on the Decollation of S. John Baptist, and a Canon on the wonder-working image at Edessa. This file gives Neale's 1862 version of the simpler stanzas for a Sunday in the Week of the Great Fast. The portrait is a sixteenth-century fresco icon, not a likeness.