patriarch Methodios I, during which the hagiography of George was written. The bishop Euthymius of Sardis was the victim of several iconoclast Christian persecutions. Euthymius had previously been exiled to Pantelleria by the emperor Nikephoros I (), recalled in 806, led the iconodule resistance against Leo V (), and exiled again to Thasos in 814. After his recall to Constantinople in the reign of Michael II (), he was again imprisoned and exiled to Saint Andrew's Island, off Cape Akritas (Tuzla, Istanbul). According to the hagiography of by the patriarch Methodios I of Constantinople, who claimed to have shared Euthymius's exile and been present at his death, Theoktistos and two other imperial officials personally whipped Euthymius to death on account of his iconodulism; Theoktistos was active in the persecution of iconodules under the iconoclast emperors, but later championed the iconodule cause. Theoktistos was later venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, listed in the Synaxarion of Constantinople. The last of the iconoclast emperors, Theophilos (), was posthumously rehabilitated by the iconodule Orthodox Church on the intervention of his wife Theodora, who claimed he had had a deathbed conversion to iconodulism in the presence of Theoktistos and had given 60 Byzantine pounds of gold to each of his victims in his will. The rehabilitation of the iconoclast emperor was a precondition of his widow for convoking the Council of Constantinople in March 843, at which the veneration of icons was restored to orthodoxy and which became celebrated as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Evaristos, a relative of Theoktistos Bryennios and a monk of the Monastery of Stoudios, was exiled to the Thracian Chersonese (Gallipoli peninsula) for his support of his hegumenos Nicholas and his patron the patriarch Ignatios of Constantinople when the latter was deposed by Photios I in 858. Both Nicholas and Evaristos went into exile. Only after many years was Evaristos allowed to return to Constantinople to found a monastery of his own. The hegumenos Nicholas, who had accompanied Evaristos to the Chersonese, was restored to his post at the Stoudios Monastery. A partisan of Ignatios of Constantinople and a refugee from the Muslim conquest of Sicily, the monk Joseph the Hymnographer was banished to Cherson from Constantinople on the elevation of Ignatios's rival Photios in 858. Only after the end of Photios's patriarchate was Joseph allowed to return to the capital and become the cathedral skeuophylax of