Orthodox icons
With that, he spat on the coin, threw it to the ground, and began to trample it underfoot. When the judges replied yes, the saint said that an even greater punishment awaited anyone who would dishonor the image of the King of Heaven and His Saints. Holding a coin bearing the emperor’s face, he asked, “If any man trample upon the emperor’s image, is he liable to punishment?”. Before the judges, Stephen bravely and eloquently defended the veneration of icons. The enraged emperor transferred the saint to the island of Pharos for trial. In exile, the saint performed healing through the holy icons and so turned more people from iconoclasm. Due to Stephen’s defence of icon veneration, the emperor accused the abbot of having an affair with a nun named Anna and sent him into exile, despite the nun denying any wrong-doing to the point of dying under torture.
In 754 he held a council that outlawed the veneration of icons. At the same time, the new Emperor Constantine V turned out to be a fiercer iconoclast than Leo and moreover hated monasticism due to the intransigence of the monks’ icon-veneration. Stephen soon became a model of obedience and was raised to the position of abbot. During the iconoclast controversy under Emperor Leo the Isaurian (716-741), Stephen’s parents fled the heresy that had taken over Constantinople and settled in Bithniya, giving the youngster over to the care of the monks of Mount Auxentios (now Mt Kayışdağ). Born after numerous prayers for a child from his pious parents, John and Anna, St Stephen was born in Constantinople in 715 and dedicated to God from an early age. On Nov 28, the memory of the Holy Confessor and Martyr Stephen “the New” of Mount Auxentios. St Stephen (right) with another defender of the icons, St Theodore the Studite