ABSTRACT
Anyone interested in what is customarily called 'iconoclasm' will encounter Palestine along the way: the Palestinians John of Damascus and Theodore Abu-Qurrah had developed a defence of icons as early as the eighth century, 1 before the Constantinopolitans, patriarch Nicephorus and Theodore the Studite, take the reins in the ninth century. Post-iconoclastic liturgy in Constantinople has a Palestinian origin; more specifically, the liturgy that is adopted in the capital after the crisis is inspired by that of the Lavra of Saint Sabas, 2 where John of Damascus might have been a monk 3 and Theodore Abu-Qurrah clearly was. 4 The poetic production of renowned hymnographers, who had been or might have been monks in the Lavra in this period, Cosmas and Stephen, was integrated into the Constantinopolitan liturgy. 5 Finally, during the second iconoclasm, three Palestinians were persecuted in Constantinople by Theophilus and acquired through this their sainthood: 400Michael Syncellus, and the two Grapti brothers, who had been monks in the Lavra of Saint Sabas as well. The East, and more specifically Palestine and the Lavra of Saint Sabas, thus provided men, hymns, liturgy, and ideas for those in favour of icons in Constantinople. The use of John of Damascus's name in the polemic against iconoclastic emperors reinforces this observation: the majority of polemical sources, the Adversus Iconoclastas, the Adversus Constantinum Caballinum, and even the Epistula ad Theophilum, were attributed to John of Damascus, som etimes against all likelihood, 6 and the Life of Stephen the Younger, another source of the same type, insists on his opposition to Constantine V. 7
