[2][3] It lay on the old Byzantine road from Kaisareia to Tabia, near the point where it crossed the Halys river by the Çokgöz Köprüsü bridge.
In the version recorded in Zacharias's chronicle, a pagan lady called Hypatia was undergoing Christian instruction, and asking her instructor "How can I worship him, when He is not visible, and I cannot see Him?"
[9] One of the images (if there was more than one) probably arrived in Constantinople in 574,[10] and is assumed to be the image of Christ used as a palladium in subsequent decades, being paraded before the troops before battles by Philippikos, Priscus and Heraclius, and in the Avar Siege of Constantinople in 626, and praised as the cause of victory in poetry by George Pisida, again very early mentions of this use of icons.
The Image of Edessa was very probably later, but had what apparently seemed to the Byzantines an even more impressive provenance, as it was thought to have been an authentic non-miraculous portrait painted from life during the lifetime of Jesus.
Texte u. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, Leipzig 1899, online in German, access date 2012-09-05