This icon is less unusual for its pictorial content than for the fact that it bears a date. The tradition of the dog-headed men (cynocephali), dates from very early times, and is common in Asia, Africa and Europe. The origins of the iconography are very obscure, and to no less so is the reason why such an ancient tradition should have survived unchanged in Byzantine Christian times. Travellers told of creatures with animal form and human heads, or vice versa, that were supposed to have come from the region of the Nile or from Asia Minor, which seemed to be the edge of the world to the Western men. Herodotus referred to strange creatures living in what was apparently a heavily wooded Libya, and wrote of a populace of strange beasts, asses with horns, men with dogs' heads and men with no heads at all. Latter stories that told of marvels of the east were transcribed and incorporated into other works, through the agency of the Byzantine scholar Phoyius from the ninth century onwards. In the Mercurius legend the cynocephali called the ancient Egyptian cult of the jackal-headed Anubis. Two cynocephali devoured the grandfather of St. Mercurius, and were preparing to eat his father when an angel appeared and surrounded them with a ring of fire. They repented and became companions of the father, and later accompanied Mercurius into battle. St. Cristopher is not the only saint to be thus represented. There is also St. Andrew of Cynocephali, in Kokar Kilise in Cappadocia, Turkey.

Tradition relates that the saint came from a country
of cannibals and that his face was disfigured.When he
became a Christian, he was martyred for his faith.