Nectarius and Theophanes of Meteora
Our Venerable Fathers Theophanes and Nectarius the Apsarades, founders of the Monastery of Varlaam at Meteora
Venerable · b. at Ioannina in Epirus, late 15th century — d. Theophanes 17 May 1544; Nectarius 1550
Commemorated 17 May — Repose of Theophanes, on which the two brothers are kept together
Theophanes and Nectarius, brothers of the noble Epirot family of the Apsarades of Ioannina, are the founders of the Monastery of Varlaam at Meteora, the second in size and honour of the rock-monasteries of Thessaly. Coming to the pillars of Meteora in the second decade of the sixteenth century, they took possession in October 1517 of a rock that had lain deserted for nearly two centuries since the death of the hermit Varlaam who first scaled it, restored his ruined chapel of the Three Hierarchs, and then spent twenty-two years hauling stone, brick and timber up the cliff-face in order to build, in a little over twenty days, the great church of All Saints that still stands. They ruled the community they had gathered in a strict coenobitic discipline and left a written foundation-account of their work. Theophanes reposed on 17 May 1544 and Nectarius in 1550; their relics are kept at Varlaam, and the Church commemorates the two brothers together on the day of Theophanes's repose.
The Apsarades of Ioannina
The brothers were born at Ioannina in Epirus, at the end of the fifteenth century, into a family of the local Christian nobility known as the Apsarades — a house of standing in a city which, under a comparatively mild Ottoman settlement, retained a wealthy and literate Christian upper class. They were educated, and their later writing shows it. Both renounced their inheritance for the monastic life, and — as the tradition of Meteora has it — served their apprenticeship in the ascetic life elsewhere before coming to Thessaly, in the Athonite and Epirot houses of the day.
They came to Meteora, the forest of sandstone pillars rising from the plain of Thessaly above Kalambaka, at a moment when its monastic settlement was old but much decayed. The rock-top houses had been founded from the fourteenth century; by the early sixteenth several stood empty.
The rock of Varlaam
The pillar they chose bore, and still bears, the name of the man who had first climbed it: the hermit Varlaam, who ascended it about the middle of the fourteenth century, built himself a cell and a small church of the Three Hierarchs, and lived and died there alone. After his death the rock lay abandoned for close to two hundred years, and his chapel fell into ruin.
Theophanes and Nectarius took possession of it in October 1517 — the date is preserved in their own account — and began by rebuilding Varlaam's little church of the Three Hierarchs, which they finished and had painted. Around it they made cells, a refectory, cisterns to hold the rain (there being no water on the summit), and the windlass and rope-ladder by which everything and everyone reached the top. Brethren gathered; the two brothers gave the house a coenobitic rule, with common table, common property and obedience to a single superior, in deliberate preference to the looser idiorrhythmic arrangement then spreading in Greek monasticism.
Twenty-two years, and twenty days
Their great work was the katholikon of All Saints. The community had outgrown the small chapel, and a large church on a rock summit reachable only by rope presented a problem of logistics rather than of architecture. The brothers' solution was patience: for twenty-two years they hoisted up materials — stone, lime, brick, timber, tiles — piece by piece in the net, storing them on the summit against the day when there should be enough. When at last there was, the building went up in a little over twenty days, in 1541–1542.
The disproportion is the detail by which they are remembered, and it is not a pious exaggeration: the numbers come from the brothers' own written account, and they have been repeated by every later description of Meteora. The church was frescoed shortly afterwards by the Theban painter Frangos Katelanos, whose work of 1548 in the katholikon of Varlaam is among the monuments of post-Byzantine painting in Greece.
Their writings and their rule
Theophanes and Nectarius left a written record of their foundation — a ktetorikon, part history, part testament, part rule — which sets out the state of the rock when they came to it, the dates of their building, the discipline they laid on the brotherhood, and the provisions they made for its continuance. It is a source of the first rank for the history of Meteora in the sixteenth century, and it is the reason that the chronology of Varlaam is better known than that of most of its neighbours. A Rule governing the coenobitic life of the house is attributed to Theophanes, the elder and, on the evidence of the documents, the more active writer of the two.
Repose and relics
Theophanes reposed on 17 May 1544, and Nectarius followed him in 1550. Both were buried in their monastery; their relics — the skulls in particular — are kept and venerated at Varlaam, in the church they built, where they are shown to pilgrims. Varlaam has been continuously inhabited since their day, one of the six monasteries of Meteora still in monastic use, and the brothers are honoured there as its founders and second patrons after the hermit whose name the rock keeps.
Feast and commemoration
May 17 (church date; New Calendar civil May 17; Old Calendar civil May 30), always within the Pentecostarion. The commemoration belongs to the Greek calendar, where the two are listed among the day's saints as "the venerable Nectarius and Theophanes the Apsarades, of Ioannina"; it is kept with particular solemnity at Varlaam and throughout Meteora, and is not generally found in the Slavic or Antiochian books. A proper service is sung at the monastery. Elsewhere the day is served with the common of venerable fathers.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
O God of our fathers, who hast made the desert of the rocks a city of monks: by the prayers of thy venerable ones Theophanes and Nectarius, who with long patience raised on the height a house to the praise of all thy saints, establish us also upon the rock of thy commandments, and save our souls.
Iconography
The two are painted together, as founders are: two monastic fathers in koukoulion and mantle, standing side by side, the elder Theophanes bearded and grey at the left, Nectarius at the right, and between them, held up in both their hands, a model of the church of All Saints — the ktetorial portrait type, in which founders present their building to Christ or to the Theotokos, who blesses it from above. Behind or beneath them the sandstone pillar of Varlaam may be shown with the windlass and the net. The type is found in the monastery itself, where the brothers appear in the sixteenth-century painted programme of the katholikon and its narthex, and in later Meteora icons and engravings of the six monasteries.
No pre-1900 image of them has been located for this collection: the ktetorial fresco at Varlaam and the monastery's icons are not represented in freely licensed reproductions, and searches of Wikimedia Commons for the brothers by name returned nothing. The Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February and in any case predates them by five centuries.
Disputed questions
- Which brother died when. The Greek lists give the pair as "Nectarius and Theophanes (1550, 1544)", so that Theophanes, though named second, is the earlier to repose, on the day the Church now keeps; the joint commemoration on May 17 is his day of death, and Nectarius, who reposed some six years later on a different day, is remembered with him. Some accounts reverse the order of the deaths; this entry follows the calendars.
- "Apsarades" and its garblings. The family name Ἀψαράδες is variously transliterated (Apsaras, Apsarades, Apsara), and at least one English day-list renders it as though it were a description of office — "gate-keepers of Meteora" — which it is not: it is the brothers' surname.
- 1517 or 1541 as the foundation date. Reference works give Varlaam's foundation as 1517 and as 1541 more or less indifferently. Both are right of different things: 1517 is the brothers' arrival and the restoration of Varlaam's chapel of the Three Hierarchs, 1541–42 the building of the katholikon of All Saints. The apparent contradiction dissolves once the twenty-two years of hoisting between the two dates are taken into account.
- Where they were monks before Meteora. The tradition sends them through other houses before Thessaly, and Athonite training is commonly asserted; the surviving documents are not explicit, and this entry does not press the point.
- Not to be confused with the hermit Varlaam himself, the fourteenth-century first settler of the rock, who is not the same as the brothers who refounded it and who has no separate commemoration in the general calendar; nor with the many other saints named Nectarius and Theophanes, in particular Nectarius of Aegina (†1920, November 9) and Theophanes the Confessor (†817, March 12).