Nectarius of Vryoulla
The Holy New Venerable-Martyr Nektarios of Vryoulla, of the Skete of St Anne on Mount Athos
New Martyr · Venerable Martyr · b. c. 1799, at Vryoulla near Ephesus — d. 11 July 1820, at Vryoulla
Commemorated 10 July — Commemoration in Slavic usage (OCA), as "Monastic Martyr Nectarius of St Anne Skete", 11 July — Martyrdom by beheading at Vryoulla, 1820
Nektarios was a young Greek of Vryoulla (Vourla) in the country of Ephesus who, at seventeen, denied Christ under the pressure of a plague and a lie, was disowned by his own mother for it, and spent the rest of his short life undoing it. Tonsured at the Skete of St Anne on Mount Athos under the elder Hatzi-Stephanos, he returned to the town of his denial, confessed himself a Christian before the Turkish authorities, and was beheaded on Sunday, 11 July 1820 — his twenty-first birthday. His elder recovered the skull and carried it back to St Anne's, where it is kept. He belongs to that Athonite generation of new martyrs who were deliberately trained for martyrdom on the Holy Mountain and sent back to die where they had fallen.
Vryoulla and the denial
He was born Nicholas, about 1799, at Vryoulla — Vourla, on the gulf between Smyrna and Ephesus — to a poor but devout family. His father died when he was seventeen, leaving him with no trade and a household to keep. He hired himself out to a wealthy Muslim of the district to tend camels, and worked alongside six other Orthodox Christian labourers.
Then plague came through the district. The seven were told — or came to believe — that their families at home were dead, and in that despair all seven professed Islam. It was a denial made in the ordinary way of the period: not under the sword, but under fear, grief and the ordinary weight of being a Christian in a Muslim household.
The mother
When Nicholas came back to the town he found that his mother was alive. Her answer to him is the sentence on which his whole later life turned, and the Greek life preserves it: I did not give birth to a Muslim; I gave birth to Nicholas the Orthodox Christian. She refused him her house. The refusal broke him open, and from it came the repentance that made him a saint — a case in which the calendar honours, in effect, a mother's severity.
The road to Athos
An uncle, a shipowner at Smyrna, took him in hand and put him on a ship for Constantinople, urging him to repentance. He went on from there into Romania, but found the life he met there a danger to his soul and turned back. On the way an Athonite monk fell into conversation with him and directed him to the Holy Mountain.
At the Skete of St Anne he was received by the elder Hatzi-Stephanos, tonsured with the name Nektarios, and set to obedience, prayer and a hard ascetic rule. He remained there some years, and it was there that the resolution formed — under his elder's direction and with his elder's testing, as was the settled Athonite practice with such candidates — to go back and confess Christ in the place of the denial. He received the blessing to go.
Martyrdom
He came to Vryoulla three days before the beginning of Ramadan, in 1820, and presented himself to the local authorities. He told them that he had professed Islam as a foolish boy, that he had never believed it, and that he was a Christian. He was imprisoned, beaten and tortured, and was worked on by turns with promises and with threats; he did not move. On the Saturday morning he was given the Holy Mysteries; on the Sunday, 11 July 1820, the governor had him beheaded. It was his twenty-first birthday.
Relics
Hatzi-Stephanos, his elder, came for the body and recovered the skull, which he carried back to the Skete of St Anne on Athos, where it is venerated. A portion of the relics was given to the saint's mother, and the tradition of Vryoulla reports miracles worked through them. His processional icon was carried out of Asia Minor by the refugees of 1922 and is venerated in the church of St George the Great Martyr at Nea Ionia in Athens — the quarter built by the Ionian refugees, who brought their saints with them when they could bring nothing else.
Feast and commemoration
July 11 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 24) in Greek and Athonite usage; July 10 in the OCA's listing. He is kept with particular honour at the Skete of St Anne, which holds his skull, and among the descendants of the Ionian refugees at Nea Ionia. He is not carried in the Antiochian calendar.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a venerable-martyr)
Thou didst fall as a child and rise as a man, O Nektarios; for having wept upon the Mountain of the Mother of God, thou didst go down to the place of thy denial and confess Christ before the ungodly, and on the day of thy birth thou wast born again by the sword. Wherefore intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Nektarios is written as a very young monk — beardless or with the first down of a beard, which is unusual among Athonite saints and is his readiest mark — in the dark habit and koukoulion of the schema, holding the cross of the martyrs in the right hand and often the palm of victory in the left. The sword and the severed head may lie beneath him, and the peak of Athos with the Skete of St Anne is sometimes drawn behind. His surviving processional icon, brought from Asia Minor and kept at Nea Ionia, is the ancestor of the modern images. No pre-1900 image has been located for this collection; the processional icon itself is of the nineteenth century, but no free reproduction of it was found, and every other available image is the work of a modern iconographer and therefore not storable under the project's constitution
Disputed questions
- July 10 or July 11? The Greek and Athonite sources are consistent that he suffered on Sunday, 11 July 1820, and the Greek calendars keep him on July 11. The OCA lists "Monastic Martyr Nectarius of St Anne Skete on Mount Athos" on July 10 without a life. This entry follows the Greek date as primary and records the July 10 listing as a secondary commemoration, since that is where the Slavic calendars place him. The corpus does not resolve the discrepancy silently.
- Not to be confused with Nectarius of Aegina (†1920), the great wonderworker of the same name and nearly the same century, nor with Nectarius of Meteora.