Nicanor of Mount Callistratus
Our Venerable Father Nicanor the Wonderworker, Ascetic of Mount Callistratus and Founder of the Monastery of the Transfiguration of the Saviour at Zavorda
Venerable · Wonderworker · Priest · b. 1491, at Thessalonica — d. 7 August 1549, at the monastery of Zavorda in western Macedonia
Commemorated 7 August — Repose at the monastery of the Transfiguration, Zavorda
Nicanor (baptised Nicholas) was born at Thessalonica in 1491 to wealthy and devout parents, John and Maria, of the parish of Saint Menas; having given away his inheritance at their deaths he was tonsured, ordained deacon and priest, and was being groomed for high office in the church of Thessalonica when — about the age of twenty-seven — he heard a call in prayer, phrased in the words spoken to Abraham, to go out from his country and his kindred to the mountain of Callistratus in western Macedonia. There he lived sixteen years as a solitary before founding, on the site where he had uncovered an icon of the Saviour hidden since the iconoclast persecution, the monastery of the Transfiguration at Zavorda, above the Haliacmon in the Grevena country. He taught and healed among the Greek villages under Ottoman rule for the rest of his life, and reposed, having foreknown his death, on 7 August 1549. His relic remains at Zavorda, and the monastery bears his name.
Thessalonica: a child given to prayer
Nicanor's parents, John and Maria, lived in the quarter of Saint Menas in Thessalonica and were known through the city for wealth, good birth, and — the local life insists on the order — chiefly for their faith and their almsgiving. They were long childless. The mother prayed daily in the church of Saint Menas, and the life tells that the answer came to her there in the words of the barren women of Scripture: that God had loosed the bond of her barrenness, and that the son she would bear would be a pure vessel of the Holy Spirit and would bring many to the Lord. The child was named Nicholas, and was given to a devout schoolmaster for a sacred education.
He was quick at letters and quicker at the thing behind them. From boyhood he kept fasts, vigils and long prayer, and desired nothing but the monastic life. His father died while he was still young; his mother, not knowing her son's mind, set about finding him a virtuous wife, and Nicholas — unwilling to grieve her — simply deferred, year after year, the thing he wanted most.
Renunciation and ordination
When his mother died the way opened. He distributed the whole paternal estate to the poor and to orphans. The life notes what he refused as well as what he gave: with his family's standing he could have had office and dignity in the world, and counted it all refuse for the love of Christ. He was tonsured with the name Nicanor.
His reputation reached the Metropolitan of Thessalonica, who ordained him deacon and then presbyter, with the declared intention of making him his successor. As a cleric of the metropolis Nicanor served with such zeal that the local memory calls his ministry unsurpassed — which makes what followed the more decisive.
"Go out from thy country": Mount Callistratus
In one of his night vigils, praying with tears, he heard a voice: Nicanor, go out from thy land and from thy kindred and go to the mountain of Callistratus, and strive well there; and I will be with thee to preserve thee all the days of thy life, and I will make thy name renowned and will glorify thee unto the ages. The phrasing is the call of Abraham (Gen. 12:1), deliberately, and the life presents the whole later history as the fulfilment of its promise.
He left Thessalonica at about twenty-seven — that is, about 1517–1518 — and travelled west. On the road, through the villages he passed, he preached like an apostle to Christians whom the Ottoman conquest had left despairing, urging them to hold their faith. This missionary walking is not incidental to his cult; it is why he is remembered in western Macedonia as a teacher of the enslaved Greek countryside and not only as a hermit.
Sixteen years of solitude
Arriving at Mount Callistratus, in the wild gorge country of the Haliacmon between Grevena and Kozani, he received the inward assurance that this was to be his arena. He restored a small ruined hermitage of Saint George and settled there. Sixteen years followed of unbroken solitary struggle — the life names vigils, fasting, labour, silence, and the absence of any human consolation — during which, it says, he was made a vessel of the Holy Spirit. His ascetic cell (askitario) in the rock is still shown.
The hidden icon and the founding of Zavorda
The monastery came, according to the tradition, by revelation: Nicanor found an icon of Christ the Saviour hidden since the age of iconoclasm, and understood from it that he was to build. He founded the monastery of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, called Zavorda, on the height above the river. The community was organised as a coenobium with Nicanor as its abbot, and its existence in his lifetime is not merely hagiographic: a synodal document of 1527 attests both the abbot and the monastery's cenobitic constitution.
His fame spread, as the voice had promised. People came in numbers from the surrounding country to be blessed by him, to hear his teaching, and to be healed — and the healings, of which the life speaks in the plural and without particulars, are the ground of his standing epithet, the Wonderworker.
Repose
He foreknew his death. Calling monks and laypeople about him, he blessed them, gave his last counsels, and gave up his spirit on 7 August 1549. The brethren buried him in a chapel of the monastery. His relic — the skull, kept in a silver reliquary — remains at Zavorda, and the monastery, formally the Monastery of the Transfiguration, is universally called the Monastery of Saint Nicanor.
Feast and commemoration
August 7 (church date; New Calendar civil August 7, Old Calendar civil August 20), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration — a coincidence that is anything but accidental for him, since his own monastery is dedicated to the Transfiguration and its patronal feast (August 6) runs straight into his own — and within the Dormition fast (August 1–14). His memory is one of the great regional festivals of western Macedonia: the monastery of Zavorda and the metropolis of Grevena, whose patron he is, keep it with a vigil, and pilgrims come from Macedonia and beyond. Outside Greece his commemoration is carried by the OCA calendar as a bare notice.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 3 (*"Θείας πίστεως"*)
Thou hast received an incorruptible crown of victory from the Creator, O venerable father, a prize worthy of thy struggles; for having left thy earthly homeland, thou becamest a dweller of the heavenly. Wherefore we all honour thee with faith and longing: rejoice, O Nicanor, companion of the venerable ones.
Iconography
Nicanor is painted as a Greek monastic founder: an elder in the dark schema and mantle, long-bearded, holding a scroll — and, in the founder's type proper to him, a model of the monastery of Zavorda in his left hand, with the church's red-tiled roofs and towers rendered in miniature, the right hand raised in blessing or in address. In the katholikon at Zavorda a wall-painting shows him exactly so, inscribed with his name and standing beside the Archangel Michael.
No image has been stored. The available Commons photographs of the Zavorda frescoes are in-situ interior shots of a curved wall surface, heavily disfigured by centuries of pilgrims' incised graffiti, with the fresco's date given only as "before the twentieth century" on the authority of a weblog; the copyright in the photograph of an architectural interior belongs to the photographer, who is unidentified, so that neither the age of the underlying work nor the licence of the image can be established to the standard this collection requires. A better candidate — a flat reproduction of a dated panel — is wanted.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with Nicanor the Deacon, one of the seven deacons of Acts 6 and of the Seventy, martyred at Jerusalem about the year 34 and commemorated on December 28 (and on July 28 with the four deacons). The two are separated by fifteen centuries and every other particular; the collision is purely one of name, and both entries carry a note.
- The epithet. Greek usage calls him Νικάνωρ ὁ Θαυματουργός ("the Wonderworker") or names him from his monastery, ὁ Ζαβορδαῖος; the Slavonic and English calendars more often use "of Mount Callistratus," from the mountain of his solitude. All three denote the same man.
- Zavorda's later fame rests on a second and unrelated ground: the monastery's library preserved the unique manuscript of the Lexicon of the Patriarch Photios, the Codex Zavordensis, rediscovered there in 1959.