Nicephorus of Ephapsis
Our Venerable Father Nicephorus the Presbyter, Abbot of the Monastery of Ephapsis
Venerable · Priest
Commemorated 13 May — Repose in peace of the abbot of the monastery of Ephapsis
Nicephorus is one of the genuinely unknown saints of the fixed calendar. The whole of his transmitted memory is a single short notice in a Athonite manuscript of the Great Lavra: that on account of his virtuous and God-pleasing manner of life he was raised up as abbot of the populous monastery of Ephapsis, that he was a presbyter, and that he reposed in peace. Neither his century, nor his birthplace, nor the location of his monastery is recorded. He is commemorated on May 13, and this entry is deliberately as short as the record that produced it.
What is transmitted
The Greek Great Synaxaristes prints, under May 13, the entry Ὁ Ὅσιος Νικηφόρος ὁ Πρεσβύτερος and states at the outset that it is unknown in what age he lived. The source it cites is the brief hypomnema in Lavra Codex I 70, folio 239 — the same Athonite manuscript that supplies the day's notice on Alexander the soldier a folio earlier. That notice says only that, by reason of his virtuous and God-pleasing polity (πολιτεία), Nicephorus was shown forth as hegoumenos of the populous monastery of Ephapsis (τῆς Ἐφάψεως), and that he fell asleep in peace.
Three things can be drawn from those few words without adding to them. First, he was a presbyter as well as a monk, since the notice styles him ὁ Πρεσβύτερος — the title by which he is distinguished in the calendars from the many bishops and patriarchs named Nicephorus. Second, he was an abbot, and of a house described as πολυάνθρωπος, "of many men," so that his community was a substantial coenobium and not a hermitage — this is the one detail the notice troubles to give, and it implies a monastery of standing in its own time. Third, he died a peaceful death: he was neither a martyr nor a confessor, and his sanctity was recognised for the ascetic and pastoral life itself.
Nothing else survives. There is no Life, no account of miracles, no tradition of relics, and no proper hymnody. Consistently with the discipline of this reference, the record is not padded out with what "must have" been true of a Byzantine abbot.
The monastery of Ephapsis
The house is named ἡ μονὴ τῆς Ἐφάψεως — "of the Touch," from ἐφάπτεσθαι, to touch or lay hold of; the word is used in Greek devotion of the touching of Christ (the woman with the issue of blood, the touch of Thomas), and a dedication of that kind is the likeliest sense of the name. Its site is not stated in the notice and is not securely known; the naming convention and the manuscript's Constantinopolitan and Bithynian horizon make a monastery of the capital or its Asian suburbs the natural supposition, but this is inference and not record, and no attempt is made here to fix it. A monastery large enough to be called polyanthropos and remembered by name in a synaxarion notice is not likely to have been obscure in its own century; the loss is ours, not the compiler's.
Feast and commemoration
May 13 (church date; New Calendar civil May 13, Old Calendar civil May 26). He appears in the Greek synaxaria of the day, after the martyrs and the hierarch, and is one of those commemorations that the Slavic and English calendars frequently omit altogether; the Orthodox Church in America's list for May 13 does not carry him. He has no service, and where a hymn is wanted the common of a venerable father is sung with his name. Because the date of Pascha moves, May 13 falls in some years within the Paschal season and in others after Pentecost; no fixed seasonal note belongs to the day.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O Father, that which is according to the image was preserved exactly: for taking up the cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal; wherefore thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels, O venerable Nicephorus.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No iconographic tradition of this saint is known, and none is likely to be recovered: a commemoration reduced to two clauses in one manuscript does not generate images. Were he to be painted, he would take the ordinary type of a venerable abbot who was also a priest — an elderly monastic in the analavos and mantle of the great schema, with a scroll or a blessing hand and, because he was a presbyter, sometimes the epitrachelion worn beneath the mantle. His feast being in May, the Menologion of Basil II (September–February) contains nothing for him. No image is stored.
Disputed questions
- The century is unrecoverable. The synaxaristes itself says so. Because the compilation of such notices in the Lavra codices is Byzantine, he must have lived before the manuscript, and therefore at some point between roughly the sixth and the fourteenth centuries; that is the whole of what can be said. He is indexed here under unknown century, per the schema's provision for synaxarion-only saints.
- The form of the name of the monastery varies: Ἐφάψεως (Ephapsis, the form in the Greek notice) and, in English lists derived from it, Ephapsios and Efapsis. They are the same house.
- Not to be confused with any of the better-known Nicephori of the calendar: the Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople (June 2 and March 13), the confessor Nicephorus of Medikion, the martyr Nicephorus of Antioch, the new-martyr Nicephorus of Chios, or Nikephoros the Hesychast of Athos. Some English day-lists have also mistakenly attached the epithet "of Neokaisareia" to this saint; the Greek source knows him only as the Presbyter, of the monastery of Ephapsis, and there is no evidence connecting him with Neocaesarea.