Nicephorus of Medikion

Our Venerable Father Nicephorus, Founder and Abbot of the Monastery of Medikion

Venerable · d. 813

Commemorated 4 May — Repose of the founder-abbot of Medikion

Nicephorus (†813) was the ascetic who founded the monastery of Medikion on the Bithynian shore of the Sea of Marmara, near the ancient Cius and the modern Mudanya, and was its first abbot. Formed in the mountains in a life of extreme fasting and of prayer for the peace of the Church, he took the government of a community only under compulsion, and raised at Medikion a house whose discipline made it one of the great iconophile strongholds of the ninth century. Grown old and unable to bear the burden, he gave the governance into the hands of his disciple Nicetas the Confessor, who succeeded him as abbot; his repose falls on the eve of the iconoclast persecution of Leo V the Armenian, and some synaxaria make him a sufferer in it. He is commemorated on May 4.

The ascetic in the mountains

Nicephorus belongs to the generation of Bithynian monks who came to maturity in the brief peace between the two iconoclasms — the years of the empress Irene, the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787), and the patriarchate of Tarasius (784–806). The Greek notice places him squarely in that setting. Renouncing the world young, he took the monastic habit and withdrew into the mountains, where he lived alone in great austerity: the synaxarion singles out his fasting, and the object of his prayer — not his own advancement, but the peace of the Church and of the world, a petition whose poignancy is plain in a man who had grown up under the first iconoclasm and would die on the edge of the second.

The founding of Medikion

The mountain solitude did not last. Disciples gathered, as they always did around such men, and Nicephorus was pressed, and long resisted, and at last consented to become their abbot. The house he founded was Medikion (Μηδίκιον), on the gulf of Cius on the southern shore of the Propontis, near the modern Mudanya; it is first heard of in his lifetime and takes its whole subsequent importance from his rule.

Under him the community grew and its discipline was established. The most consequential of the monks who came to him was Nicetas, a young man of Caesarea in Bithynia, who entered Medikion while it was still new; Nicephorus set him under obedience, saw what he was, and had him ordained priest by the Patriarch Tarasius. As Nicephorus aged, the weight of the abbacy became more than he could carry, and he handed over the governance of the monastery to Nicetas, retaining the name of abbot while his disciple bore the office in fact. On Nicephorus's repose, Nicetas succeeded him formally. Under Nicetas the number of monks rose into the hundreds and Medikion became one of the houses that, with the Studion, refused every compromise with iconoclasm; the community's later glory is the fruit of Nicephorus's planting, and the Church commemorates him in that light.

Repose

The year of his repose is generally given as 813 — the year in which Leo V the Armenian came to the throne, and two years before the emperor's revival of the war on the holy icons in 815. On the received chronology Nicephorus died in peace, in his own monastery, spared by two years the persecution that would break his successor. The Greek synaxarion, however, gives a harder account: that in 814, under Leo the Armenian, Nicephorus was driven out of his monastery for venerating the holy icons, endured grievous hardships in exile, and died shut in a dark cell. On that reading he is a confessor and not merely a venerable father, and his repose falls a year or more later than the usual date.

Feast and commemoration

May 4 (church date; New Calendar civil May 4, Old Calendar civil May 17). The commemoration is carried by the Greek synaxaria, where he appears among the day's venerable fathers immediately after the martyr Pelagia of Tarsus, and by the English lists that follow them. His successor Nicetas is kept on April 3, and the two feasts are sometimes cross-referenced in the menologia. No proper service is transmitted for Nicephorus; the common of a venerable father is sung, the Menaion of the day belonging to Pelagia.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (from the common of a venerable father)

By the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren wilderness to bear fruit, and by thy sighings from the depths thou didst labour a hundredfold; and thou didst become a planter of monks and a lamp to the faithful, O our father Nicephorus. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Nicephorus is painted as an aged monk, in the rason, analavos and koukoulion of the great schema, with a long white beard, holding a scroll or with the right hand raised in blessing. Where he is shown as founder — the type by which he is chiefly recognisable — he holds a model of the monastery church of Medikion in his hands or supports it before his breast, the standard Byzantine convention for a ktētōr. In the menologion cycles for May he appears in a row of ascetic elders and is distinguished only by his inscription, Ο ΟΣΙΟΣ ΝΙΚΗΦΟΡΟΣ Ο ΤΟΥ ΜΗΔΙΚΙΟΥ, which is necessary precisely because the day carries a second venerable Nikephoros.

No pre-1900 image of him alone has been identified for this collection. Any candidate must be checked against the two Nicephoruses named above, and against his successor Nicetas, before it is accepted.

Disputed questions

Peaceful repose in 813, or death in prison after 814? The two accounts described above cannot both stand. The Greek synaxarion notice (followed at saint.gr) makes Nicephorus a victim of Leo V, exiled from Medikion for the icons and dying in confinement; the more widely printed calendars, Greek and Slavic alike, give 813 as the year of his repose, which places it before Leo's iconoclast turn and agrees with the Life of Nicetas, whose narrative has Nicetas already abbot in his own right when he is summoned before the emperor in 815. The likeliest explanation is a transfer of his successor's sufferings to the founder in one branch of the synaxarion tradition — Nicetas was indeed expelled, exiled, and imprisoned in close and filthy cells, and died in 824 — but the possibility that Nicephorus lived into the persecution and shared its first blows cannot be excluded from the evidence available. This entry follows the received date of 813 and classifies him as venerable only, without the confessor that the alternative account would require; readers should know that some sources would add it.
Not the Patriarch Nicephorus. He is not Nicephorus of Constantinople (†828, June 2 and March 13), the patriarch deposed by Leo V for the icons — a saint with whom he is frequently confused, since both are Nicephoruses, both belong to the same decade, and both stand on the iconophile side of the same quarrel. The patriarch was deposed in 815, exiled across the Bosphorus, and died at the monastery of St Theodore; the abbot of Medikion never left Bithynia.
Not Nikephoros of Mount Athos. He is also distinct from Nikephoros the Hesychast, the Athonite of the thirteenth century, who is commemorated on the same day, May 4 — an unfortunate coincidence that has produced conflated entries in some day-lists. Four and a half centuries and the whole hesychast controversy separate them.
Not Nicetas. The founder must not be collapsed into his successor Nicetas of Medikion (†824, April 3). The abbatial succession is the point of contact and the source of the error.