Nicetas, John and Joseph of Nea Moni

Three ascetics on the mountain

What is transmitted of them personally is very little, and it is honest to say so at the outset: they are known as a group, by three names, from the foundation tradition of the monastery they caused to be built. They were monks or hermits living in the interior highlands of Chios, on the slopes above the plain of Kambos — the ridge later called Mount Provateion — in the decades before 1042. No family, no origin, no order of seniority, and no separate biography is preserved for any of the three, and the sources do not agree on the order in which their names are given.

The icon in the myrtle

The foundation story is the substance of their veneration. The three found, hanging in the branches of a myrtle bush, an icon of the Theotokos. They took it down and carried it away; and it returned, or could not be removed, or would not stay where they put it — the tradition is told in the several forms usual with the acheiropoieta and the found icons, and its point is constant in all of them: the Mother of God had chosen the place, and the men who found the icon understood that a church was owed there and that they had not the means to build it.

Constantine Monomachos in exile

The means came from an unexpected quarter. Constantine Monomachos, a Constantinopolitan aristocrat who had fallen out of favour, was living under a kind of house-exile on the neighbouring island of Lesbos. The three went to him, and told him that he would be emperor; the story belongs to the well-worn Byzantine genre of the ascetic who foresees an accession, and it is told here with the specific detail that Constantine, who evidently had nothing to lose, promised that if the word proved true he would build the church the monks wanted.

In 1042 the empress Zoe took Constantine as her third husband and he was crowned as Constantine IX. He honoured the promise at once — the tradition has the three travel to the capital to remind him, which they may or may not have needed to do — and issued the foundation charter and the funds.

The Nea Moni

The Nea Moni, dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos, was begun in 1042. The katholikon — an octagon of the "island octagon" type, whose dome rests on squinches over a single undivided space — was consecrated about 1049, and the whole complex finished about 1055, after Constantine's death, under Theodora. Its mosaics, executed by workmen sent from Constantinople, are the reason the monastery is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the three great surviving eleventh-century mosaic ensembles of the Greek world, with Daphni and Hosios Loukas: the Washing of the Feet, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, the Anastasis, the Myrrhbearers at the Tomb, and, in the sanctuary, the Theotokos orans.

The icon of the myrtle was enshrined in the katholikon and is still kept there. The three founders lived to see the work begun, and are said to have been buried at the monastery; their relics are venerated in it.

Later history of their house

The monastery they founded became the greatest ecclesiastical institution of Chios, wealthy in land and in privileges, and its later history is a martyrology. In the massacre of Chios of 1822, in the Greek revolution, the Ottoman troops burned Nea Moni and killed the monks and the people who had taken refuge in it; the bones of the slain are kept in the ossuary chapel by the gate, and the community has never recovered its numbers. The earthquake of 1881 brought down the dome and the belfry. The founders' names are read there still, and it is at Nea Moni and in the Church of Chios that their feast is chiefly kept.