Nicetas of Nisyros
The Holy New Martyr Nicetas of Nisyros
New Martyr · b. c. 1715, at Mandraki on the island of Nisyros — d. 21 June 1732, beheaded at Chios at the age of seventeen
Commemorated 21 June — Martyrdom by beheading, 1732
Nicetas was a boy of Mandraki, on the volcanic island of Nisyros in the Dodecanese, whose father — a notable of the town — escaped execution for a crime by turning Muslim, and carried his household with him; the child, renamed Mehmed, was raised in Islam without knowing that he had ever been baptised. Learning the truth from a taunt, he fled to Chios, was received back into the Church with holy chrism at the monastery of Nea Moni, and, counselled that a Christian who has denied Christ must confess Him where he denied Him, went of his own will to declare himself before the Turkish judge. After ten days of prison and torture he was beheaded on 21 June 1732, at seventeen. His head is kept at Iviron on Mount Athos and his relics at the church that bears his name on Nisyros.
A household apostatised
Nisyros is a small volcanic island of the Dodecanese, between Kos and Tilos, and Mandraki its chief town. Under Ottoman rule the island's Christian community lived under the ordinary pressures of the millet system, in which the surest escape from a capital sentence was conversion. Nicetas's father was one of the leading men of Mandraki. Charged with a crime that carried death — the sources do not specify it — he saved his life by declaring himself a Muslim; and by the working of Ottoman law his wife and children were carried over with him. The boy, baptised Nicetas, was given the name Mehmed and grew up believing himself born to it.
The quarrel and the truth
He was still a boy when a quarrel with a Muslim playmate ended, as such quarrels do, in the throwing of the family's history in his face: that he was no Turk but a giaour's son, a Christian child whose father had bought his life with his faith. Nicetas went to his mother, who told him the truth — his baptism, his Christian name, and what had been done. From that hour, the account says, he had no rest.
He determined to leave. Alone, and still very young, he crossed to Chios, the great island to the north, and made his way to the ancient imperial monastery of Nea Moni — the eleventh-century foundation of Constantine Monomachos whose mosaics are among the treasures of Byzantium, and the house of Nicetas, John and Joseph, its founders. There he was taken in, catechised, and received back into the Orthodox Church by holy chrism, under the direction of a former metropolitan named Makarios who was living at the monastery. He took up the ascetic life among the fathers.
"Where you denied Him"
What he had done was, by the law he had been born under, a capital offence: apostasy from Islam. He might have remained on Chios in safety, or gone further, and many in his position did. But an ascetic of the island named Anthimos, to whom he opened his conscience, gave him the counsel that shaped the last chapter of his life and that shaped the whole movement of the neomartyrs: that a Christian who has denied Christ — even in ignorance, even as a child, even by another's act — must return to the place of his denial and confess Him there, publicly, before the same authority. Nicetas accepted it.
Confession, prison and death
The arrest came, characteristically, over a triviality: he was taken up for want of proof that he had paid the poll-tax — the haraç, which Christians paid and Muslims did not, so that the receipt was itself a declaration of religion. Brought before the judge, he declared plainly that he was a Christian, that he had been baptised Nicetas, and that the name Mehmed had never been his by right.
He was held ten days. The sources describe the usual sequence of the Ottoman new-martyrdoms: flattery first — offers of money, of position, of a wife — then blows, then worse. He was shut for a night in a stable among wild horses, in the hope that they would trample him; he was found in the morning unhurt. Nothing shook him. On 21 June 1732 the sentence was given and he was beheaded. He was seventeen years old.
Relics and miracles
The tradition records that his blood restored sight to the blind among those who came to the place of execution. His body was thrown into the sea by the authorities, to prevent its becoming a relic — the standard precaution, and the standard failure: his head was recovered and came in time to the monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, where it is kept, and his relics are venerated at the church of Saint Nicetas at Nisyros, his native island. Nisyros keeps him as her own saint, and the Dodecanesian and Chian churches commemorate him with the other new-martyrs of the Turkish period.
Feast and commemoration
June 21 (church date; New Calendar civil June 21, Old Calendar civil July 4), the day of his beheading in 1732. Greek and OCA usage; the Slavonic calendar for the day does not carry him, and he does not appear in the older printed Menaia, his commemoration having entered the books with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections of the new-martyrs — above all the Neon Martyrologion of Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth, the work that gathered and gave liturgical form to this whole class of saints. June 21 falls inside the Apostles' Fast in most years, the fast having no fixed beginning but always ending on June 28.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Nicetas, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from thee, our God; for possessing thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Nicetas is painted in the type of the youthful new-martyr: a beardless boy of about seventeen in the plain shirt and belted breeches of an eighteenth-century islander — not in the tunic and mantle of the ancient martyrs — holding the cross in his right hand and often a palm-branch, with the sabre of his beheading shown at his side or in the hand of an executioner in a small scene beside him. Where the island claims him he is set against the volcano and the white houses of Mandraki. The severed head, which is his relic at Iviron, is sometimes shown held in his own hands, the convention used for beheaded martyrs whose head is separately venerated.
No public-domain image of him has been located. He was martyred in 1732 and his iconography is accordingly post-1900 in every surviving instance known to this collection: the panels at Nisyros and the Athonite representations are modern works, and where photographs of them appear under a Creative Commons tag, the tag licenses the photograph only and leaves the painter's rights in the icon entirely untouched — so none of them is storable here. He wants an icon. The Menologion of Basil II is in any case no help for a June saint, its surviving volume covering September to February only.
Disputed questions
- Chios or Nisyros? He suffered at Chios, where he had been received back into the Church and where he made his confession before the judge; his cultus, however, is centred on Nisyros, his birthplace, which possesses his relics and the church dedicated to him. English notices sometimes place the martyrdom on Nisyros. The Greek sources are clear that the arrest, the trial and the beheading were on Chios.
- The forced conversion. The story turns on a point of Ottoman law that is easily misread: the father's conversion transferred his minor children automatically, so that Nicetas was legally a Muslim without any act of his own, and his return to Christianity was therefore apostasy in the eyes of the courts and reversion in the eyes of the Church. He is reckoned among the new-martyrs who had been made Muslims as children, a distinct and numerous class of the Ottoman martyrology.
- Not to be confused with the other saints of his name — the great-martyr Nicetas the Goth (September 15), Nicetas of Medikion the confessor (April 3), Nicetas of Chalcedon, Nicetas the Stylite of Pereyaslavl, Nikitas of Novgorod, or the founders of Nea Moni, one of whom is also a Nicetas and in whose monastery this Nicetas was chrismated — the coincidence that makes the pair especially easy to confuse.
- No Wikidata entity exists for him (searched 2026-07-26: absent, not merely unlocated).