Nicetas of Thebes
Our Venerable Father Nicetas of Thebes and those with him
Venerable · Wonderworker · d. 1079, at Thebes in Boeotia
Commemorated 23 June — Repose at Thebes, 1079
Nicetas was a monk of Thebes in Boeotia, the "seven-gated" city of the old Greek epic, who was tonsured at the age of sixteen and gathered about him a small company of ascetics — the monks Daniel, Theodore and Gregory are the three the synaxarion names — drawn by the report of his character rather than by any office he held. He received the gift of wonderworking, and, as the notice puts it, the hospitality of Abraham: the charism of receiving whoever came and sending them away rested in soul. He lived to a great age and reposed in 1079. The record of him is a single synaxarion notice and one anecdote of a journey to Patras; he belongs to that large class of Byzantine ascetics of the middle period whose sanctity was local, unliterary, and nonetheless kept in the books of the Church.
Thebes
Nicetas was a native and inhabitant of Thebes in Boeotia — the notice calls it by its Homeric epithet, the heptapylos, the seven-gated. Eleventh-century Thebes was not the ruin the classical name suggests: under the Comneni it was one of the wealthiest towns of the Greek mainland, the seat of a metropolitan and the centre of the imperial silk industry, with a substantial population and a great deal of monastic life in and around it.
At sixteen he was tonsured. Nothing is transmitted of his family, of the house that received him, or of the name of his elder.
The gathering of a brotherhood
What the synaxarion records instead is the effect he had. Report of his spiritual bearing and purity of life spread, and other ascetics came and attached themselves to him — the usual way in which a Byzantine monastic settlement began, before any charter or foundation. Three of them are named: Daniel, Theodore and Gregory. They are the "those with him" of the title of his commemoration, and they have no separate notices of their own.
Two gifts are ascribed to him. The first is the working of miracles, stated flatly and without example — the notice preserves the fact and has lost the stories. The second is more particular and more revealing: he was given, the Life says, the gift of hospitality after the manner of Abraham — that is, not merely to house and feed those who came to him, but to give them rest by giving them spiritual direction. In the vocabulary of Byzantine monasticism this is the charism of the elder, and it is the one thing about Nicetas that the tradition thought worth defining.
The journey to Patras
One episode survives. Nicetas travelled to Patras in Achaia, and there met Daniel, described as a great ascetic and a man of prayer. Whether this Daniel is the same as the Daniel who was among his own companions the notice does not make clear, and the two are often read as one man met on that journey and afterwards attached to him.
He reposed full of days in 1079.
Feast and commemoration
June 23 (church date; New Calendar civil June 23, Old Calendar civil July 6), with the monks who gathered about him. He is served with the common of a venerable father; no proper hymnography, canon or synaxarion verse of his own has been located. On this day he stands well down the list, after the martyr Agrippina and the martyrs of Ancyra.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved with exactness; for taking up the cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passes away, and to care rather for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Nicetas, thy spirit rejoices with the angels.
Kontakion — Tone 2
From thy sixteenth year thou didst take on thee the yoke of Christ, O father Nicetas, and the seven-gated city sent thee forth as a lamp to the ascetics; and having received the hospitality of Abraham, thou didst give rest to all who came to thee. Wherefore we cry: entreat unceasingly for us all.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No individual iconography of Nicetas of Thebes is known, and no pre-1900 image of him has been located. Where such a saint is painted he takes the standard type of the venerable elder: an aged monk with a long white beard parted at the point, in the brown or black mandyas and analavos of the great schema, the koukoulion thrown back or drawn over the head, blessing with the right hand and holding in the left an open scroll — for an elder known for the direction of others, the scroll would ordinarily bear a saying on obedience or on receiving the brother. His feast falls in the month whose menologion cycles are the least fully painted, and he is absent from the Menologion of Basil II, which covers only September to February.
Disputed questions
How little is known. The whole of the record is the synaxarion notice summarised above. There is no Life in the full sense, no relics-tradition, no monastery that claims him, and no proper office. This entry is deliberately short: the PRD's rule is that a saint known from a few lines receives an honest short account rather than an invented long one.
Which Nicetas. He is not to be confused with the several better-known saints of the name: Nicetas the Goth the martyr (September 15), Nicetas of Medikion the confessor (April 3), Nicetas of Chalcedon, Nicetas the Patrician, or the Russian Nicetas the Stylite of Pereyaslavl and Nikitas of Novgorod. The distinguishing marks of this one are the city of Thebes, the companions, and the year 1079.
Calendar range. He is a Greek local commemoration. He appears in the OCA day-list for June 23 (drawn from the Greek synaxaristes) and in the Greek books; the Slavic Menaia and the Antiochian calendar do not carry him.