Nicetas the Goth

The Gothic church of the fourth century

Nicetas belongs to one of the most remarkable and least-remembered chapters of the early Church: the Christianity of the Goths beyond the Danube, in the lands the Romans called Gothia (roughly modern Wallachia and Moldavia). The faith had reached the Goths in the third century, partly through Roman captives carried off in the raids of the 250s, among whose descendants was Ulfilas himself. By 325 the community had a bishop: Theophilus, "bishop of Gothia," subscribed the acts of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea. The tradition makes Nicetas a Goth born and raised on the banks of the Danube, baptised by this Theophilus and formed in his circle.

Theophilus's successor in the Gothic mission was Ulfilas (Wulfila), a descendant of Cappadocian captives, consecrated bishop "for the Christians in the Gothic land" about 341. Ulfilas devised an alphabet for the Gothic tongue and translated the Scriptures into it — the first Bible in a Germanic language, of which the surviving Codex Argenteus is a descendant — omitting, as Philostorgius reports, the books of Kings, lest their wars inflame a war-loving people. Ulfilas's doctrinal allegiance was to the Homoian ("Arian") party dominant at the imperial court of his day, and through his mission Arianism became the historic form of Gothic Christianity; the hagiographic tradition of Nicetas, however, remembers the saint simply as an orthodox confessor of Christ formed by Theophilus and labouring for the conversion of his countrymen. Nicetas is said to have worked tirelessly among the Goths, drawing many to the faith by his example and his words.

The persecution of Athanaric

Within the Gothic confederation of the Tervingi, Christianity provoked a pagan reaction. The iudex (chief magistrate) Athanaric, seeing in the new faith a Roman infiltration dissolving ancestral custom, raised two persecutions against the Christians among his people, the second and fiercer falling in the years 369–372. This persecution is solidly historical, attested by contemporary witnesses far beyond the hagiography of Nicetas: on April 12, 372 the martyr Sabas the Goth was drowned in the river Mousaios (the modern Buzău in Romania), and the letter of the Gothic church which accompanied his relics to Cappadocia — together with the correspondence of Basil the Great, who received them through Junius Soranus, the dux of Scythia — is among the treasures of early hagiography. The church historians Socrates and Sozomen record the persecution and the many Gothic martyrs; a Gothic liturgical calendar fragment preserves commemorations of martyrs "burned in Gothia."

The Passion of Nicetas sets his martyrdom against the civil strife within the Gothic nation: the chieftain Fritigern, at the head of a party increasingly aligned with the empire and open to Christianity, clashed with Athanaric; after Fritigern's victory (with Roman support) the faith spread the more freely, but Athanaric regathered his strength, regained power in his own territory, and turned upon the Christians in vengeance for his humiliation. Nicetas, filled with zeal, openly denounced Athanaric's cruelty and impiety and strengthened the faithful for martyrdom. Seized by the persecutor, he endured many tortures and was finally cast into fire, in which he surrendered his soul on September 15, 372. The tradition insists that his body remained unburnt, radiant in the fire — the synaxarion's epigram plays on his name: "Thou art burned, Nicetas, and becomest a victory-bearer; or rather to say, a fire-bearing victory-bearer" (Νικήτας, "the victorious").

Relics and translations

A friend of the martyr, Marianus, a Christian of Mopsuestia in Cilicia who had known Nicetas in Gothia, took up the body by night — the Passion says he was guided by a star-like light — and carried it home to Mopsuestia, where it was enshrined and quickly became a fountain of healings. Mopsuestia was the historic centre of the cultus: the Passion itself was almost certainly composed there, and the city kept the martyr as its patron. Portions of the relics were later translated to Constantinople; the Serbian royal monastery of Visoki Dečani preserves a portion of the relics to this day, and the monastery of St Nicetas near Skopje (a foundation of the Serbian king Milutin) carried his name into the medieval Balkans.

Veneration and later cultus

From Mopsuestia and Constantinople the veneration of Nicetas spread through the whole Byzantine world and passed with special warmth into the Slavic lands. In Russia "Nikita" became one of the most popular of all baptismal names, and churches of the great-martyr multiplied (the church of Nicetas the Martyr on Staraya Basmannaya in Moscow and the Nikitsky monastery which gave its name to Nikitskaya street are examples; the Yaroslavl church of Nikita the Martyr preserved a great sixteenth-century vita icon of the saint). Russian popular devotion invokes him as a protector of children — the OCA notes the custom of praying to him for the preservation of infants — and as a mighty vanquisher of demons: a whole class of medieval Russian images, amulets and pilgrim crosses shows "Nikita Besogon," Nikita the demon-beater, thrashing a small black devil. That image, however, descends from an apocryphal Life of a different, unhistorical "Nikita son of the emperor Maximian," which church tradition and popular piety merged with the Gothic martyr; the Besogon iconography was eventually discouraged by the Russian church authorities, but its association with the name of the great-martyr persists in the material record (see Disputed questions).