Nicodemus the Albanian
The Holy New Martyr Nicodemus of Vithkuq, monk of Vatopedi, who suffered at Berat
New Martyr · Venerable Martyr · b. at Vithkuq in southern Albania, late 17th century — d. 11 July 1722, at Berat
Commemorated 10 July — Second commemoration in Albanian and Greek usage, 11 July — Beheading at Berat in 1722
Nicodemus (†11 July 1722) was a Christian of Vithkuq in southern Albania who, wanting a fourth marriage the canons would not give him, apostatised to Islam and drew his children after him. Pursuing to Mount Athos the one son whom Christians had carried off to save him, he was converted instead, became a monk of Vatopedi, and passed three years of hard penance in the skete of Saint Anna. Blessed by the elder Acacius of Kavsokalyvia and sent back, he returned to Berat, confessed Christ publicly in the place where he had denied Him, and was beheaded there on this day. He is one of the best-loved of the Albanian new-martyrs, and is counted with the great company of Athonite new-martyrs of the Ottoman centuries.
Vithkuq, Berat, and the apostasy
Nicodemus was born at Vithkuq, a mountain town of southern Albania in the region of Korçë, of Orthodox parents, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, and moved to Berat, where he worked as a tailor. He married and was widowed; married again and was widowed again; married a third time, and was left with children and no wife. When he wished to marry a fourth time the Church refused him, as the canons refuse a fourth marriage to any Christian.
He then set his mind on a woman of the household of a Muslim bey of the city. The bey consented on one condition, and Nicodemus took it: he professed the faith of Islam, accepted the Qur'an, and — the accounts are emphatic on this point, because it is what made his repentance so bitter — brought his children after him into apostasy. One son alone was saved. Christians of Berat took the boy secretly out of the town and away to the Holy Mountain.
The pursuit, the repentance, and the monastic penance
Nicodemus went after him. He came to Athos meaning to recover the child and to have his revenge on those who had taken him, and on the Mountain the thing turned in him: the sight of the monks, and — as the Athonite account has it — the memory of what he had been, broke him, and he stayed to repent. He was received back into the Church and tonsured, keeping the name Nicodemus, and was set to a severe penance. Three years he passed in the skete of Saint Anna, under the sternest ascetic discipline the Mountain knew, weeping for the denial and for the children he had led away.
Out of that penance came the resolve that his repentance was not complete until it was public, and made where the denial had been made. This is the pattern of nearly all the Athonite new-martyrs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Mountain had a settled discipline for it: no monk went to the tribunal unblessed, and a spiritual father tried the resolve first. Nicodemus laid the matter before Acacius of Kavsokalyvia, the great elder and preparer of martyrs, who, having proved him, blessed him and — the account says — put a staff in his hand for the road. The Mother of God, it is related, appeared to him and offered him a bitter cup with the words, Confess Christ where thou didst deny Him.
Martyrdom at Berat
He came back to Berat in his monastic habit and confessed openly that he was a Christian, that the faith he had taken was a lie, and that he had come to unsay it. He was seized, beaten, and — the tradition says — thrown from the walls of the citadel and taken up alive. The vali had him tortured over some days, and the constancy of a man the city had known as a renegade worked on the Christians of Berat and of the villages about it, Sinjë, Poftal and Sadovicë among them, who were then under pressure to conform and who held to their faith by his example; this consequence is the reason the Albanian tradition honours him as it does. On 11 July 1722 he was beheaded.
Relics
The Christians bought the body from the governor and buried it in the church of the Dormition of the Theotokos in the Mangalem quarter under the castle of Berat, where it became a source of healings and the saint's shrine for two centuries. In 1967, when the Albanian state declared the country an atheist republic and set about the destruction of the churches, the relics were taken up and hidden by a layman of Berat, Lili Koçi, at grave risk, and kept in private hands through the whole of the persecution. After the fall of the regime they were given back to the Church, and are now enshrined in the monastery of the Theotokos at Elbasan. A portion remains at the skete of Saint Anna on Athos, where he was prepared.
Feast and commemoration
July 11 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 24), the day of his beheading. He is kept in Greek and Athonite usage, in the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania — where he is one of the national saints and his name is borne widely — and by the OCA, whose calendar lists him as "New Monastic Martyr Nikodemos of Albania." He is commemorated also within the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and within the synaxis of All Saints of Vatopedi.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a venerable-martyr)
Thou didst deny in weakness and confess in strength, O blessed Nicodemus; for having washed away thy denial with the tears of repentance and the labours of the desert, thou didst return to the place of thy fall and there give thy neck to the sword for Christ. Wherefore, O new martyr, entreat Him that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Nicodemus is painted as a monk of middle years in the black rason and koukoulion, with a dark beard, holding the cross of martyrdom in the right hand and often a palm or an unrolled scroll in the left; where the composition allows, the severed head or the sword is shown at his feet, and behind him the castle rock of Berat above the Osum with the white houses of Mangalem climbing it. In the Albanian churches he appears beside the other national saints, and on Athos among the ranks of the new-martyrs in the refectory paintings of Vatopedi and Saint Anna's. Every image of him is modern — he suffered in 1722 and the earliest depictions belong to the century after — and the modern Albanian and Athonite icons of him are the copyrighted work of living iconographers; none has been stored, and none may be. A pre-1900 engraving from a New Martyrologion would be storable if one can be located.
Disputed questions
- Vithkuq or Elbasan. The Greek Athonite sources make him a native of Vithkuq who lived and suffered at Berat; the OCA's notice makes him a man "of Elbasan, a town of Epirus," and the Albanian Church, which keeps his relics at Elbasan, is often cited under that name. Vithkuq for the birth and Berat for the martyrdom is the better-attested combination and is followed here, with Elbasan recorded as an alternate name because the relics rest there.
- The number of the marriages is given as three in most accounts, and the impediment as the canonical bar to a fourth; a few retellings compress this.
- Not to be confused with Nicodemus of Vatopedi, the hesychast elder of Saint Gregory Palamas (†c. 1319–1322), who is commemorated on this same day and who is also styled "of Vatopedi." The two are regularly merged in calendar listings and even in some synaxarion notices; they are four centuries apart. Nor with Nicodemus the Hagiorite (†1809, July 14), the compiler of the Philokalia and the editor of the New Martyrologion in which the acts of martyrs like this one were gathered.