NIKETAS OF MEDIKION

On this day, the Churches following the Julian calendar celebrate the memory of St. Niketas of Medikion (760–824). April 16 – mid-spring. Such a coincidence does not have any sacramental significance, but it helps to better remember the day of his memory. Nikita was a priest, abbot of the monastery and confessor of the faith.

The image of Saint Niketas was preserved in the oldest illustrated Byzantine hagiographic manuscript, the menology of Basil II, compiled at the end of the 10th century. This speaks both of the special veneration of the saint and of the fact that he was very known to the church and court circles of the Empire. The life of the saint was recorded by his disciple Theostiriktus. It has preserved precious, reliable information about the saint and is also important as a monument of that time.

Saint Niketas was born in Caesarea Bithynia near modern Turkish Bursa. The circumstances of his birth were tragic. His mother died on the eighth day, his father gave him to his grandmother to raise him, and he himself became a monk. He was brought up in the church. In his youth he joined the brethren of the monastery, in 790 he was ordained a priest, and in 813 he became abbot instead of the deceased abbot Nicephorus. Under his leadership, the monastery, which at the time of his arrival numbered only a few monks, numbered one hundred brethren.

The Medikion monastery was located near the northern shore of the Black Sea near Mount Olympus in Bithynia. It was founded in 780 by the Monk Nicephorus (755–813). This was a whole country, which was called “Monastic Mountain”. One of the Byzantine monastic mountains, like Athos, Olympus of Bithynia consisted of about 50 monasteries. Theodore the Studite, the Slavic Apostles Cyril and Methodius, and many others began their monastic path here. Such details help to understand how much can be revealed through the lives of the saints. A great many Christian shrines are irretrievably left in the past. History and the passage of time spare nothing, not even the traces of sacred deeds. Memory is inherently erasable.

The relative remoteness of this Monastic Mountain from the capital contributed to the fact that during the era of Byzantine iconoclasm, icon-worshipping monks found refuge in this and other monasteries. Nicephorus himself was one of the participants in the VII Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 787. The monastery was in the name of the holy martyr Sergius, its church was dedicated to Michael the Archangel. Sometimes the monk is mistakenly identified with the Patriarch Nicephorus the Confessor (758–828) of the same name. The day of his liturgical commemoration has not been preserved, so we will honor this saint together with Niketas.

The Byzantine iconoclasm, which lasted 85 years, in two stages, from 730 to 787 and from 815 to 843, was the longest continuous persecution in the history of Orthodoxy. Its peculiarity was that the emperors who persecuted icon venerators, as well as the hierarchs who supported them, considered themselves sincerely Orthodox. Christians shed the blood of Christians when the Empire itself was losing territory and was under attack from Muslim Arab armies.

In 815, Emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820) began a new persecution of icons. He ordered the arrest of Niketas and imprisoned him in the fortress. After some time, he summoned him to Constantinople and persuaded him to restore Eucharistic communion with the iconoclastic Patriarch Theodotus (815–821), who did not understand theology at all, and had previously been a military man. For that time, it was an absurd rarity.

Niketas’ friends, among whom was Theodore the Studite (759–826), persuaded him not to do this. Later, realizing his own mistake, he returned to condemning iconoclasm. For this he was imprisoned on an island near the capital, where the imperial eunuch, named Anthimus, subjected him to much abuse and torture.

On the night before Christmas 820, Emperor Leo was killed, and Nikita gained freedom. However, contrary to persuasion, he did not return to his monastery, considering himself an apostate. 4 years later, on April 16 (3), that is, exactly 1200 years ago, he went to the Lord in one of the cells, where, in repentance, he exhausted himself with asceticism. The saint’s body was transferred to his native monastery, and Theodore the Studite delivered a speech of praise, in which he confessed Nikita as a protector of icons and a martyr.