The Calumny and Expulsion from Egypt (1890)

In the spring and summer of 1890, only sixteen months after his consecration as Metropolitan of Pentapolis, Nektarios Kephalas was stripped of his duties at the Patriarchate of Alexandria and ordered out of Egypt — the victim of a whispering campaign by envious clergy who had convinced the aged Patriarch Sophronios IV that his brilliant, beloved auxiliary was plotting to seize the patriarchal throne. The charges were never substantiated. He left in silence, carrying a vague and damaging recommendation letter. The Greek community of Egypt gave him a farewell document signed by roughly nine hundred of its members, attesting his innocence. One hundred and eight years later, the Patriarchate of Alexandria formally restored his ecclesiastical order and asked his forgiveness.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The Sixteen Months That Ended Everything

The rapidity of the blow is part of its horror. Nektarios had been consecrated Metropolitan of Pentapolis — a titular see in the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Alexandria — in January 1889, after impressing Patriarch Sophronios IV with both his piety and his administrative competence during the years he served as a preacher and assistant in Cairo (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html; Titos Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Athens, 1955). He had been appointed to head the Patriarchate’s offices in Cairo — the chief administrative post under the Patriarch — and within months his influence in the Greek community of Egypt had grown remarkable. The churches filled when he preached; the faithful pressed around him after the liturgy; the Patriarch himself showed him marked favor (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

That favor was itself the kindling. In the Egypt of 1889–1890 the Patriarchate of Alexandria was a small, hierarchically close world, and the clergy who had served it longer — some of them with their own ambitions, some merely jealous of the newcomer’s gifts and the affection the faithful showed him — watched Nektarios’ rise with growing resentment. What began as envy sharpened, in the telling of the classical Lives, into a deliberate campaign (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/164878.html; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia). The mechanism was the whisper: the old Patriarch, Sophronios IV — already advanced in age and increasingly dependent on those around him — was gradually persuaded that his trusted auxiliary harbored designs on the patriarchal throne itself (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life).

3 May 1890: The First Notification

On 3 May 1890 Nektarios received a formal notification from the Patriarchate relieving him of his position as director and head of the Patriarchal offices in Cairo (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia). He had held the post for barely over a year. The notification was terse and, crucially, without a substantive explanation of cause — the document released him from his duties without stating, in any documentarily recoverable form, the grounds on which he was being removed.

[Disputed: The exact nature of the charges against Nektarios in 1890 is not preserved in any recovered written indictment. The consistent account across all sources — Matthaiakis (Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas), Sanidopoulos (A Brief Life), OrthoChristian.com (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, orthochristian.com/50001.html), and OrthoChristian.com (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, orthochristian.com/164878.html) — is that envious clergy fabricated a suspicion that Nektarios coveted the patriarchal throne and persuaded Sophronios IV accordingly. Some accounts additionally mention vague accusations of immorality or improper conduct circulating against him, which reportedly “arrived before him” in Greece and were the reason no bishop would receive him when he returned; but these accounts do not specify, and no source identifies, any named accuser, any specific act charged, or any documented finding. The Patriarchate’s own letter releasing him was deliberately ambiguous — what later sources describe as a “wolf ticket,” a letter of recommendation worded so vaguely as to constitute a mark against rather than a recommendation for its bearer (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com). No charge was ever adjudicated, and the 1998 Patriarchal decision (see below) constitutes an institutional admission that no charge was well-founded.]

The Campaign Behind the Notification

The sources that have reached us — the early Life compiled from the recollections of those who knew Nektarios, the modern Greek biography by Matthaiakis, and the tradition of the Aegina convent — are unanimous that what destroyed his position was not a formal canonical process but an informal erosion of the Patriarch’s trust through relentless private whispering (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com). Sophronios IV, the sources note, was aged and by this period highly susceptible to the counsels of those nearest him; the campaign required no dramatic confrontation, only the steady repetition of the accusation that Nektarios sought to replace him (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The irony — which later commentators have not missed — is that the qualities most likely to have made the accusation seem plausible to an old man surrounded by sycophants were precisely Nektarios’ genuine virtues: his administrative competence, his popularity with the faithful, the crowds that came to his sermons, the love the Greek community bore him. These were the very signs that the accusers could reframe as evidence of ambition (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com). In the logic of envy, exceptional gifts are their own indictment.

July 1890: The Order to Leave Egypt

By July 1890 the situation had moved from administrative removal to outright expulsion. Patriarch Sophronios IV commanded Nektarios to leave Egypt entirely (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The order was not couched in the language of formal canonical suspension — Nektarios remained a bishop — but it was an expulsion in every practical sense: he was to leave the jurisdiction, leave the country, leave the community he had served and that had loved him, with the vague and damaging letter as his only credential for presenting himself to the hierarchy of Greece.

He made no formal protest. He did not seek an appeal to Constantinople or to any higher authority. He did not write a defense of himself to the Patriarch. The silence — which would define the following three decades of his life — began here, in Egypt, in the moment when he might most reasonably have defended himself and chosen instead not to (see Bearing It in Silence).

The Farewell: 29 July 1890

What the official Patriarchate had refused to say in its vague letters of dismissal, the Greek community of Egypt said plainly and in writing. On 29 July 1890 a delegation of approximately nine hundred members of the Greek community — laypeople, merchants, families, the faithful who had heard him preach and received his pastoral care — presented Nektarios with a farewell letter (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The document, signed by this large assembly, attested two things: their continuing love for him, and their belief in his innocence.

The farewell letter is one of the most consequential documents in the history of the case. It could not reverse the Patriarch’s decision, but it constituted a record — made at the moment, by people who had lived under his ministry — that the charge against Nektarios was not believed by those who had known him best and most closely. It is a document of communal verdict in the absence of any canonical process, and the tradition has preserved it as the community’s witness to what the institution refused to adjudicate (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

Nine hundred signatures, in 1890, in a community whose resources were those of a diaspora parish network, represent a remarkable act of public solidarity. The people could not protect their Metropolitan from being expelled; they could, and did, tell him — and put in writing for posterity — that they did not believe what had been said about him.

Departure for Athens

Nektarios left Egypt for Athens in the late summer of 1890, departing the country definitively before the year’s end (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). He carried with him his episcopal dignity, his monastic habit, his theological manuscripts, and the Patriarch’s ambiguous letter — that carefully neutral document that managed, by its very neutrality, to suggest that something was wrong without specifying what.

The vague recommendation letter had consequences that were immediate and severe. In Greece, Nektarios presented himself to the hierarchy of the Church of Greece as a bishop in good standing, seeking some position, some responsibility, some ministry commensurate with his orders. The vague letter — combined, some accounts note, with rumors of improper conduct that had preceded him across the Mediterranean — meant that no bishop of the Church of Greece was willing to receive him (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com). He arrived in Athens without a position, without income, without a community, without a welcome from the institution he had served. The poverty of his first years in Athens — the bishop who slept in borrowed rooms and could not always pay for his meals — is one of the fixed elements of all the early Lives (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The Nature of the Wound

What was done to Nektarios in 1890 was an injustice of a specific and particularly damaging kind: it was not a formal accusation that could be answered in a canonical court, but an informal poisoning of a patron’s trust by means that left the accused no arena in which to speak. A formal charge can be refuted; a whispering campaign in the ear of an aged superior leaves nothing to refute except the whisper itself, and one cannot summon a whisper to a tribunal. The accusers’ method was, in this sense, the perfect weapon against the virtuous: it exploited the very trust that Nektarios had earned with the Patriarch, turning the Patriarch’s earlier fondness into the instrument of the betrayal.

The structural parallel that the Orthodox tradition draws here is deliberate and explicit. The silence before accusers; the absence of self-defense; the sufferings inflicted by the very institution one has served faithfully; the vindication that does not come in the accused’s lifetime — these are the marks of a particular kind of cross, and the tradition has always read Nektarios’ expulsion in this light (see Bearing It in Silence; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com).

No Substantiated Charge

The essential fact — which the tradition has always insisted upon and which the 1998 Patriarchal decision confirmed — is that no charge against Nektarios was ever substantiated. He was removed from his administrative position by informal pressure, ordered out of Egypt by his Patriarch, denied a position in Greece by the vague letter that followed him, and spent the three decades after 1890 in institutional marginality: a bishop without a see, living on a schoolteacher’s salary, governing a convent of nuns on a small island in retirement (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). He died in 1920 having never been rehabilitated in his own lifetime, never having received an apology or a retraction, never having been told that the institution that expelled him acknowledged it had been wrong.

The acknowledgment came seventy-eight years after the expulsion and twenty-eight years after his glorification.

15 September 1998: The Patriarchate Asks Forgiveness

On 15 September 1998, under Patriarch Petros VII of Alexandria, the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria issued a formal decision restoring Nektarios’ ecclesiastical order and asking the forgiveness both of the saint and of his predecessors (Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, 1998, orthodoxphotos.com/readings/nektarios/decision.shtml). The decision is explicit on several points: it acknowledges that Nektarios had been wronged; it restores his good standing in the memory and records of the Patriarchate; and it asks, from a Church to a canonized saint, for forgiveness for what was done to him.

The 1998 decision is the closest thing to documentary proof that the charges of 1890 were without foundation. The Patriarchate did not issue it as a routine housekeeping measure; it issued it as an act of institutional repentance — the acknowledgment, a century on, that one of its own patriarchs had, under the influence of slanderers, expelled a holy man on fabricated grounds (Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, 1998; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). The decision also implicitly exonerates Nektarios’ defenders within the Egyptian Greek community — those nine hundred signatories of 29 July 1890 — by confirming, across the gulf of more than a century, that their instinct about him had been right.

The Weight of the Injustice in His Sanctity

The Orthodox tradition does not venerate Nektarios despite the 1890 expulsion; it venerates him in part because of it — or rather, because of what he did with it. The wound was real. The poverty of Athens was real. The doors that closed because the letter was vague were real. The decades of institutional exclusion, in which a man who had been a metropolitan was living on a schoolmaster’s income, were real. The tradition insists on the reality of the suffering precisely so that the response to it — the decades of silence, the refusal of retaliation, the continuing reverence toward the Church that had expelled him — can be seen for what it was: not resignation or incapacity for anger, but a chosen bearing of the cross (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com).

His sanctity is inseparable from this particular form of suffering. The Metropolitan of Pentapolis became a saint not by escaping the injustice but by descending into it — and emerging, thirty years later, bearing no grievance that anyone around him ever heard expressed.

See Also

• Bearing It in Silence — how Nektarios received and bore the expulsion: the refusal of retaliation, the continued reverence, the spiritual meaning
• Favor and Envy — the context in which the slander took root: the favor of Sophronios IV and the envy it provoked
• Return to Greece — the years of poverty and institutional marginality in Athens that followed the expulsion
• The Second Slander — a second campaign of slander, this time regarding the convent, and the prosecutor who reversed himself
• Glorification 1961 — the posthumous vindication that was complete only in his canonization
• The Hidden Ascetic — the interior life that sustained him through the decades of injustice
• Orthodoxy: Greece, Bulgaria and Others — the Church of Greece into which Nektarios returned in 1890
• St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco — likewise a wonderworking bishop slandered and vindicated after death

References

• Matthaiakis, Titos (Archimandrite). Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas [The Blessed Nektarios Kephalas]. Athens, 1955. The standard modern Greek biography, drawn from the Aegina convent tradition and early witnesses; the primary narrative source for the chronology and character of the 1890 events.
• Sanidopoulos, John. A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios. johnsanidopoulos.com (Mystagogy Resource Center). A concise English Life drawing on Matthaiakis and later scholarship; used here for the chronology of the administrative removal (3 May 1890) and the farewell letter (29 July 1890).
• Saint Nektarios of Aegina. OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html. The OrthoChristian.com narrative Life; used for the sequence of events in 1890, the order to leave Egypt (July 1890), the departure for Athens, and the poverty on arrival.
• St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement. OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/164878.html. A focused treatment of the slander and its bearing; used for the characterization of the campaign of envy, the absence of substantiated charges, and the spiritual meaning of the expulsion.
• Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria [on the restoration of the ecclesiastical order of St. Nektarios]. Issued 15 September 1998 under Patriarch Petros VII. Text available at orthodoxphotos.com/readings/nektarios/decision.shtml. The documentary admission that the 1890 charges were without foundation.
• Nectarios of Aegina. Wikipedia (used to locate and cross-check dates; chronology verified against the above sources).