Return to Greece: The Years of Obscurity (1890–1894)

Expelled from Alexandria in 1890, Nektarios Kephalas arrived in Athens with no position, no income, and a letter of release from the Patriarchate so vague that it quietly disqualified him from every appointment he sought. This file traces the years of obscurity: the wandering in poverty, the slow intervention of a sympathetic government official, the appointment in February 1891 as a preacher in the diocese of Euboea and the adjoining provinces, and the patient, humble labor among simple village people that preceded his appointment to the Rizareios School in 1894.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

Arrival in Athens: Poverty and a Damaged Letter

Nektarios arrived in Athens in 1890 with almost nothing. The calumny that had driven him from Alexandria — the whispering campaign orchestrated through the entourage of Patriarch Sophronios IV — had left him stripped of his position as Patriarchal Exarch and, effectively, of his standing in the Church (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html). He was still, in title, the Metropolitan of Pentapolis, a dignity conferred by Alexandria; but the letter of release that followed him from Egypt was so deliberately noncommittal — neither charging him nor defending him — that it generated suspicion everywhere it was presented. It said nothing of his virtues, nothing of the circumstances of his dismissal, and left any bishop or government minister who read it in the position of being asked to employ a man whom his own Patriarchate had silently distanced itself from (John Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia).

The pattern of rejection repeated itself across the months that followed. Nektarios presented himself at the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece, asking for any assignment. He was turned away. He sought a position as a simple preacher in an Athenian parish. He was again refused. The formal reason given in each case tended to dissolve when pressed — there was no explicit accusation, no trial, no verdict — but the insinuations attached to his name from Alexandria were doing their work without ever being stated plainly (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com). He was a Metropolitan without a see, a theologian without a pulpit, a bishop who could not find even the simplest clerical employment in his own country.

The Shape of the Humiliation

It is worth pausing on what Nektarios’s situation meant in practical terms. He had no income and was reduced to genuine material poverty during this period in Athens (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com). He was a bishop of the highest personal attainment — he held a theology degree from the University of Athens, had served brilliantly as Exarch in Egypt, had impressed scholars and clergy alike — and yet the institutional Church of Greece would not give him a preaching post. The accounts of this period, as gathered in the hagiographical tradition, emphasize not his bitterness but his silence: he did not fight the rumors, did not demand a hearing, did not write to defend himself. He bore the obscurity as something permitted by God (Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia; Titos Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Athens, 1955). The same quality of patient, uncomplaining endurance that had marked his reception of the calumny in Egypt now marked his months of wandering in Athens, and it would later be identified by his biographers as the foundation on which the sanctity of his later years was built.

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s account of this period notes that those who met him personally during these years were struck by his serenity — that there was no trace of resentment or self-pity in his bearing, even though the injustice done to him was transparent to anyone who inquired carefully (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, Saint Nektarios of Aegina, goarch.org).

The Intervention: February 1891

The impasse broke through the intervention of a government official sympathetic to Nektarios’s situation. The sources identify the relevant appointment as February 1891, when Nektarios was made a preacher (ierokēryx) attached to the diocese of Euboea, the large island northeast of Athens (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com). The sources also extend his preaching territory to include the mainland provinces of Phthiotis and Phokis, the mountainous central Greek regions whose scattered rural communities had little regular contact with educated clergy (Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

The appointment was, by any ecclesiastical measure, a demotion so extreme as to be almost impossible to square with his rank. He was a Metropolitan — in Byzantine and modern Greek hierarchical reckoning, a hierarch of the first class — and he was now to serve as an itinerant preacher, a role filled in the Greek Church by ordained men of far lower standing. He accepted it without recorded complaint. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese account notes that his willingness to take this position was itself read by those who observed it as a sign of genuine holiness rather than mere resignation (goarch.org).

Preacher in Euboea and the Provinces

What Nektarios’s preaching ministry among the people of Euboea, Phthiotis, and Phokis looked like in practice is attested consistently across the sources, even if the details of individual sermons or visits have not survived in any systematic record. The provinces were predominantly rural, and the populations he served were simple village people with little formal education — the kind of listeners who could hear easily whether a preacher believed what he said, and who were not impressed by the apparatus of learning alone.

He preached with warmth and without condescension, and the people received him with unusual affection (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com). There is a recurring note in the hagiographical accounts that the ordinary people of these provinces did not know or care that he was a Metropolitan; they knew only that here was a priest who prayed as if he meant it, who spoke of the Gospel as a living reality rather than a professional obligation, and who gave time to each person who approached him. The contrast between his formal dignity and the simplicity of the role he was performing was invisible to them, which was, in a manner, the grace of the arrangement (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia).

He was by this period already a man of serious personal ascesis — austere in diet, devoted to prayer, given to extended vigil (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; goarch.org). The years in the provinces were not wasted ones in any inward sense. His theological writing continued; he was composing or developing works on Orthodox dogmatics, on the study of the Psalms, and on the spiritual life, even during this period of outward obscurity (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The Euboea appointment gave him time that a normal episcopal ministry would not have afforded, and he used it.

The Provinces: Their Religious Landscape

The territory assigned to Nektarios deserves some description, because its character shaped what the preaching years meant in practice. Euboea is a long, narrow island running parallel to the Attic and Boeotian coast; in the late nineteenth century it was a predominantly agricultural region with a scattered, traditional Orthodox population, its village churches served by local clergy who were often semiliterate and rarely formally trained (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia). Phthiotis and Phokis, the mainland provinces assigned alongside Euboea, were mountainous interior regions — central Greece at its most rugged — where the physical difficulties of communication meant that an itinerant preacher might travel for hours by mule or on foot to reach a hamlet of two hundred souls for a single service (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

The Greek Church of this period faced real problems in these provincial areas: a village clergy formed without systematic theological education and embedded so thoroughly in local life that the distinction between pastoral care and social custom had sometimes become unclear; congregations whose piety was genuine but whose grasp of the doctrinal substance of what they practiced was thin (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; goarch.org). The role of the ierokēryx, the sacred preacher, was precisely to address this: to travel from parish to parish bringing homiletic instruction of a quality that the local clergy could not provide.

Nektarios was vastly overqualified for this role by any measure of ecclesiastical rank, but not, the sources suggest, by the measure of fitness. He had the patristic formation of a serious theologian, the pastoral temperament of a man who genuinely loved individual people, and — crucially — the lived experience of poverty and obscurity that prevented any condescension toward simple villagers (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com). A Metropolitan who had spent months unable to pay for his own bread was not going to speak to subsistence farmers from a height.

The Temptation He Did Not Yield To

The hagiographical tradition is attentive to what Nektarios did not do during this period, and the negative record is as revealing as the positive. He did not pursue the calumniators publicly. He did not use his connections — and he had them, having served directly under Patriarch Sophronios and having a degree from the University of Athens — to force the Church of Greece’s hand. He did not leave the Church, seek reception in another jurisdiction, or make a cause of his case (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). The very restraint that looked, to an outside observer, like passivity was, in the tradition’s reading, a form of spiritual combat: the choice, repeated across the whole period from 1890 to 1894, to let God vindicate him rather than to vindicate himself.

This reading of the obscurity years is found most fully in Matthaiakis’s monograph, which draws on the Greek hagiographical sources closest to the events and treats the preaching period not as a biographical interlude between two more significant appointments, but as itself a school — the place where the patience that would sustain his thirty years of bearing the calumny was finally perfected (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; on the original expulsion from Alexandria, see The Calumny and Expulsion).

From the Provinces to Athens: 1894

By 1894, enough had changed — whether through the patient advocacy of the official who had secured the Euboea appointment, or through a broader shift in the attitude of the Greek Synod, the sources are not entirely explicit — that Nektarios was offered the directorship of the Rizareios Ecclesiastical School in Athens (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). It was not an episcopal see, and it did not restore him to his rightful rank as a bishop with territorial responsibilities; but it was a position of genuine significance and real influence, and it removed him from the lonely circuit of provincial preaching. He accepted it.

The appointment to the Rizareios in 1894 marked the end of the years of obscurity. The preaching years in Euboea and the provinces left no institutional record of triumph, no correspondence of vindication, no ecclesiastical honor restored. What they left was a man formed, as the tradition reads it, precisely for the work he was about to do: the patient, humble, deeply prayerful formation of a generation of Greek Orthodox clergy (see The Rizareios School).

References

Sanidopoulos, John. A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios. johnsanidopoulos.com (Mystagogy Resource Center). (Arrival in Athens in poverty; rejection of applications; intervention leading to February 1891 appointment; preacher in Euboea, Phthiotis, Phokis; appointment to Rizareios 1894.)
Saint Nektarios of Aegina. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/50001.html). (Calumny from Alexandria; the noncommittal letter of release; rejection by the Holy Synod; the Euboea appointment; the people’s love for him as preacher; his personal ascesis.)
Nectarios of Aegina. Wikipedia. (Dates: expelled from Alexandria 1890; preacher from February 1891; provinces of Euboea, Phthiotis, Phokis; Rizareios 1894. Cross-checked against Sanidopoulos and OrthoChristian.)
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Saint Nektarios of Aegina. goarch.org. (Serenity and absence of bitterness during the poverty years; willingness to accept the preacher role as itself a sign of holiness.)
Matthaiakis, Titos. Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas [The Venerable Nektarios Kephalas]. Athens, 1955. (Greek-language monograph; most detailed account of the preaching years and their spiritual significance; treatment of Phthiotis and Phokis; reading of the obscurity as a school of patience.)