The Repose of St. Nektarios (8 November 1920)

The final illness, death at the Aretaeion Hospital in Athens on the evening of 8 November 1920, and the immediate posthumous wonders attested in the earliest accounts: the healing of a paralytic in the hospital ward when the saint’s garment was laid on his bed, and the fragrant, largely incorrupt body that was received by the Holy Trinity Convent on Aegina and venerated for decades thereafter.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The Final Illness and the Journey to Athens

By the summer of 1920, St. Nektarios Kephalas — retired since 1908 from the directorship of the Rizareios Ecclesiastical School, and living at the convent of the Holy Trinity on Aegina which he had founded — was visibly failing. He had been suffering for some time from what the sources describe as a serious ailment of the prostate, possibly carcinoma, a condition that had been steadily worsening through the preceding months (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html; A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com). He bore the pain with the characteristic reticence of his later years — the same inward endurance that had marked his response to the slanders and ecclesiastical injuries of the 1890s — and the nuns of the convent, who served him as daughters, were the principal witnesses to the degree of his suffering (see Bearing It in Silence).

When his condition became critical, the decision was made to transfer him to Athens for medical treatment. The journey from Aegina — the small island in the Saronic Gulf where he had spent his last years — to the capital required crossing the gulf by boat and then making the passage through the city, an ordeal for a man in severe pain. According to accounts preserved in the convent tradition and summarized by Sanidopoulos, Nektarios made the journey without complaint and arrived at the Aretaeion Hospital (Greek: Αρεταίειον Νοσοκομείο, commonly transliterated Aretaieio), the university clinic associated with the University of Athens, which received him as a patient (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The Hospital Ward: Two Months

He would remain in the hospital for approximately two months. The ward into which he was placed was a general ward — not a private room — and this detail becomes significant in the account of his death, because it meant that he lay among other patients, in proximity to men suffering from their own ailments. In the neighboring bed, according to the accounts preserved in the Lives and the convent’s own oral tradition, lay a man who had been paralyzed for years, unable to walk or care for himself (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; “Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/98838.html).

What occurred in the ward during those weeks — whether there was direct encounter or conversation between the saint and this man, whether the paralytic knew who his neighbor was — is not recorded with precision in the sources available. What the tradition does record is what happened on the night of the saint’s death.

The Evening of 8 November 1920

St. Nektarios reposed on the evening of 8 November 1920. The sources give the time as the evening hours; the feast of his repose and his liturgical commemoration is observed on 9 November, following the standard Orthodox practice when a saint dies in the evening (Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia, cross-checked against OrthoChristian.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com). He was seventy-four years old.

The immediate circumstances of his death are described in the Lives without elaboration. He died in the hospital ward, in the presence of the medical staff and, according to some accounts, of at least some of the nuns from the convent who had accompanied him to Athens or had come to care for him (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos). The accounts do not record last words in the mode of some hagiographical Lives — no final pronouncement or vision — but several sources note that he died peacefully, having received the Holy Mysteries (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The First Miracle: The Paralytic Healed

According to the account recorded in Saint Nektarios of Aegina (OrthoChristian.com) and in the convent tradition summarized by Sanidopoulos (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com), the first miracle attributed to the saint occurred within minutes of his death, in the hospital ward itself.

When the nurses and attending staff moved to prepare the body, they removed the saint’s outer clothing — described in the sources as his undershirt or a simple woolen garment he had worn — and, in the ordinary course of clearing the space around the bed, laid it on the adjacent bed where the paralytic patient lay. According to these accounts, the paralytic immediately rose from his bed. He had been unable to walk; he walked. The accounts describe the event as sudden and inexplicable to those present, and it is consistently identified in the hagiographical tradition as the first recorded miracle of St. Nektarios (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; “Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/98838.html; Titos Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Athens, 1955).

This account is attested in the early written Lives and is the most consistently reported of the immediate posthumous wonders. It follows the pattern of healings through contact with the garments of the saints found throughout the hagiographical tradition — cf. Acts 19:12 on cloths and aprons carried from Paul — though the sources present it as an event witnessed by the hospital staff rather than a theological inference. The earliest sustained written documentation is Matthaiakis’s 1955 biography, composed within living memory of the events and drawing on testimony from those present in the convent and, reportedly, from persons connected with the hospital (Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Matthaiakis, 1955, cited via Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com).

The Fragrance in the Ward

A second immediately attested phenomenon is the fragrance. According to multiple accounts in the Lives, from the first minutes after the saint’s death the body began to exude a sweet, unaccountable fragrance — not the smell of medicines or of death, but a scent described as floral or as resembling myrrh (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina, agiosnektarios-monastery.gr). The body remained in the hospital ward for approximately eleven hours before it was removed. According to these accounts, the fragrance persisted throughout this period and was noticed by the hospital staff and by visitors (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The sweet fragrance of a saint’s relics — what the tradition calls euodia — is one of the classic signs recognized in Orthodox hagiography as accompanying sanctity. The accounts do not present clinical evidence and are not put forward here as historical proof; they are presented as attested tradition, first recorded in the early Lives and consistently reproduced in the convent’s own memory. The earliest written attestation remains Matthaiakis (1955); the convent’s account is available on the Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina website (agiosnektarios-monastery.gr).

Return to Aegina: The Burial

The body of St. Nektarios was transported from Athens back to Aegina and received at the convent of the Holy Trinity — the community he had founded, whose nuns were his spiritual daughters — where it was accorded the full honor of the monastic burial rites. He was interred on the grounds of the convent (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina, agiosnektarios-monastery.gr).

The burial itself was simple in the manner consistent with his life. Nektarios had always lived without ostentation: the nuns who cared for him in his final years on Aegina were accustomed to his giving away what little he possessed, his wearing of old and patched clothing, his refusal of comfort when discomfort was available. The man who died in a general ward of a public hospital rather than seeking private accommodation died as he had lived; and he was buried among the community he had served, on the island that had sheltered him, in the grounds of the convent that remained his principal legacy (see Founding Holy Trinity).

The convent thus became, from the day of his burial, a place of pilgrimage. Accounts from the subsequent months and years describe a steady stream of visitors — the sick, the desperate, those who had known him in life and those who had only heard of him — coming to pray at the grave. The fragrance, according to these accounts, did not cease with his death; visitors and nuns alike reported perceiving it at the grave, and this continuance became one of the earliest signs around which popular veneration crystallized (see The Modern Veneration).

The grave became the focal point of a popular devotion that the Greek Orthodox Church had not yet officially authorized. This is an important structural observation: for the four decades between 1920 and his glorification in 1961, all veneration of Nektarios was informal, driven by the testimony of the nuns, the accounts of pilgrims, and the spreading word of reported healings. The institutional Church neither endorsed nor suppressed it; the people simply came. It is the pattern the Orthodox tradition has repeatedly followed with its saints, and it is why the glorification of 1961 was received not as an innovation but as a confirmation.

The Fragrant and Largely Incorrupt Relics

The most doctrinally significant of the posthumous signs is the reported condition of the saint’s remains when the grave was subsequently opened. According to accounts recorded in the convent tradition and summarized by Sanidopoulos (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com) and on the Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina website (agiosnektarios-monastery.gr), when the grave was opened — as is the practice in Greek Orthodox tradition, when the time came for the translation of the bones — the body was found to have remained substantially incorrupt and the fragrance was perceived with renewed intensity by the nuns and those present at the translation.

The exact timing of the opening of the grave and the full translation of the bones is subject to some variation in the sources. [Disputed: Sanidopoulos (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com) states that the relics remained substantially intact for an extended period, while the Holy Trinity Monastery account (agiosnektarios-monastery.gr) gives details of the translation without specifying an exact year; other accounts suggest the bones were fully translated sometime in the years following his glorification in 1961, but no source consulted gives a single verified year for the final translation.] What the sources agree on is the condition discovered at opening — fragrance, substantial incorruption — and the reaction of the community, which received the discovery as a confirmation of the holiness they had venerated since his death.

The incorrupt or partially incorrupt state of the body, like the fragrance, is presented here as attested tradition sourced in the convent community, not as a certified material fact. The relics — including the skull, which is accorded particular veneration — are kept at the Holy Trinity Convent on Aegina to the present day (see Glorification 1961).

The Significance of the Deathbed Pattern

It is worth observing what the accounts, taken together, describe. Nektarios died poor, in a hospital ward, among other patients, without ceremony or public recognition. He had spent the last decades of his life under a cloud of slander that was never officially lifted in his lifetime (see The Calumny and Expulsion); the Patriarchate of Alexandria, which had dismissed him without a hearing in 1890, did not restore him posthumously until 1998. He died, in the reckoning of the ecclesiastical institutions that had judged him, as a retired metropolitan of no fixed see, in reduced circumstances.

The very poverty of his death is part of what the tradition has made meaningful. For those who venerate him, the contrast between institutional dismissal in life and miraculous vindication in death is not an irony to be overcome but a theme to be read theologically. The saint who bore calumny in silence — who reportedly never complained about those who had wronged him, who tore up letters of self-defense unread — bore his final illness in the same register, and the healings that followed the moment of his death are read in the tradition as the response of God to a life of unrewarded righteousness. The pattern belongs to a long line: Joseph sold into Egypt; the prophets stoned; the desert fathers dismissed as fools. Nektarios enters that tradition not as a theologian describing it but as a man who lived it into the twentieth century.

What the accounts of his death describe — the healing of the paralytic, the fragrance in the ward, the fragrance at the grave, the incorruption — is precisely the pattern by which the tradition of the Church has repeatedly recognized its saints: not in triumph but in the vindication that comes after. The first to perceive it were not bishops or theologians but hospital nurses, and a paralyzed man who walked. That the glorification did not come until 1961, and the formal apology from Alexandria not until 1998, are the last chapters of the same story; the first chapter was written in the hospital ward on the evening of 8 November 1920.

References

Saint Nektarios of Aegina. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/50001.html). Comprehensive English-language Life; covers the final illness, the Aretaeion Hospital, the healing of the paralytic, the fragrance, and the burial on Aegina.
Sanidopoulos, John. A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios. Mystagogy Resource Center, johnsanidopoulos.com. Summary of the principal hagiographical tradition; covers the prostate ailment, the transfer to Athens, and the posthumous signs.
“Do you want to see an angel?” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/98838.html). Extended account of the saint’s death and the healing of the paralytic.
Matthaiakis, Titos. Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas [The Venerable Nektarios Kephalas]. Athens, 1955. The earliest sustained biographical treatment within living memory of the events; the primary source for the hospital accounts in the later Lives.
Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina. Official website: agiosnektarios-monastery.gr. Convent’s own account of the saint’s burial, the fragrance, and the condition of the relics.
Nectarios of Aegina. Wikipedia. Used for cross-checking dates (repose 8 November 1920; feast 9 November; glorification 20 April 1961); not cited as terminal authority.
Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria (15 September 1998). Available: orthodoxphotos.com/readings/nektarios/decision.shtml. (The 1998 restoration of his ecclesiastical order — the posthumous close of the 1890 injustice — is noted here as context; it is treated in full in Glorification 1961.)