Nikolaos of Sirikari (b. 1890)

St. Nikephoros the Leper was born Nikolaos Tzanakakis in 1890 in the mountain village of Sirikari in the region of Chania, western Crete. Orphaned young and raised by his grandfather, he left home at about thirteen for the town of Chania, where he was apprenticed to a barber — the ordinary opening of an ordinary poor Cretan life, before leprosy turned it toward sanctity.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (20th-c. Cretan monk; glorified 2012)

Birth and Birthplace

The future saint was born in 1890 in the world as Nikolaos Tzanakakis (Νικόλαος Τζανακάκης), in the village of Sirikari (Σιρικάρι; also transliterated Serikari), in the mountainous Kastanochori country to the west of the prefecture of Chania, on the island of Crete (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, Athens, 2007, as summarized in Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper,” oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Nicephorus the Leper”). The Life describes Sirikari as a healthy upland place of forests, running water, gorges and caves — the memory of a green childhood set deliberately against the ruin the body would later suffer (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org). His birth is placed in the district’s Kostoyiannides neighbourhood; his parents are remembered simply as pious villagers (ibid.).

The birth year is not in dispute in the modern sources, and it is internally consistent: the same tradition that gives 1890 records that he arrived at the Chios leprosarium “at the age of twenty-four” in 1914, and that he reposed in 1964 “at the age of seventy-four” — a life of exactly the span 1890–1964 (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, on St. Nikephoros, orthochristian.com/164755). Because Nikephoros is a saint of the twentieth century, remembered by named witnesses and attached to a documented institution, these dates rest on firmer ground than the back-computed dates typical of ancient hagiography (cf. The Sources for His Life; METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Orphaned and Raised by His Grandfather

Nikolaos’s parents, “simple and pious villagers,” died while he was still a young child, leaving him an orphan (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org). He was taken in and raised by his grandfather (ibid.; Holy Cross Monastery, “The Life of St. Nikephoros the Leper,” holycross.org). Orphanhood is a recurring note in the modern Greek hagiography of the poor: like several of his contemporaries among the recent saints, Nikephoros began life without the ordinary shelter of a household, and the pattern of enduring loss without bitterness — which his witnesses would later see as the substance of his holiness — was set early (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, orthochristian.com/164755).

The sources do not romanticize this childhood or supply pious anecdote for it; they report a bare, hard beginning. Per the repository methodology, the honest course is to say only what the Life attests — an orphan raised by a grandfather in a mountain village — and to resist filling the silence (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Apprenticed to a Barber in Chania

At about the age of thirteen Nikolaos left his grandfather and the village and went down to the town of Chania to earn his living (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org). There he found work in a barber’s shop and began to learn the trade of a barber (ibid.; OrthodoxWiki, “Nicephorus the Leper”). The detail is not incidental. The barber’s trade of the period involved close, sustained physical contact with many clients — precisely the kind of work in which the earliest, still-hidden lesions of Hansen’s disease would be both dangerous to conceal and impossible to hide for long. It is in the barbershop of Chania, the Life records, that “he first showed signs of Hansen’s disease, i.e. leprosy” (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; see The Onset of Leprosy).

The trajectory of these first years is therefore a compressed and ordinary one: an orphan of the Cretan mountains, apprenticed in his early teens to a town trade, standing at the threshold of an unremarkable working life — a life that the disease would break open. The whole significance of the biography lies in what was made of that breaking: not the destruction of a life, but, in the reading of the Church that later glorified him, its redirection. The obscure barber’s apprentice of Chania became the monk Nikephoros of the Lovokomeio, and, through half a century of borne affliction, one of the most-invoked saints of the contemporary Greek Church (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, orthochristian.com/164755; on the glorification see Glorification 2012).

The Cretan Context

Crete in the 1890s and 1900s — where Nikephoros passed his childhood and youth — was a place of poverty, political turbulence (the island moved from Ottoman rule toward autonomy and union with Greece in exactly these years), and, for those who fell ill with leprosy, a specific and dreaded fate: confinement on the fortress-island of Spinalonga off the northeastern coast, which functioned as Crete’s leper colony until 1957 (a fact of Cretan social history; see, generally, the standard accounts of Spinalonga and, on Nikephoros’s flight from it, The Onset of Leprosy). That Nikephoros would flee the island rather than be sent to it is the pivot on which the rest of his life turns, and it belongs to the concrete history of his native place: leprosy in Crete meant Spinalonga, and Spinalonga was what the young Nikolaos ran from (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org).

See Also

References

  • Monk Simon (Monachos Simon). Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience [Νικηφόρος ὁ Λεπρός]. Athens, 2007. (The fullest modern Life; birth in Sirikari 1890; orphaning; the grandfather; the barber’s apprenticeship in Chania; the first signs of leprosy. Not consulted in the Greek original; cited via the English digests below that reproduce its data.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper.” oca.org/saints/lives (synaxarion; birth, orphaning, Chania, the disease, dates).
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Nicephorus the Leper.” orthodoxwiki.org. (Summary life and dates.)
  • “The Life of St. Nikephoros the Leper.” Holy Cross Monastery, holycross.org/blogs/spiritual-articles. (English narrative of the Life.)
  • Metropolitan Neophytos (Masouras) of Morphou. “St. Nikephoros (Tzanakakis) the Leper,” Part 1. orthochristian.com/164755. (Oral memory of the saint; the birthplace Sirikari; the shape of his early affliction.)