The Onset of Leprosy

The first lesions of Hansen’s disease appeared on Nikolaos while he was a young barber’s apprentice in Chania. To escape confinement on Spinalonga, Crete’s leper island, he fled at about sixteen to Alexandria in Egypt, where the disease worsened; there, with the help of a clergyman, he was directed toward the leprosarium of Chios — the flight that opened the whole of his monastic and saintly life.

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

The First Signs

The disease that would name him for the Church — leprosy, Hansen’s disease — first declared itself while Nikolaos was still an adolescent working in the barber’s shop in Chania (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, Athens, 2007, via Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper,” oca.org). The Life reports simply that “it was then that he first showed signs of Hansen’s disease” (ibid.). Hansen’s disease is a chronic infection of the peripheral nerves and skin by Mycobacterium leprae; in its untreated course over the early twentieth century it produced the disfiguring lesions, loss of sensation, and progressive destruction of the extremities and the face that the word “leper” evoked and that Nikephoros would bear for the rest of his life (on the medical reality and the absence of effective drugs before the sulfones of the 1940s, see Blindness and Total Affliction).

For a young man in Crete at the turn of the century, the appearance of such signs carried a specific and terrible social consequence, and it is against that consequence that the next events of his life must be read.

The Fear of Spinalonga

Crete’s lepers were, in this period, isolated on the small fortress-island of Spinalonga, off the northeastern coast — a place whose name became a byword for the living death of segregation, and which operated as a leper colony until 1957 (a fact of Cretan social history; see the standard accounts of Spinalonga). The young Nikolaos, the Life says explicitly, did not want to be shut up on Spinalonga, and it was to avoid that fate that he made the decisive move of his youth (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Nicephorus the Leper”). The detail matters for understanding the man: his first response to the disease was not the heroic acceptance for which he would later be venerated but the wholly human flight of a frightened teenager from confinement and shame. Sanctity, in his case, was not a starting condition but the fruit of a long labour begun in fear.

Flight to Alexandria

At about the age of sixteen — that is, around 1906 — Nikolaos left Crete for Alexandria, in Egypt, where a large Greek community then lived, precisely because the symptoms of his illness “were becoming more and more conspicuous” and could no longer be hidden at home (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org). In Egypt he supported himself and tried to live with the advancing disease, but it continued to worsen (ibid.; Holy Cross Monastery, “The Life of St. Nikephoros the Leper,” holycross.org).

The Alexandrian episode is the most sparsely documented stretch of the biography, and the sources say little beyond the bare fact of the flight, the worsening of the disease, and — crucially — the intervention of a churchman. Per the repository methodology, the honest treatment is to report exactly that thin outline and no more (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Clergyman and the Turn Toward Chios

The hinge of the flight — the point at which a frightened runaway’s story becomes the story of a monk — is the meeting with a clergyman in Egypt. It was “with the help of a clergyman,” the Life records, that Nikolaos left Alexandria for the island of Chios, where a leprosarium existed that was not a place of mere confinement but, under its remarkable chaplain, a spiritual community (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Nicephorus the Leper”). The sources name the destination — the leper hospital of Chios — and the outcome — his entry there in 1914 — without always supplying the clergyman’s name; the essential point they preserve is that the redirection of his life toward Chios came through the Church, not through the state’s machinery of segregation (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; see The Lovokomeio of Chios).

[Disputed: the year of entry to the Chios leprosarium. Most modern digests of the Life give 1914 (Nikephoros then aged twenty-four), consistent with a birth in 1890 and a flight to Egypt at about sixteen (Monk Simon, *Nikephoros the Leper*, 2007, via oca.org; OrthodoxWiki). A minority summary gives his admission to the Chios colony as 1912. This collection follows the 1914 date as the better-attested and internally consistent figure, and notes the 1912 variant.]

From Fear to the Beginning of Ascesis

The theological weight the tradition places on this section is the transformation of motive. Nikolaos came to Chios fleeing a fate; he stayed to become a monk. What began as the evasion of Spinalonga ended as the voluntary embrace of a leper’s life offered to God — and the whole of his later reputation for the “joy” of affliction is unintelligible without this starting point in ordinary human dread. His witnesses would later frame the disease itself as the providential instrument of his salvation, the cross that made the resurrection; but they were careful to remember that the cross was first simply feared, as any man fears it (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, “St. Nikephoros the Leper,” Part 1, orthochristian.com/164755, on the disease as the saint’s providential cross; on St. Anthimos’s counsel “the greater the cross, the greater the resurrection,” see Monastic Life Among the Sick).

See Also

• Nikolaos of Sirikari (b. 1890) — the childhood and the barber’s trade in which the disease appeared
• The Lovokomeio of Chios — the leprosarium the clergyman directed him toward
• Blindness and Total Affliction — the medical course of the untreated disease
• Legacy — leprosy, hidden sanctity, and the theology of redemptive suffering

References

• Monk Simon (Monachos Simon). Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience. Athens, 2007. (The onset of the disease in Chania; the fear of Spinalonga; the flight to Alexandria at c. sixteen; the clergyman and the turn toward Chios; entry to Chios in 1914. Cited via the English digests below.)
• Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper.” oca.org/saints/lives. (Synaxarion: the disease, the flight to Egypt, the clergyman, Chios 1914.)
• OrthodoxWiki. “Nicephorus the Leper.” orthodoxwiki.org. (Summary life; the 1912 admission variant.)
• “The Life of St. Nikephoros the Leper.” Holy Cross Monastery, holycross.org. (English narrative.)
• Metropolitan Neophytos (Masouras) of Morphou. “St. Nikephoros (Tzanakakis) the Leper,” Part 1. orthochristian.com/164755. (The disease as providential cross; the transformation of the saint’s affliction.)