The Lovokomeio of Chios

In 1914, at about twenty-four, Nikolaos Tzanakakis entered the Lovokomeio — the leprosarium of Chios — a walled complex of small houses with a chapel of St. Lazarus at its centre. Within about two years he was tonsured a monk with the name Nikephoros by the leprosarium’s chaplain, Father Anthimos (Vagianos), the future St. Anthimos of Chios. This was the beginning of a monastic life that would last half a century.

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

Entry to the Leprosarium, c. 1914

The leprosarium of Chios — in Greek the Lovokomeio (Λωβοκομεῖο, “house of the lepers”; from lóva/lóvos, an older Greek word for leprosy) — received Nikolaos in 1914, when he was about twenty-four years old, after his flight through Alexandria (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, Athens, 2007, via Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper,” oca.org; on the flight, see The Onset of Leprosy). [Disputed: a minority summary gives his entry to the Chios colony as 1912; the fuller Life and the OCA synaxarion give 1914, the year followed here (OrthodoxWiki, "Nicephorus the Leper"; oca.org).]

The Lovokomeio was not a single ward but, as the Life describes it, a complex of many small houses (homesteads) within which the patients lived — a walled village of the segregated sick (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org). At its heart stood a chapel dedicated to St. Lazarus — the friend of Christ raised from the dead (John 11), and, in later Western and Eastern usage alike, a patron associated with lepers — in which was kept a wonderworking icon of the Mother of God, the Panagia Ypakoë (“Our Lady of Obedience”) (ibid.; Holy Cross Monastery, “The Life of St. Nikephoros the Leper,” holycross.org). It was in this chapel and its liturgical life, the Life says, that “the course of virtues was opened” for the young Nikolaos — the leprosarium becoming, for him, less a prison than a monastery (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org).

A Leprosarium That Was a Spiritual Centre

What made this possible was the man who served the Chios leprosarium as chaplain: Father Anthimos Vagianos (1869–1960), later canonized as St. Anthimos of Chios. After a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, Anthimos had returned to Chios and become chaplain to the leper hospital, and under his care the institution — which had, the accounts say, fallen into moral and spiritual disorder — was transformed into a place of prayer and healing, its chaplain tending the sickest patients with his own hands (Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Anthimus of Chios,” oca.org; on Anthimos as Nikephoros’s spiritual father, see Monastic Life Among the Sick). Nikolaos thus arrived not at a mere holding-station for the incurable but at a functioning ascetic community with a saint at its head — the decisive good fortune, humanly speaking, of his life.

Tonsure as Nikephoros

Under Anthimos’s direction Nikolaos advanced quickly in the ascetic life, and his chaplain judged him ready for the monastic tonsure. He was clothed in the angelic schema and received the name Nikephoros (Νικηφόρος, “bearer of victory”) — a name whose meaning his witnesses would find providential in one who bore the “victory” of patience over an unconquerable disease (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, “St. Nikephoros the Leper,” Part 1, orthochristian.com/164755).

[Disputed: the year of tonsure. Some English digests state that Nikolaos was "tonsured with the name Nikephoros in 1914," conflating the tonsure with the year of entry. The fuller Life is more precise: it records that Anthimos judged him ready and tonsured him "within two years" of his arrival — i.e. c. 1915–1916 (Monk Simon, *Nikephoros the Leper*, 2007, via oca.org, which reads: "Within two years Saint Anthimos considered him ready for the angelic Schema and tonsured him with the name Nikephoros"). This collection treats the entry (1914) and the tonsure (c. 1916) as distinct events and does not assert a single 1914 tonsure as fact.]

The tonsure changed the meaning of everything that followed. Nikephoros was no longer merely a patient serving out an illness in confinement but a monk under obedience, whose leprosarium was his monastery, whose fellow-patients were his brotherhood, and whose incurable disease became the material of a deliberate ascesis (see Monastic Life Among the Sick and Unceasing Prayer in Affliction).

The Chapel, the Chanting, and the Coming Blindness

Within the liturgical life centred on the chapel of St. Lazarus, Nikephoros took his place as a chanter. As the disease advanced and began to attack his eyes, he continued to serve: the Life records that he came to chant the troparia and the Epistle readings from memory, when his sight failed him — a detail his witnesses cherished as an image of a soul so filled with the services that it no longer needed to see the page (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; on the blindness, see Blindness and Total Affliction).

He lived in the Lovokomeio for more than four decades — from 1914 until the colony’s closure in 1957 — the longest and formative period of his life (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; on the transfer, see Transfer to Saint Barbara (1957)). It was in these years, under Anthimos and among the sick, that the obscure barber’s apprentice became the ascetic whose radiance the next generation of witnesses would report.

See Also

References

  • Monk Simon (Monachos Simon). Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience. Athens, 2007. (Entry to the Lovokomeio 1914; the complex of houses; the chapel of St. Lazarus and the Panagia Ypakoë icon; the tonsure “within two years” as Nikephoros; the chanting from memory. Cited via the English digests below.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper.” oca.org/saints/lives. (Synaxarion; Chios 1914; the chapel; the tonsure; the chanting.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Anthimus of Chios.” oca.org/saints/lives. (Anthimos as chaplain who reformed the Chios leper hospital.)
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Nicephorus the Leper.” orthodoxwiki.org. (Summary life; the 1912 entry variant.)
  • “The Life of St. Nikephoros the Leper.” Holy Cross Monastery, holycross.org. (English narrative of the Life.)
  • Metropolitan Neophytos (Masouras) of Morphou. “St. Nikephoros (Tzanakakis) the Leper,” Part 1. orthochristian.com/164755. (The name Nikephoros; the tonsure under Anthimos.)