Transfer to Saint Barbara (1957)

When the leprosarium of Chios was closed in 1957, its remaining patients — Father Nikephoros among them — were transferred to the Saint Barbara Antileprosy Station at Aigaleo in western Athens. There, in a humble cell, the blind and disfigured monk of Chios spent the last seven years of his life and became known to the wider circle of Athenian witnesses who would carry his memory to the whole Church.

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

The Closure of the Chios Leprosarium

By the mid-1950s the segregation of lepers on isolated colonies was being wound down across Greece — the Cretan colony of Spinalonga also closed in 1957 — as effective sulfone chemotherapy (from the later 1940s) made the old model of lifelong island quarantine both medically unnecessary and increasingly indefensible (a fact of Greek public-health history; on the drug, see Monastic Life Among the Sick and Blindness and Total Affliction). In this general closure the Chios leprosarium was shut in 1957, and its remaining patients were moved to the mainland (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, Athens, 2007, via Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper,” oca.org).

For Nikephoros this meant the end of the only community he had known as an adult. He had entered the Lovokomeio about 1914 and had lived there for more than forty years; the closure uprooted a man now in his late sixties, blind and severely disfigured, from the chapel of St. Lazarus and the brotherhood of the sick that had formed him; his spiritual father St. Anthimos, still living on Chios in 1957, would repose there in 1960, so that the move also separated the monk from his aged confessor (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; on the Chios years, see The Lovokomeio of Chios).

The Saint Barbara Antileprosy Station, Aigaleo

The remaining Chios patients, together with Father Nikephoros, were sent to the Saint Barbara home for lepers — the Antileprosy Station (Antileprikós Stathmós) at Aigaleo (Agía Varvára), in western Athens (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; Holy Cross Monastery, “The Life of St. Nikephoros the Leper,” holycross.org). The station at Aigaleo was Greece’s principal mainland institution for the treatment of Hansen’s disease, and it is the setting of the final and best-witnessed phase of Nikephoros’s life (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, “St. Nikephoros the Leper,” Part 1, orthochristian.com/164755). At the time of the transfer Nikephoros was approximately sixty-seven years old, his body, the accounts say, already severely disfigured by four decades of untreated disease (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org).

The Cell and the Gathering of the Faithful

At Aigaleo, Nikephoros lived in a small, poor cell within the station. It is here that the tradition locates the beginning of his reputation for holiness beyond the walls of the leprosaria: the accounts record that people — patients, staff, and visitors — began to gather at the cell of the blind leper to ask his prayers, drawn by a radiance and a gift of consolation that seemed to them at odds with the ruin of his body (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, orthochristian.com/164755; on the reported gifts, pinned to their attestation, see The Fragrance of Holiness). The move that had uprooted him thus also, in the tradition’s reading, brought him into the open: the hidden ascetic of Chios became, in his last years at Aigaleo, a spiritual father sought out by many.

The Decisive Meeting with Eumenios

The Athens transfer is also the occasion of the single most important relationship of Nikephoros’s last years — and the one that would secure his memory. It was at the Saint Barbara station, shortly after the 1957 transfer, that Nikephoros encountered the younger Cretan leper Constantine (later the monk-priest Eumenios) Saridakis, who became his novice, spiritual son, and closest attendant for the remaining seven years, and who would become the chief eyewitness to his life (Wikipedia, “Evmenios Saridakis,” citing the Greek Life; Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, orthochristian.com/164914; see The Disciple Eumenios Saridakis). That a saint who spent forty years hidden on an island should, in his last seven years on the mainland, acquire precisely the disciple who would later be glorified himself and would transmit his master’s memory, is the providential hinge on which the whole later history of the cult turns (see The Sources for His Life).

A Note on the Chronology

The 1957 transfer date is well and consistently attested across the sources, and it is anchored to a documented institutional event — the closure of the Chios colony — rather than to hagiographic memory alone (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Nicephorus the Leper”). It is one of the fixed points of the biography, and, with the birth (1890), the entry to Chios (1914), and the repose (1964), it frames the four datable stages of the life: Crete, Alexandria, Chios (1914–1957), and Athens (1957–1964).

References

Monk Simon (Monachos Simon). Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience. Athens, 2007. (Closure of the Chios leprosarium 1957; transfer to the Saint Barbara station at Aigaleo; the disfigurement; the cell and the gathering faithful. Cited via the English digests below.)
Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper.” oca.org/saints/lives. (The 1957 closure and transfer to Saint Barbara, Aigaleo.)
“The Life of St. Nikephoros the Leper.” Holy Cross Monastery, holycross.org. (English narrative; the Athens station.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Nicephorus the Leper.” orthodoxwiki.org. (Chronology.)
Wikipedia. “Evmenios Saridakis.” en.wikipedia.org. (Eumenios’s meeting with Nikephoros shortly after the 1957 transfer; Nikephoros as his elder and confessor for seven years until 1964.)
Metropolitan Neophytos (Masouras) of Morphou. “St. Nikephoros (Tzanakakis) the Leper,” Parts 1–2. orthochristian.com/164755, /164914. (The Aigaleo cell; the faithful; Eumenios.)