Founders of Varlaam Monastery

Saints Nektarios and Theophanes, the Founders of Varlaam Monastery at Meteora (Barlaam), were brothers and hieromonks of the distinguished Apsarades family of Ioannina, born in the late fifteenth century. Their parents and three sisters also took the monastic schema. The two brothers received an excellent education at the Philanthropinon monastery. In time they went to a hermitage of the Honorable Forerunner on the island of Ioannina, where an elder named Savvas gave them the monastic schema in 1495. They remained with him ten years, until his repose on 9 April 1505.

Then they went to Athos, where they were received by the former Ecumenical Patriarch Nephon II, living as a monk at Dionysiou. He blessed their wish for solitude but advised them to return to Ioannina. There they settled in a cave above the lake, in the hermitage of Saint Panteleimon, and built the church of the Honorable Forerunner, finished in 1507. At Lepenos they also built a hermitage of Saint Nicholas for their parents and sisters, which later became a dependency of Barlaam.

They were afterwards tried by temptations that came from ecclesiastical and civil authorities, not from the Turks. Remembering the advice of Nephon, after four years they left the monastery and went, about 1510-1511, to Meteora, where they lived seven years on the pillar of the Forerunner. This being too narrow and swept by wind, they moved in October 1517 or 1518 to the rock called Barlaam, after a hermit who had lived there centuries before. They restored the cells and the ruined church of the Three Hierarchs. With exhausting labour and the help of their disciples Benedict and Pachomios, they laid the foundation of the church of All Saints in 1542, and it was completed on Saturday, 17 May 1544.

Theophanes had been bedridden for ten months. That evening, according to tradition, a bright star stood over his cell and he departed to the Lord. Nektarios reposed six years later, on 7 April 1550, the second day of Renewal Week. Their tomb and relics (the right hand of Nektarios and the left hand of Theophanes) are a source of strength for the monks of the monastery and for visitors. They are remembered on 17 May.