Nicetas of Serres

Saint New Martyr Nicetas of Serres is a new martyr of the Orthodox Church, martyred by hanging at Serres in Macedonia, on the evening of Great Saturday, 4 April 1808. He is the protector of the city of Serres and is commemorated there on Thomas Sunday. The record gives no commemoration day; the sources say Thomas Sunday.

The sources do not agree on his origin. The Greek source says that he was born in Epirus, in Korfoi of Epirus, that is, according to the account, in Corfu; according to the Bulgarian source, by various suppositions, he comes from Trebizond or Epirus, or was born in Albania in a Slavic family. The saint has two services, in Greek and in Church Slavonic, which show differences about his nationality. The Bulgarian source also says that the accounts of the reasons for his resolve vary.

He received the monastic habit in Saint Anne Skete on the Holy Mountain. Later he was ordained deacon and priest in the Athonite monastery of Saint Panteleimon, where he served as priest in turn; then he moved to Saint Anne skete, where he lived in stillness. He went about the surroundings of Drama and Serres and preached before the Turks Christ as true God, either in order to shed his blood for Christ or in order to proclaim Christianity among the Muslims. In a letter of 19 February 1809, of Abbot Constantius of Serres to the abbot of Saint Panteleimon, it is said that on 30 April 1808 Nicetas stopped at the monastery of Saint John the Forerunner in Serres, to prepare for martyrdom; this date does not fit 4 April 1808, the day of the martyrdom.

At Serres he met a Muslim student of religion, lame in both legs. Saint Nicetas told him that he would be healed if he believed in Christ. The young Turk at once told his teacher the saint's words. So the saint was seized and taken to the voivode of Serres, who ordered him imprisoned. The Bulgarian source says that either he appeared directly before the governor of the region and declared that Christ is the true God, cursing Muhammad and Islam, or he came to him only after he had first entered into a religious dispute with local Muslim clerics, because he tried to baptize a lame youth. According to the lives, the governor (or his son) assembled the spiritual court, and Nicetas was enticed and pressed with flattery and heavy tortures to renounce his faith. Failing to break his will, they sentenced him to death by hanging, and the sentence was carried out on Great Saturday, 4 April 1808, at the place called Tzeriach-⁠Pazar in Serres.

Three days after the hanging, the Christians bought his remains (which are said not to have decayed and even to have shone) and buried them, with permission, beside the church of Saint Nicholas, near the hospital above the hotel, behind its sanctuary. Later, the fathers of Saint Anne skete, at the request of Metropolitan Constantius Kardamenis, gave the church of Serres a particle of his relics, which had been kept in the saint's church of the same name.