Nicetas the Stylite of Pereslavl

Saint Nicetas the Stylite was a twelfth-⁠century Russian monk who founded the monastery of Saint Nicetas on the eastern shore of Lake Pleshcheyevo in Zalesye, near Pereslavl. He was killed on 16 May 1186. The Church remembers him on 24 May, and on 23 May in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl.

He was a native of Pereslavl-⁠Zalessky and in youth, married, led a dissolute life. As his Life says, he was a friend of tax collectors and gathered dues and taxes, growing rich by plundering the inhabitants. In 1152 Yuri Dolgoruky moved the city of Pereslavl to a new site and ordered a harsher collection of taxes. Nikita, who directed the collection, robbed the people, appropriating great sums. Once he entered a church where words from the book of the prophet Isaiah were being read: "Wash you, make you clean." The words touched him so deeply that he resolved to leave his sinful life. According to tradition, that night he did not sleep, and in the morning, as his wife prepared a meal for guests, she saw in the boiling cauldron now a human head, now a hand, now a foot. Nikita saw the same, his conscience awoke, and he understood that by his exactions he acted as a murderer. He ran from the house crying: "Woe to me, I have sinned much. Lord, guide me on Thy way." He left home and family and went to the monastery of the Holy Great Martyr Nicetas, three versts from Pereslavl, where the abbot tested him by ordering him to stand three days at the monastery gate and confess his sins to all who passed.

He was tonsured and led a severe life: he put on heavy iron chains, some lighter on his body, others, weighing some forty kilograms, over his clothes, and shut himself in a stone pillar in which, until death, he spent day and night in labours, fasting and prayer, asking forgiveness for his sins with the words: "Master Christ the King, have mercy on me who have fallen." For his life of struggle and repentance he received from God the gift of miracles. The report spread, and pilgrims came from everywhere, among them Prince Michael Vsevolodovich of Chernigov, paralysed, father of the Venerable Euphrosyne of Suzdal, whom Nikita healed.

On the night of 16 May 1186 robbers, thinking his chains were of silver, killed him and took them. When they saw they were iron, they threw them into the Volga. It is told that the monks of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in Yaroslavl saw three rays of light above the river and found the chains floating. The saint appeared in a dream to the old monk Simeon, telling him to lay the chains beside his relics. The monks carried them to his tomb at Pereslavl. He is also called a venerable martyr.