Nicholas of Grigoriou

Nicholas of Grigoriou, a hieromonk, with the family name Kantaros, was born on 10 June 1911 in the village of Kaparelli in the Mantineia district of Arcadia. He was the fourth of the ten children of his pious parents, Evangelos and Vasiliki. His elder brothers prospered in Tripoli by preparing and selling dairy products, known to this day under the name "Kantaros Brothers." Little Constantine showed a particular inclination for learning; therefore he was the first pupil at the primary school, which he finished in his village. He had the same success at the gymnasium of Tegea. But he did not go on to higher studies, despite repeated urgings by his teacher, Dounoukos, to his father.

Once an Athonite monk came to the villages of Tegea, a native of the village of Vouno in Tegea, named Averkios, who lived in a cell at Karyes. He became acquainted with the young Constantine Kantaros and took him to the Holy Mountain in 1929, at eighteen, after promising to help him study at the Athoniada School. Instead of finding himself in the benches of the School, he found himself in the stalls of a small Karyes monastery, where he was tonsured a monk. The little monastery was the cell of the Archangels. There, in a small company, he began his monastic struggles, because he believed the words told him, that the greatest goal of man is the salvation of his soul. But he never forgot his secret desire for learning and culture.

In this cell lived together six brothers, with the monk Averkios as elder. The others were Father George, Father Gabriel, the monks Neophytos and Kosmas, and last himself. Besides their monastic duties, which they performed strictly, they also engaged in agriculture. Their elder, the monk Averkios, did not yield on the order of the daily services and on their personal prayer rule. Especially Great Lent they spent, according to the order, without oil except on Saturday and Sunday, regardless of whether someone in the company was ill, frail or weak. There was no room for economy. Therefore he said to his monks: "Better that I bury you than lead you to damnation by trampling the fasts of our Church." In their time, 1935, the monk's rule was fixed for all: he had to make 300 full prostrations every day.

A fellow monk relates that Father Nicholas had many table clocks, some wound with a key, others newer, electronic. He set them all, about ten, so that each would go off every ten minutes, about two hours before the start of the service. For every safety, in case sleep took him after so many alarms, he also told his neighbouring brother; therefore in the end the latter woke him and urged him to be, like himself, in church on time. The account stops here, being the beginning of a longer work. The year of his repose is not known. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.