Nicholas of Tmutarakan

Holy Hierarch Nicholas of Tmutarakan was the first bishop of the former diocese of Tmutarakan, at the end of the eleventh century.

He is mentioned in the epistle of Bishop Simon of Vladimir to Polycarp, a monk of the Kiev Caves Monastery, and in the life of Saint Nikita, bishop of Novgorod. History shows that a bishop was consecrated at Kiev for Tmutarakan, the former capital of some princes of Rus, at the end of the eleventh century, but the diocese perished from its very beginning, because of the invasion of the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians. His memory is kept on 3 October (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Kuban Metropolis, in the new style.