Nicholas the Greek

Nicholas the Greek (San Nicola Greco) was archimandrite of the community of Greek-⁠Italian monks at Prata, near Casoli, in Abruzzo. He was born around 910 and died around 13 January 1010, at the age of a hundred. He is venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church and is patron of the town of Guardiagrele. He is not entered in the Roman Martyrology, and our sources give no Orthodox act of canonization, so we present him here as a locally venerated saint in Italy.

In the Byzantine Empire, in the eighth century, because of the struggle against icons, many communities of monks from Constantinople settled in southern Italy (Sicily, Calabria), giving rise to Italo-⁠Greek monasticism. The raids of the Saracens in the tenth century threatened the survival of these communities. In 977, under the guidance of Archimandrite Hilarion, a group of twenty-⁠eight monks from the monasteries of Saint Martin sought refuge in the Sannio region. Many monks preferred to withdraw as hermits into the mountains of Molise. Archimandrite Hilarion and seven of his disciples, among them Nicholas, settled in Abruzzo. There they bought the castle of Prata, near Casoli, where the old monastery of Montecassino lay.

Abbot Hilarion, out of humility, had not chosen a successor, so when he reposed the monks could not choose a new abbot. For the choice they followed a procedure in which each held a vessel on the bank of the river Aventino and waited until a fish entered one of them. The one in whose vessel the fish came was to be the new abbot. So Nicholas was elected abbot. His life was marked by works of charity and by spiritual life. He died at the age of a hundred in the monastery of Prata, probably on 13 January, in the time of Pope Sergius IV (1009 to 1012).

On 9 August 1343 Napoleone Orsini, count of Manoppello, moved the saint's body from Prata to Guardiagrele, to the church of Saint Francis, which from then on was also dedicated to Saint Nicholas the Greek, as shown by a plaque on the inner wall of the main facade of the church. The saint's relics lay in an old wooden box under the Holy Table of the church, and on 16 May 1890 they were moved to a reliquary of carved wood, on the initiative of the archbishop of Chieti, Rocco Cocchia. His commemoration is kept at Guardiagrele on the third Sunday of May. In the Orthodox cathedral of Michalovce, in Slovakia, seat of the metropolis of Michalovce and Košice, a particle of the relics of Saint Nicholas the Greek is kept, given to the metropolis through the efforts of Metropolitan George.