Nikodim

Nikodim was a Russian schemamonk on Mount Athos, venerated by the faithful without synodal canonization. He was born in the 1880s in the Ryazan province. He came to Athos still a youth and stayed there until his death. At first he settled in the skete of Thebaid, and then, with the blessing of Saint Silouan, he moved to Karoulia, where the hermits struggled, and was a disciple of an elder for eleven years.

All his life he laboured in unceasing prayer, without boasting of it. His prayer diary reads as if written by a beginner: he calls himself lazy and proud. Yet his words show his spiritual height. He taught that one is guarded against the delusion of the devil by three works: of the mind, self-⁠reproach; of the heart, contrition; of the body, making the sign of the cross with attention and saying the words of prayer with reverence. From these, he said, come tenderness, grace and tears.

Not only Athonite monks came to him for counsel, but people from many countries. The writer Pavel Rak describes his hut clinging to the rock like a swallow's nest. The elder reposed in 1984, at almost one hundred years of age.