Nikodim of Karoulia

Nikodim of Karoulia was a Russian schemamonk, born in the 1880s in Ryazan province, who came young to Athos and remained there until his repose in 1984, at almost a hundred years of age. He is venerated by the faithful, without a synodal canonization.

He first settled in the skete of Thebaid, then, with the blessing of St Silouan, moved to Karoulia, where he entered the obedience of the well-⁠known learned hermit elder Theodosios (Kharitonov). All his life he laboured in unceasing prayer and advanced greatly in it, yet he never boasted or showed his spiritual level. His prayer diary, in which he speaks mostly of his own faults, might be taken for the writing of a beginner. In one entry he writes that he had lived eleven years with his elder and had still not acquired true obedience, being proud and lazy.

He taught that whoever wishes to be rid of the delusion of the demons needs three things: self-⁠reproach of the mind, contrition of the heart, and sealing the body with the sign of the cross and saying the prayer attentively. For his sincere repentance, the narrator says, he was granted the gift of unceasing prayer. Athonite monks and people from all over the world came to him, and one writer describes him as an old man, a great faster and man of prayer, in a hut clinging to the rock like a swallow's nest, one of the last Russians of Athos who had left their homeland before the First World War.