Nikon Strandtman

Nikon Strandtman was a Russian hieroschemamonk, a former guards colonel who became a hermit on Karoulia on Mount Athos. He reposed on 20 September 1963, at nearly ninety. He is venerated by the faithful, without a synodal canonization.

He was born in 1873. He began as an officer in the Emperor's Life Guards, took part in the Russo-⁠Japanese war and the First World War, was wounded, served as adjutant to Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich and ended his service as a colonel. Like many Russian refugees, he came to Yugoslavia, where he was tonsured in a monastery in Serbia. By the end of the 1930s at the latest he had settled on Athos, in one of the harshest places, Karoulia, in the hut of St George, where the terrain itself makes one a recluse. He spoke five languages fluently.

Archimandrite Cherubim Karambelas mentions him twice. On one visit, when Cherubim was a young novice, the old man came to meet him with a smiling face and unusual kindness and bowed first before him, so quickly that the young man had no time to kiss his feet; Cherubim was left thinking that he had seen a heavenly man still on earth. Elder Gabriel of Dionysiou describes him as a senior officer, a connoisseur of languages and theology, visited by many foreigners and especially Protestants, some of whom left enlightened; one, a member of the British House of Commons, became Orthodox and speaks gratefully of him in London.