Nilus of Erikousa

Holy Venerable Nilus of Erikousa, also called Nilus the Sanctified, was a wandering monk and then founder of a monastery in Epirus, who died at a very advanced age around 1334.

Youth and pilgrimages

He was born in 1228 or around 1250 in Constantinople, with the name Nicholas, in the family of John Laskaris, brother of the emperor Theodore Laskaris (1205-1221), who, after the capture of the capital by the Crusaders, ruled at Nicaea. After the invasion of the Crusaders, to escape the oppression of the Latins in the capital, he fled to the Monastery of the Unsleeping, where he received the monastic tonsure with the name Nilus. He struggled there until the Byzantines regained power over Constantinople, under Michael VIII Palaiologos, in 1261. The monk Nilus made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he stayed six years. Then, together with a holy elder, he came to Constantinople to rebuke the emperor Michael VIII for his pro-⁠Latin policy. The two were detained and then left on the open sea on a ship without rudder or pilot. Tossed by the waves in a storm, they reached Athos after forty days. There, at the Iviron Monastery, Nilus spent three years as a simple doorkeeper.

When the emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos summoned him to Constantinople, the saint made a very great impression on the courtiers, but, unwilling to give himself to the vain cares of the world, he soon set out on a second pilgrimage to the holy places. After Palestine he spent seven years on Mount Sinai, then lived in various monastic centres of the East and visited the Peloponnese, the islands of Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete and the Ionian archipelago.

Epirus

After seventeen years of wandering, around 1310 the venerable one came to Epirus and settled in a solitary place near the ancient coastal city of Hyricus (Orikum), on the Gulf of Aulon, where for ten years he manfully faced the harsh conditions of nature and the attacks of demons. By other sources, he spent those ten years on the uninhabited island of Erikousa, near Corfu, whence the name "the Erikousian". Pirates and Albanian raids drove him from there, and he went south and settled with two disciples, Gerasimus and Kallinikos, in a cave in Thesprotia (in the Igoumenitsa area). One night they saw a light which led them to the ruins of the monastery of Gyromerion, founded in the time of the emperor Heraclius and laid waste in the time of the iconoclast persecution. In the monastery they found an icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria, miraculously preserved unharmed.

With the financial support of the despot of Epirus, John Aspar, and of other notable men, Saint Nilus succeeded, by about 1330, in restoring the monastery, so that a great number of monks might be saved in it, gathered to live under his guidance. Come to old age, Nilus gave his disciples his "Testament", in which he urged them to stand firm in the confession of the true faith and in the holy monastic traditions, and handed the leadership of the community to his disciple Isaiah. Then he withdrew to a nearby skete, to pray without distraction. There, at the age of a hundred and six, he reposed in peace (by some sources in the night toward 1 January 1334, by others around 1335).

A few years later men sent by the emperor came to the monastery to open the venerable one's relics and carry them to Constantinople. But God ordained otherwise, showing His will in a wonderful way: a huge boulder fell from the mountain and covered the saint's grave, making access impossible. So the relics rest beneath the stone, over which a church dedicated to Venerable Nilus was built.

His memory is kept on 29 August, in the new style.