The Venerable Martyr Nectarius

Life

By origin from Vrioula in Asia Minor. At the age of seventeen he was forcibly converted to Islam. He had a fate similar to that of Saint Nicodemus. When as a Turk he presented himself to his mother, she cried out to him: "Depart from me, I do not know thee. I bore thee as a Christian and not as a Turk." He repented bitterly, went to the Holy Mountain, and there in the skete of Saint Anne he became a monk. Resolved to die for Christ and thereby wash away his sin, he went again to Vrioula, where he suffered. He was beheaded for Christ by the Turks in his native town on July 11, 1820, in the twenty-first year of his life.