Our righteous and God-bearing Father Nicholas Planas, Presbyter of Athens.
This Saint, who is affectionately known as Papa-Nicholas Planas, was born on the island of Naxos in 1851. From earliest childhood he loved to spend his time in the little church dedicated to Saint Nicholas on his parents’ property, and was even seen there dressed in a sheet like a clergyman and chanting. When he was fourteen his father died and the family moved to Athens. When he was seventeen his mother compelled him to marry, but he only lived with his wife until they had a child. In 1879 he was ordained deacon, and in 1884, priest.
He lived out his whole life serving at the altar of the Lord and knowing nothing but the divine services of the Church, to the degree that when he was asked his opinion on a political question, he would ask who was Prime Minister, after which the company would leave him alone to his prayers. While oblivious of earthly affairs, he was in continual communication with God and His Saints, who often appeared to him as friends, healing him when sick, consoling him when downcast, announcing the will of God to him, and serving with him in his unceasing liturgy of prayer and ministration to those in need. His life of earthly labors ended on February 17 (according to the traditional church calendar), 1932. Even in the last eight months of his life when he was too sick to serve the daily Liturgy as he had done for some fifty years without a break, he still read his entire daily prayer rule, with the only exception being the day of his death.
We are extremely blessed to have an account of him from someone who lived with him day in, day out, and knew his way of life and his mind and heart. The nun Martha (Ourania Papadopoulos, 1883–1973) wrote a collection of incidents taken from her experience of Papa-Nicholas, many of them her own eye-witness accounts, so that a certain author of historical novels might incorporate them into an historical novel about Papa-Nicholas. This novel fortunately was never written; when the blessed iconographer Photios Kontoglou read Mother Martha’s notes, he encouraged Alexander Papademetriou, owner of the Athenian publishing house Astir, to print them as they were. Papademetriou himself had known Papa-Nicholas when he was a child, and himself wrote a prologue to the edition published by Astir.
Mother Martha’s great virtue as a writer is that she was educated and wrote with engaging wit and vigor, without having her piety muddled by shallow sophistication; she understood Papa-Nicholas’s simplicity as being founded in the fear of God, and wrote of him with deep spiritual understanding. Rather than relating one long narrative, she records unconnected incidents one after another, often interjecting that she forgot to mention this or that earlier, so that the account has a very colloquial and lively tone, charmingly seasoned with her editorial comments (e.g. “Here I just remembered to write something since I have recently been seeing the quarrels and misunderstandings of a certain hierarch with a columnist of a newspaper, who were having it out like village women with their yards separated by a hedge of dried-up weeds and bushes.” [p. 63])
The following is an example of the spiritual power hidden in Papa-Nicholas’s meekness and long-suffering:
At the family’s where Father often went, their space inside the courtyard had been rented by a certain cobbler who was mainstay of the Communist party. The hatred which he felt toward all, and especially toward priests, knew no bounds. There, while he worked, he would talk to himself, raving about where his comrades would begin slaughtering the priests. And he would say, “First of all, we’ll slaughter the priests of the Live-giving Spring.” And he would go on dealing in turn with the others also. As I said, he worked inside the court. Father, in his kindness went up to him and said, “Good evening, my child.” Without lifting his head from his work, he mumbled something.
The next Saturday Father went again; “Good evening, my Luke.” He answered, “Good evening,” again without lifting his head.
On the third visit, Father said to him again, “Good evening, my Luke; how are you doing, my child?” He deigned to say, “Well, Father.”
Father would visit him continuously there where he worked, until the ice was broken. He got up from his work, he kissed his hand with reverence, and he told us, “When they kill the priests, I will tell them not to kill Papa-Nicholas. And not only will I say it, but I will defend him.” Afterwards, whenever Father used to come, he would hasten to meet him and kiss his hand. Father neither knew his inclinations, nor did he have any conception of communism, nor did he notice his transformation—so we supposed. Who knows how he saw with the clairvoyance of his soul? Well, no matter how many sermons that Communist might have heard, no matter how many admonitions they might have given him, none of these would have been able to have any influence on his hardened soul as the goodness of this white-haired little old man, who used to pay him a standing visit each time—indifferent as to whether he had been scorned at the beginning. With Father’s little greetings and good wishes he repented. And when a short time afterwards he fell ill from a disease (paralysis of the lower extremities of his legs) and died at the age of thirty years, he reposed as a good Christian and . . . without having killed anyone. Such was the influence that the personality of Father had on all who knew him. (p. 49)
The following illustrates how the grace in him worked repentance, and his gift of clairvoyance:
Another unfortunate girl came one day to the Church of the Prophet Elisseus and confessed with tears that for nine years she had lived with someone who had always put off legal marriage. He told her that he would pray very much concerning this situation. “But try in any way you can to get him here to church so I can meet him,” he told her. When this woman went to her home, she cajoled her “husband,” pleaded with him, and finally succeeded in getting him to the church. As soon as he saw Father (who had a venerable appearance), immediately, as though the invisible obstacles of the demon had been set aside, being moved to compunction, he said to Father, “I want to be married.” In ten days the wedding took place, and thereafter they enjoyed great spiritual joy because their consciences had been settled. They hung the picture of Father above their bed. As they themselves used to tell, because of their former sin he put them under the rule that they would eat only dry food on Wednesdays, Fridays, and during fasts, and would give alms as much as they could. They did all these things with great joy, and called him, “our Father.” They would regularly invite him and all his synodia to their home for dinner.
Taking this opportunity we will also write the following event. There were days when the church was filled with friends and strangers. On one of those days, there came up an unknown woman to give him a prosphoron. He looked at her very carefully, and said to her, “I cannot take it.”
“Why?” the woman asked him.
“Because you are living in sin!”
Then the woman understood the gravity of her sin. She had offered the prosphoron without the least self-reproach. The woman began to weep.
“What can I do for you? I, too, weep with you, but I cannot take it.”
Someone I knew was also living in sin. She also heard what had taken place with Father, and she took a friend of hers and they went to church. When they came up to kiss his hand, he offered it to her companion but not to her, and drew it back in an obvious manner. She came with tears and told me this: she lived in sin very secretly and no one knew it. In spite of this, Father censured them; he admonished them without many words, but only with the grace of the Holy Spirit, which he had in abundance. (pp. 31–33)
The Greek edition published by Astir was translated into English by our monastery and was first printed in 1981. Our abbot knew Mother Martha and recounts in the Introduction what he knew of her, and how people who knew both her and Papa-Nicholas remarked that towards the end of her life Mother Martha had seemed to come to resemble Papa-Nicholas physically in an uncanny way, besides having a striking gift of clairvoyance; he also recounts how another person who had known Papa-Nicholas as a child was delighted that Papa-Nicholas, through whose unmercenary hands unknown quantities of money passed directly to the poor, had a weakness for sweets and would ask his mother if she had brought him chocolates.
As was noted in lives of Saint John the Almsgiver and Saint Moses of Optina, it is only by reading incident after incident that one gets a real perception of the goodness and godliness of mind of the Saint. In fact when spiritual reading material was not as plentiful as it is now, the Fathers of our monastery used to give out the life of Papa-Nicholas as a catechism to those interested in the Faith. It is available here, and we strongly recommend reading it over and over. It has an enduring freshness that does not fade with time, and upon each reading one appreciates the spiritual greatness of this unassuming priest more deeply.
Copyright © 2016, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Brookline, MA, all rights reserved.
All reproduction of texts or icons on this website in any form
without prior written permission is forbidden.