Niketas the Stylite was a twelfth-century ascetic of Pereyaslavl-Zalessky in northeastern Rus' who, before his conversion, served as a tax collector and for many years enriched himself by mercilessly overcharging the people in his charge. By tradition he led a dissolute and hardened life until a single phrase of Scripture, heard in church, broke his self-assurance and turned him toward repentance. He is commemorated on May 24.
His conversion is dated to the moment he heard the words of the Prophet Isaiah read aloud in church—"Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean" (Isaiah 1:16)—which, the synaxarion relates, penetrated to the depths of his heart. The accounts add that his wife was shaken by a disturbing vision while cooking, seeming to see blood and human limbs rise in the boiling pot, and that Niketas thereupon abandoned his household and possessions to seek salvation in monastic life.
He entered a monastery dedicated to the Great Martyr Niketas, situated a short distance outside Pereyaslavl, where the abbot tested the sincerity of his repentance by requiring him to stand at the monastery gates for three days, openly confessing his sins. After he was tonsured a monk he embraced an extreme asceticism: he wore a hair shirt and bound himself in heavy iron chains, and he dug a deep round pit in which he stood upon a stone in unceasing prayer, in imitation of the ancient stylites—the practice from which his title derives. He came to be venerated as a wonderworker and healer.
On the night of May 24, 1186, Niketas was murdered by men who mistook his iron chains and crosses, worn bright from long use, for silver. Finding the fetters worthless, the killers cast them aside. His body was found fragrant, and he was buried at his monastery. His relics were uncovered in the fifteenth century and reported incorrupt, and his veneration spread through the Russian Church.
