Nilus the Myrrh-streamer

Saint Nilus the Myrrh-streamer, also known as Nilus the Myrrh-gusher or Nilus of Mount Athos, was a Greek Orthodox monk and hermit of the seventeenth century. Traditional Orthodox hagiography places his birth in 1601 in the village of Agios Petros in Kynouria, in the Peloponnese, a region then under Ottoman rule. He is said to have belonged to a pious family. After the death of his parents he was raised by his uncle, the hieromonk Makarios. Together they left the Morea for Mount Athos, where Nilus was tonsured a monk at the Monastery of the Great Lavra, the oldest of the ruling monasteries of the Holy Mountain.

Leaving the coenobium, he settled as a hermit in a cave on the rugged southeastern side of the Athonite peninsula, in the area between the Great Lavra and the skete of Kavsokalyvia. There he lived in extreme poverty and asceticism, devoted to prayer, fasting, and vigil according to the eremitic custom of Athos. Later synaxaria ascribe to him gifts of discernment and prophecy, but almost nothing in the way of contemporary written records survives, and the details of his inner life rest on liturgical and Athonite tradition rather than on independent archival documentation.

He died on 12 November 1651 and was buried in the cave that had served as his cell. After his death, fragrant myrrh was reported to flow from his relics, which is the origin of the epithet Myrrh-streamer (Myrobletes). The cave became a pilgrimage site and was later associated with a small chapel dedicated to him. In the Eastern Orthodox Church his principal feast is 12 November, the day of his repose.

Nilus held no episcopal, patriarchal, or papal office. He lived as a celibate monk and is not recorded to have married or to have had children. He was glorified as a monastic saint (hosios) within Eastern Orthodoxy rather than canonized by a pope in the Latin manner. A set of apocalyptic prophecies printed and circulated in modern times under his name, often referring to events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is of doubtful authenticity and uncertain date; it should not be assumed to be a genuine work of the seventeenth-century Athonite hermit. What can be stated with reasonable confidence is the outline given by Orthodox hagiographical sources: a Peloponnesian who became a hermit of Mount Athos, died in the mid-seventeenth century, and was thereafter venerated for ascetic holiness and for the reported streaming of myrrh from his relics.