Venerable Nikolai, Schemamonk of Optina

Optina Monastery

As I have mentioned before, historically speaking there has been a small but significant witness of the Orthodox faith among the Turkic-speaking peoples of Asia, among whom the Chuvash, Gagauz and Khakass peoples have already converted en masse to Orthodox Christianity. The vast majority of this witness has been borne among them by the Russian people. The saints Abraham of Bolgar (1227), Peter of the Golden Horde (1290), Pafnutii of Borovsk (1475), Paul and Stephen of Kazan (1553), Serapion of Kozheozersk (1611), Misail of Ryazan (1654), ’Ahmad the Calligrapher (1682), Platonida of Revda (ca. 1785) and Constantine of Smyrna (1819). To these we add the memory, today on the thirty-first of August, of the holy schemamonk of Optina, Saint Nikolai (Abrulakh).

We know the following about Saint Nikolai of Optina primarily from the Optina Paterikon, who is sometimes in other sources also erroneously called Saint Pavel the Turk. At the time of his death on the eighteenth of August (on the Old Calendar), 1893, he was sixty-five years of age – which would have put the date of his birth sometime in the year 1827 or 1828. (The Paterikon lists his birth in the year 1820.) He was born by the name Yusuf Abdul. He was born in the largely-Armenian village of Baghaghesh, to impoverished parents of noble lineage, who weaved cloth for a living. He was the eldest of three, having a younger brother and a younger sister.

When he was five years old he fell blind, and for three years no remedies were successful. His mother took him to an Armenian shrine which had just come into possession of some holy relics – in this way his blindness was cured. His father died in a famine, leaving the family without means of subsistence. Because of the cruelty of his wealthy Kurdish neighbours, Yusuf Abdul was dependent on the charity of the Armenians, to whom he went around begging as a child in the name of Christ. In this way he developed a kindness for the Christian faith even though he did not understand it, because the Armenians helped him when his fellow Muslims could not or – in the case of the Kurds – would not. He was apprenticed to an Armenian weaver, though the wealthy Kurds continued to treat him badly: beating him when he made a mistake or displeased them, for example. His Armenian master, however, took his mother and his siblings into his house and provided for them all through Yusuf’s apprenticeship. He also learned from an Armenian the barber’s trade, though his uncle disapproved of that line of work (as well as of the folk he was learning from).

When he came of age, he travelled to Trebizond and then to Istanbul where he made the acquaintance of the vizier, and then to Sivas, where he came to serve in the Ottoman Army. His regimental commander was pleased with him and he served there as an officer of the guard, attaining the rank of captain. He began to have dreams about the Divine Liturgy and about the Theotokos, and his sympathy for his Armenian compatriots in particular continued to grow. His unit was transferred from Sivas to Konya, and then to Erzurum, where he married the daughter of a senior officer – a great beauty and a politically-advantageous match. In 1853, during the Crimean War he was captured in an engagement outside Aleksandropol (modern Gyumri in Armenia), and as he observed the Russians who had captured him and how they treated their prisoners, he began to ask them questions about their faith. They recommended him to a certain monastic abbot, who sheltered him in his abbey in Tbilisi and where he was free to learn about the Christian faith. All during his captivity he attended Liturgies, primarily in Russian, and he determined to accept Christianity and to be baptised. However, this would not come to pass as yet. The Russian officer in charge of the prisoners would not allow Yusuf to be baptised, fearing that he was a spy and that his interest in Christianity was a ruse to gain intelligence for the Turks.

At the end of the Crimean War in 1856, Yusuf Abdul was returned to Turkey along with the other prisoners, and he was forced to leave behind the friends he had made in the Christian monasteries, which he bitterly regretted. He was pensioned in gold for his time spent as a prisoner, and then retired to Erzurum and lived for some time with his wife and daughter. His father-in-law began to suspect him of apostasy, though he made no move against him. He became very good friends with the Armenian families in Erzurum, and they discussed the Christian faith. Yusuf collected a large number of icons and prayer-books from them.

At length, though, his house was searched by the gendarmes. They found his icons and books, and placed him under arrest. They stripped him of his pension and beat him severely with two hundred blows of the cane. It turned out that his wife had betrayed him to his father-in-law, who had informed the authorities. He was transferred to a civilian prison, where he was sustained only by the kindness of Greek and Armenian residents who took pity on him and brought him food. As a gâvur, he was despised by both the other prisoners and by the prison guards, who beat him and tortured him whenever given the opportunity. He was transferred to Beirut and then to Cyprus, where he was forced to live as a beggar. He was mocked and abused while he lived there, though he managed to get enough food to survive.

At length he was allowed – or rather forced, by greedy and vicious gendarmes who found equal pleasure in extorting him, beating him, and forcing him to march barefoot before them – to return to Erzurum. His erstwhile wife and his father-in-law cruelly turned him away from their house, calling him a gâvur, refusing his request to let him see his sons, and telling him never to show himself at their door again. He went to the Greek and Armenian merchants of his hometown and asked them for funds to get to Russia, and they arranged for him to flee there, raising a thousand roubles for his travel expenses. The Turkish authorities got wind of this and planned to arrest him again, but he managed to flee into the Caucasus in a beggar’s disguise, with the money stitched into his clothes. He was met with suspicion on the Russian side – they believed him to be a Russian deserter from the Crimean War – and was forced back into Turkey where again he faced arrest.

Not being able to return home to Erzurum in the open, without being recognised, Yusuf Abdul instead turned southward, seeking to undergo a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Here again he was aided by the Greeks and Armenians, who saw fit to aid him with money and supplies for the journey. Yusuf Abdul joined the throng of pilgrims to the Holy Land, and took a route through Sivas, the city where he had begun serving the Ottoman state. He proceeded through Cæsarea and Adan, and in one Kurdish village he was attacked by dogs, and was saved from being mauled, or worse, only by reciting the Jesus Prayer. After he had said the Jesus Prayer, another dog leapt into the mêlée, and the four attacking him turned on that dog and savaged it instead of him. From Adan Yusuf Abdul made his way to Tarsos the birthplace of Saint Paul, and then to Mersin.

At Mersin he was able to board a Russian steamboat which was carrying pilgrims to the Holy Land, and which made port in Jaffa. Yusuf Abdul accompanied the Russian pilgrims to Jaffa and thereafter to Jerusalem. Again he was nearly turned away at the door – being still in his Turkish garb he was taken for a local guide for the pilgrims, and was not allowed inside the Christian dortoir. He explained that he had come seeking baptism, and after they had inquired about him, the Russian churchmen decided to allow Yusuf Abdul to stay with them. He soon fell ill there, however, and was treated by a Russian doctor. The doctor promised Yusuf that if he took a turn for the worse, he would call for a priest to baptise him and administer the unction to the sick.

After he recovered some forty days later, he began looking about in Jerusalem for someone to baptise him: the archimandrites of monasteries, the chaplain to the Russian Consulate, even the Patriarch of Jerusalem himself, Prokopios II. All of them, however, citing the severity of Ottoman law upon apostates from Islâm, refused to put his life in danger. Crestfallen, Yusuf Abdul returned to Constantinople, where again he attempted to seek baptism through the Russian Embassy. Here, at last, he was able to make headway toward his goal. Fr Makarii of the Russian Skete of St Panteleimon in Constantinople referred him to the Russian ambassador, Nikolai Pavlovich, Graf Ignat’ev (the same one who would negotiate the Treaty of San Stefano in 1877). Ignat’ev listened to Yusuf Abdul’s tale with sympathy, and ordered that he be given a Turkish passport with a Russian visa for entry, as well as some gold for expenses and a ticket on a steamboat to Odessa.

In October of 1874 Yusuf Abdul entered Russia a second time. He was set up in travellers’ quarters, given accommodations and food, and made the acquaintance of the mayor of Odessa, who offered to be his sponsor at baptism. This baptism, of which Yusuf Abdul had spent nearly two decades in deep desire and steadfast pursuit, occurred on the tenth of November, 1874, in the quarantine Church of Saint Nicholas in Odessa. Naturally enough, Yusuf Abdul took the Wonderworker as his patron saint, and was baptised with the name of Nikolai.

It behooves us readers of his hagiography to notice, at this point, the many obstacles and dangers that were presented to this Turkish man – who faced disownment by his family, imprisonment, torture, mutilation, forced marches, attacks by dogs, official harassment of all kinds, threats of death – in pursuit of baptism in the Orthodox faith. This is something we in the West too often take for granted. Our crosses are far lighter than his, a fact for which we should be thankful to God and to which we should be attentive as evidence of Saint Nikolai’s remarkable personal valour and trust in God. Here I look to score no political or sectarian points, as I speak as much for myself here as anyone else – having been baptised in a Russian consulate in China, where Orthodoxy is not legally recognised, but having still been subject to no official harassment either there or anywhere else. We moderns have a very easy time of it where religious freedom is concerned; what we do with that freedom, on the other hand, bears a great deal of scrutiny when placed next to the holy simplicity and deep faith of someone like Yusuf Abdul, who would become Saint Nikolai of Optina.

At any rate, having been baptised Orthodox, Yusuf Abdul – now known as Nikolai Abrulakh – conceived a desire to stay in Russia and to visit all the holy places there. Early on, during his Crimean War imprisonment, Yusuf Abdul had been told by a holy fool that he should go ‘walk in the forest’: even though at the time he was offended by this, he would only late in his life come to understand what it meant. He stayed in several monasteries – the Svyatogorsk Lavra in Kharkov, the Trinity-Saint Sergius Lavra in Moscow – but did not embrace the monastic life just yet. He stayed in Russia for twenty years longer. He had fallen in love with the Russian love for God, love for Tsar, love for motherland, all expressed and felt with simplicity. But he began to notice a creeping idolatry on the edges of Russian society: the idolatry of Mammon, the worship of trade, the pursuit of profit at all costs. The cupidity and materialism of the Russian bourgeoisie disgusted and repulsed him, and he began to entertain far-left and revolutionary political sympathies. In his biography he even says that his faith in God was shaken and that he came close to embracing atheism, but that God saved him from this disillusionment by pointing out to him again how the faithful still lived in Russia.

Nikolai lived in Saint Petersburg for some time, but spent most of his intervening years in Kazan. He again came under suspicion from the Russian police on account of his Turkish heritage, and was afraid he would be deported as a suspected Turkish spy. In 1891 he began making plans to move to Tashkent and take up a position in the civil service there, but God prevented. Nikolai had made a petition to Fr Ambrosii of the Optina Monastery, who occasionally came to the Kazan area for pastoral purposes. Fr Ambrosii bade Nikolai come to him, and began to speak with him about his way of life for the prior fifteen years. Then Fr Ambrosii sternly enjoined Nikolai to come to the Optina Monastery and stay there, for only there would he find peace for the rest of his days. He was accepted under the abbacy of Fr Anatoli, who would later refer to Nikolai as ‘our very own Saint Andrew the Fool-for-Christ’.

Nikolai obeyed, and he was tonsured as a novice at Optina later that year, and undertook the obediences of a novice to read from the Psalter. This outward obedience he found very easy, and he truly loved his brethren and the life he had chosen to lead; he did not consider himself worthy of the holy equality in which the monks of Optina lived. He soon found, though, that the real work of the monk was the inward work: not judging his neighbours, concentrating on his own sins and working to heal them. He found himself able to rely upon God, and even in the midst of the uneasiness and the terrible knowledge of his own sins, he was able to find forgiveness and joy in his life among the brethren. A year into his novitiate, however, the elderly Turkish monk fell gravely ill. It was decided among the brethren of Optina to place upon him the obedience of the schemamonk, lest Nikolai suddenly die.

As had happened several times in his life before, Saint Nikolai was given visions of things that would happen in the future upon earth, and also beatific visions of the heavenly realms, granted to him by the Most Holy Theotokos. Saint Nikolai had seen once, in his youth, the church in Odessa where he would be baptised, which is one reason for his devotion to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker. At one point in his illness he was visited by blasphemous thoughts and sensory images of devils for three days. He describes how his soul was gripped by horror, and he found it a great effort even to begin to pray.

When he began reading the akathist to Saint Nicholas, he began to weep uncontrollably, and then his head was bathed in a light and a fire which did not burn him. He beheld a vision of an ocean of light, and before him appeared Saint Andrew the Fool for Christ and his disciple Saint Epiphanios, standing in silence before him. Looking beyond them he beheld a shroud of dark crimson, and enthroned in glory, our Lord Jesus Christ in robes like those of a bishop, and at his right hand the Most Holy Theotokos, and at his left Saint John the Forerunner holding the sign of the Cross. Saint Nikolai was filled with a sense of his own unworthiness even to behold them, but they all looked upon him with great kindness. He said it was not given to him to hear one word from their lips, but he did see Father Nikolai the schemamonk of Optina being welcomed into their company in the form of a child and in the robes of a novice.

He also saw a vision of hell, with Satan holding Judas at his side, and the false prophets, and numerous people of every age and condition in great despair, unaware of each other and unable to reach each other. These were all within an abyss, which lay between him and the crimson robe upon which Christ was seated.

He was then given a vision of paradise, which to him seemed both ineffable, inexpressibly joyous in any sort of human language, and yet also unaccountably familiar: there were trees heavy-laden with ripe fruits and birds which sang sweetly in harmony. Indeed, it seemed to him that paradise looked a great deal like the Optina Monastery, and its abodes seemed to him grander beyond measure than the palaces he’d seen in Constantinople, yet in the same familiar style. He saw the walls of Paradise inscribed with the names of the Twelve Apostles, yet he did not know the language of the writing. In his paradise, Saint Nikolai saw that it was peopled by a great multitude of those who had been beggars. These were conversing with an elderly man whom Nikolai was told was Saint Filaret the Merciful. He was seated in a garden, in the midst of which was planted the Cross. By an unearthly compulsion Saint Nikolai bowed before the Cross and his heart was filled with a great and unspeakable sweetness.

He was then granted a vision of the Most Holy Theotokos, enthroned as the Queen of Heaven, upon the balcony of a monastic palace and guarded by young men in luminous white robes. Saint Nikolai later recounted that he was not worthy to hear a word from her lips, but that he spent an immeasurable length of time in her presence meditating upon the mysteries of the Holy Trinity.

Saint Nikolai spent his time in Optina Monastery meekly and quietly, and did not speak about this vision to any except his confessor, Fr Barsanufii (and that only under obedience to Fr Anatoli), during his life – of which only two years were spent in the Optina Pustyn’. He only undertook his duties at the monastery, which included gathering wood for the common stove, meekly and quietly, and often did this alone without being told. When his neighbour, Fr Martirii, asked him why he did this, he merely told him ‘I love you’ and continued on with his work.

Saint Nikolai was given the great schema shortly before his death, and reposed in the Lord on the eighteenth of August (that is to say, the thirty-first of August on the civil calendar), 1893. Only when his body was being washed for burial and the brothers beheld the scars all over his body, did Fr Anatoli reveal to the monks of Optina what sort of man Saint Nikolai had been, what he had suffered in his life and what spiritual heights he had attained as a reward for his faithfulness. Blessed and long-suffering Nikolai, witness to the love of Christ among the Turkish people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!