Life and Martyrdom
According to the tradition, Niketas was born around 1716 in Mandraki on Nisyros into a prominent family; his father is described as one of the leading men, and in one account as governor of the island. When his father fell into legal trouble with the Ottoman authorities and faced the death penalty, he saved himself and his household by professing Islam, and the young Niketas was renamed Mehmed. By some accounts the family moved to Rhodes.
Niketas came to learn that he had been baptized a Christian and that his family had apostatized. Resolved to recover his ancestral faith, he made his way to the island of Chios, landing, by one account, at the harbor of Lithe, and reached the Monastery of Nea Moni. There, under the direction of the abbot and a hierarch named Makarios — identified in the sources as Saint Makarios, Metropolitan of Corinth, or as a former bishop of Thebes — he was received back into the Church through Holy Chrism and took up an ascetic life, declaring his desire to confess Christ publicly and to suffer martyrdom.
Returning to Chios to make his confession, he was arrested at the port — by one account by a Crimean Muslim tax collector — for lacking proof of the head tax required of Orthodox Christians, and was brought before a Turkish judge. He confessed that, though he had been made a Muslim, he had returned to his ancestral faith. He was subjected to torture for ten days but remained steadfast, answering, by tradition: 'I am a Christian; my name is Niketas, and I will die as Niketas.' He was beheaded on 21 June 1732. The sources give his age at death as sixteen or seventeen.