Origins and monastic formation
Sources place Nikodemos's birth at Prilep around the year 1320. Accounts of his parentage vary: he is described as of Macedonian-Romanian origin, and tradition relates a family connected by kinship to the ruling prince of Wallachia Nicolae Alexandru Basarab and to the holy Prince Lazar of Serbia. According to the synaxarion his parents wished to see him advance in worldly rank, but he set aside this prospect for the monastic life.
He met traveling monks of the Hilandar monastery in Serbia and went with them to Mount Athos, where he entered Hilandar and labored with perseverance. There he was trained in the hesychast tradition. After a period of discipleship he was tonsured a monk, ordained deacon, and in time ordained priest. Beyond Athos he is recorded to have traveled to Constantinople, acquiring virtue through his love of labor.
Foundations in Serbia and Wallachia
Nikodemos became the founder and renewer of several monastic communities. In Serbia he is associated with a monastery near the Danube; in Wallachia he established a community by the waters of the Motru and the monastery of Vodita, dedicated to Saint Anthony the Great. His most significant and lasting foundation was the monastery of Tismana in Oltenia, dedicated to the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos, which sources date to 1378. He is also credited with the reconstruction or renewal of other houses, and he introduced the hesychast monastic order at his foundations.
Through these foundations Nikodemos became a principal organizer of communal monastic life in the Romanian lands, drawing on the discipline he had received on the Holy Mountain.
Diplomacy, patrons, and manuscripts
In 1375 Nikodemos took part in a delegation sent to the Patriarchate of Constantinople to reconcile it with the Church of Serbia. The sources relate that Patriarch Philotheos elevated him to the rank of archimandrite and gave him a patriarchal staff together with particles of holy relics.
His work was supported by a succession of rulers, among them the Wallachian princes Radu I, Dan I, and Mircea the Old, to whom he is said to have served as father confessor. He was a scribe as well as an organizer: tradition records that he copied the four gospels in Church Slavonic in 1405, and he is reported to have been fluent in Serbian, Church Slavonic, and Greek.
Repose, relics, and glorification
Nikodemos reposed on 26 December 1406 and was buried in the narthex of the church at Tismana monastery. His relics were preserved at Tismana, and the sources name among them a finger, a quantity of myrrh, and a lead cross kept in a vessel.
His veneration was recognized in the Eastern Orthodox Church in earlier centuries, and the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church decreed his general veneration in 1955; the first service in his honor was celebrated in the Metropolitan cathedral of Oltenia at Craiova on 28 October 1955. He is commemorated on 26 December.
