The Manuscript Still Kept on His Prayer Table

The manuscript still sits on a prayer table at the Holy Trinity Monastery on the Greek island of Aegina, kept there as the physical trace of how Agni Parthene is said to have reached the page at all. According to the account preserved by the monastery Nectarios himself founded, the Theotokos appeared to him while he served as director of the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School in Athens in the late nineteenth century and asked him to write down a hymn the angelic choirs around her were singing. Whatever a reader makes of that account, the hymn itself is squarely his own composition, first printed in 1905 in his collection Theotokarion, twenty four stanzas arranged across four strophes, each one closing on the same refrain calling Mary an unwedded bride. Orthodox liturgical practice draws a real distinction between hymns composed for the Divine Liturgy itself and devotional hymns meant for private or paraliturgical use outside it, and Agni Parthene sits in the second category by design, never intended for the liturgy proper even though many parishes today sing it as a recessional once the liturgy has ended.

Its spread since has run well past its original setting. Monks at the Simonopetra Monastery on Mount Athos set selected verses to Byzantine musical notation and published the arrangement in their own collection, Psaltirion Terpnon, helping carry a school director's private devotional composition into the wider chanted repertoire of Orthodox monastic and parish life across the following century.