Nectarios's own path to sainthood ran through a professional injustice long before it ran through a monastery. Ordained a priest in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1885 and consecrated Metropolitan of Pentapolis by the Patriarch of Alexandria in 1889, he served barely a year before rivals jealous of his popularity with the laity convinced his superior, falsely, that he harbored ambitions against the Patriarch himself. He was suspended from his post with no public explanation and no chance to answer the charge, a bishop's career ended by rumor rather than by any documented fault. He returned to Greece rather than contest it, spent three years preaching before becoming director of the Rizarios school in Athens for fifteen years, and in 1904 founded the Holy Trinity Monastery on the island of Aegina at the request of a group of nuns, where he spent his final years in manual labor and spiritual direction after resigning the school in 1908. He died there in 1920, and it took until 1961, four decades later, for the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras I, to formally glorify him as a saint.
That long gap between his death and his canonization has become part of how he is remembered, a churchman whose own hierarchy failed him in life and only fully vindicated him well after he could know it. Agni Parthene, composed in the quiet unglamorous years of his school directorship rather than during any public vindication, has outlasted the injustice that shaped so much of his career and become one of the most widely sung modern compositions in Greek Orthodox devotional life.