Lincoln, August 5, 2025
Photo: domoca.org
On Saturday, August 2, a group of 20 pilgrims from St. John of Kronstadt Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, made a pilgrimage to Kearney to pray at the gravesite of Fr. Nicola Yanney, known as the “Apostle to the Plains.”
The pilgrims were greeted at Kearney Cemetery by Fr. Christopher Morris, current pastor of St. George Church, which served as Fr. Nicola’s home base for his extensive pastoral journeys, along with parishioners, including one of Fr. Nicola’s great-grandsons. Fr. Joseph Winsler of the St. John of Kronstadt Church served a panikhida at the gravesite, reports the Orthodox Church in America’s Diocese of the Midwest.
St. Raphael ordaining Fr. Nicola. Photo: domoca.org
Following the cemetery visit, the group toured St. George Church, where Fr. Christopher showed them icons of St. Raphael and Fr. Nicola in the narthex. The pilgrims were particularly interested to learn that recently discovered records indicate Fr. Nicola had ministered to an Orthodox community in Lincoln during his missionary travels.
Many of the pilgrims had been inspired to make the journey after reading Apostle to the Plains: The Life of Father Nicola Yanney, which chronicles the priest’s sacrificial ministry to Orthodox immigrants scattered across the American frontier.
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Fr. Nicola communing the sick. Photo: domoca.org
Fr. Nicola Yanney (1870-1918) was a pioneering Orthodox priest who served Syrian and other immigrants across the American Great Plains in the early 20th century. Born near the Balamand Monastery in Syria, he immigrated to Nebraska with his wife Martha in the 1890s, initially working as a peddler and farmer near Kearney.
After his wife died in childbirth in 1900, leaving him widowed at age 29 with five children (one of whom also died shortly after birth), Yanney was chosen by the local Syrian Orthodox community to become their priest. In 1904, he traveled to New York City to be ordained by St. Raphael of Brooklyn, becoming the first priest ever ordained by the future saint.
St. Raphael assigned Fr. Nicola responsibility for an enormous territory covering what is now roughly equivalent to the Antiochian Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America. For 14 years, he served as both pastor of St. George Church in Kearney and as a circuit-riding missionary, routinely spending six months at a time traveling by train and horse-drawn carriage to minister to scattered Orthodox communities across the Plains states.
Fr. Nicola’s ministry came to an end during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Despite his own deteriorating health, he continued visiting parishioners house-to-house, administering communion and last rites to the sick and dying. He collapsed from exhaustion and the flu, dying on October 28, 1918, at age 48.
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