Archbishop Nikandr (in the world Leonid Nikolaevich Viktorov) was born on April 6/18, 1891 on day of St. Eutychius, Archbishop of Constantinople and Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Methodius, Archbishop of Moravia. The future archbishop has open his eyes in family of the priest of the Yaroslavl diocese - Nikolai Nikolaevich Viktorov. On the mother's side of Maria Nikolaevna (in girlhood Voskresenskaya) the ancestry of Archbishop Nikandr belonged to hereditary Russian clergy and had many generations of clerics.
Leonid Nikolaevich Viktorov (Photo of 1911)
The large Viktorov family lived in every respect in constrained situation, being content with a modest prosperity of the head of the family, who worked in a small district town.
In these circumstances care about senior son Leonid has been in part shifted to shoulders of the grandfather and grandmother (priest Nikolai Petrovich Voskresensky and his matushka Sofia Ivanovna), so in the childhood the future archbishop Nikandr, by his own words, was "reared by two families". Being already in Harbin and addressing mentally his childhood and youth, Vladyka Nikandr recollected: "As a child, when I was with Grandfather, I remember, I fell asleep and woke up under reading of private rule and prayers before the Holy Eucharist, which Grandfather always read aloud. And this reading has much helped me in the future. He had early lost his sight, has been compelled to leave the service. The taught rule gave the elder consolation. And during a vacation, while being a student, I came to his aid-helped to read a rule and drove him to church for divine services. The rest of my life went the usual way as for all children of the clergy: district spiritual school, seminary and, at last, the Kiev Spiritual Academy" [1.]
In 1911, during competition in the Yaroslavl seminary, L. Viktorov received a grant and was sent to the most ancient in Russia Spiritual Academy. He always recollected about the study in Kiev with undisguised delight: "Four years within the Kiev academy walls - unforgettable and unique time. In Kiev I have found not only marvelous beauty of our first capital city, not only fertile gifts of the nature of our south, but, mainly, have felt great strength of spirit and religious feeling of the Russian person. About Kiev without exaggeration it is possible to repeat a historical phrase that it is our Russian Jerusalem [1a.]
[1] Ordination of Nikandr, Bishop of Qiqihar. // Heavenly Bread. Harbin, 1946.- №9, 10. - Page 55. [1a] Ibid.