Sunday, July 12

Modern · 1924 – 1994

St Paisios of the Holy Mountain

Beloved elder and counselor of Mount Athos

Born Arsenios Eznepidis to Cappadocian Greek parents in Farasa, he was baptized by St Arsenios of Cappadocia shortly before the family was uprooted to Greece in the exchange of populations, settling in Konitsa. He worked as a carpenter and served as a radio operator in the civil war before giving himself to monastic life on Mount Athos, with periods at the monasteries of Esphigmenou and Philotheou, at Sinai, and at the Stomion monastery near Konitsa, which he restored. From his simple cell of Panagouda near Karyes he received a ceaseless stream of pilgrims — students, workers, the sick, the despairing — offering discernment, humor, and prayer, and bearing others' pain as his own. His counsels, gathered by the sisters of the monastery of St John the Theologian at Souroti, fill many volumes. Suffering cancer without complaint, he reposed at Souroti in 1994 and was canonized in 2015; he is among the most beloved saints of modern Orthodoxy.

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