St. Paisios the Athonite

Arsenios Eznepidis was born in the village of Farasa in Cappadocia on the twenty-fifth of July, 1924, and baptized by the saintly Elder Arsenios of Farasa, who foretold that the boy would one day become a monk. Less than a month after his baptism his family was uprooted by the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and they settled at Konitsa in Epirus, where he grew up.

He learned carpentry, served in the Greek army as a signalman during the civil war of 1948-1949, and from his youth practiced a strict prayer rule and read the lives of the saints. After his military service he sought out the monastic life, first at the monastery of Esphigmenou on Mount Athos in 1950, then at Philotheou, and was tonsured to the small schema with the name Paisios in 1954.

From 1958 to 1962 he was sent at the bidding of the Metropolitan to help revive monastic life at the dilapidated monastery of Stomion in Konitsa; from 1962 to 1964 he lived on Mount Sinai, struggling in solitude in the cave of Sts. Galaktion and Episteme; and in 1964 he returned to Athos for good. After years at the Iviron skete and at Katounakia, in 1979 he settled at the small cell of Panagouda, a dependency of the monastery of Koutloumousiou, where he was to spend the remaining fifteen years of his life.

There, against all the inclinations of his solitary heart, he gave himself to the multitudes who climbed the steep path to his door, pilgrims from every corner of Greece and from many nations, sometimes a thousand a day in the summer months. He spoke with each as if there were no other, healed the sick by his prayer, foresaw the difficulties of his visitors, and refused all gifts but a little flour for the prosphora.

He suffered from cancer in his last years and bore it without painkillers, as he had borne every cross. He was taken from Panagouda to the women's monastery of St. John the Theologian at Souroti, near Thessaloniki, which had grown up under his guidance, and there he reposed on the twelfth of July, 1994. His grave at Souroti has been since that day a place of unbroken pilgrimage. The Ecumenical Patriarchate canonized him on the thirteenth of January, 2015, naming his feast on the day of his repose.