The life of St Agathangelos
Tormented afterward by conscience, he eventually left his master and made his way to Mount Athos, where he confessed his fall to the elder Euthymios, abbot of Esphigmenou Monastery, who received him as a novice. Believing his apostasy could only be undone by publicly confessing Christ again before those who had forced him to deny his faith, he prepared for months in fasting and prayer, and was tonsured a monk under the name Agathangelos.
With the blessing of Patriarch Gregory the Fifth, who had prepared several other martyrs for their own confessions in the years before his own, Agathangelos returned to Smyrna, declared his Christian faith before the authorities who had once compelled him, and after enduring imprisonment and repeated attempts to sway him, was beheaded there in April of 1819, not yet twenty years old. His relics, kept first in Smyrna, were later brought in part to Esphigmenou.
