The life of St Anthimos of Chios
He later returned home to care for his aging parents, supporting himself by his trade while continuing a hidden life of prayer, keeping vigil in the hollow of an old olive tree near where he lived.
His prayers before an icon of the Mother of God that had come to him from his own mother became known for freeing a number of tormented people from the spirits that afflicted them. When the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s sent a wave of destitute women and girls to Chios, Anthimos took up the work of building them a refuge, founding a monastery on a steep and previously uninhabited part of the island. Completed in 1930 and known as the Monastery of Panagia Voithia, it grew to house some eighty nuns and came to be regarded across Greece as a model of monastic life. Anthimos reposed on the fifteenth of February, 1960.
