The life of Ninety-nine Fathers of Crete
A storm nearly ended the voyage, and the ships were driven instead to the small island of Gavdos before the monks eventually reached Crete itself, where they settled into caves in an empty stretch of the island and lived on what wild plants they could find. John, the most renowned among them, lived apart from the others and knelt so constantly and so long that he could no longer stand and moved about only on his knees. Tradition holds that a hunter came upon him one day, mistook him for a wild animal, and shot him, so that he died of the wound. The Church's memory holds further that the other ninety-eight, scattered in their own caves, breathed their last on that same day, entering together into what the tradition calls a single shared repose. Nothing in the record fixes when this company actually lived beyond a general sense that it was before the sixteenth century; the exact date remains unknown, and the story survives chiefly as the Church's own memory of a community bound together in life and, it is said, in death as well.
