The life of St Païsios of the Holy Mountain
Decades later, the world would come to know this same child, grown into a monk, by a different name, Paisios, but the two men, godfather and godson, were tied together by that single act performed on the edge of a vanishing world.
Once his military duty was behind him, the young man at twenty turned toward Mount Athos and stayed there for the greater part of his life, deepening a discipline of prayer that grew only more exacting with age. Word of his directness and his down-to-earth wisdom spread far past the mountain, drawing streams of visitors and letters from people who had never expected an answer so plain. He came down from Athos for good in the autumn of 1993, and doctors in Thessaloniki soon found the cancer that would end his life; after an operation he was taken to the convent of Souroti nearby, and there, the following July, he died. Roughly two decades on, in January of 2015, the Ecumenical Patriarchate placed him formally among the saints.
