Agathon

Venerable Agathon was the founder and first abbot of the Agathon Monastery in Phthiotis. Many details of his life are lacking. After a nearby monastery had subsided and the saint had found the icon of the Mother of God, he built the present monastery, which received the founder's name from his disciples. The monastery is honoured in the name of the Mother of God, because of the wonderworking icon, and of the Transfiguration of the Saviour.

According to more recent research, the life of Venerable Agathon is linked with that of Venerable Athanasios the Meteorite of Hypati (20 April), whom Agathon followed to Mount Athos. He is therefore numbered and honoured with the Athonite venerables, and his time is placed in the fourteenth century. Both on Athos and at the first great monastery of Meteora, founded by Saint Athanasios, the Mother of God and the Transfiguration are honoured.

In 1959, on the south side of the fine main church of the monastery, excavations brought to light the grave of the venerable and his holy relics. His oldest icon is a sixteenth-⁠century fresco in the monastery's chapel of Saint John the Forerunner, and his holy head is kept in the monastery. An unpublished service composed on Athos by the monk Gerasimos Mikragiannanites is in his monastery. Venerable Agathon is a central figure of monasticism in Phthiotis, and his monastery supported the struggles of the nation and is today a pilgrimage of the Mother of God for all Roumeli. He is commemorated on 7 August, in the calendar of the Church of Greece (new style).