Agathon the Hermit

Agafton, in the learned form Agathon, was a hieromonk and hermit, founder of the hermitage that became Agafton Monastery in Botoșani, in the eighteenth century. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

He had taken his vows at the Doamnei Monastery, founded by Elena Rareș in 1552. After many years of struggle he was called to the hermit life and, taking two disciples, withdrew into the nearby forests, where a few monks lived. He lived there as a hermit for ten years in fasting and unceasing prayer and became a known hermit and confessor in the Botoșani region.

In 1729, seeing the brothers gathering around him, he set out with them into the forest on princely land near Botoșani, they cleared the woods, built a small monastery and planted fruit trees beside the cells, as a preserved note says. The small settlement, dedicated to the Holy Archangels, was first called Agafton's Hermitage. He gathered about twenty hermits there and they struggled together until the middle of the eighteenth century. The rule was unceasing prayer day and night, the reading of the Psalter in the cells, the meal after sunset, and on Sunday the Liturgy and communal Communion.

The Paterikon describes him as a teacher of stillness and prayer, whom none of his disciples equalled, and as a skilled confessor of hermits and laity, who drove out unclean spirits. It says there was no hermit or abbot better known in the area than he. Feeling his end near, he blessed his disciples and passed in peace to the rest of Christ.