Agathon the Hermit of the Buzau Mountains

Agathon was a hermit and priest of the fourteenth century who struggled in the Buzău Mountains, around the hermitage of Fundătura, and founded a rock hermitage that bore his name. 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.

In the first half of the century Agathon lived in a cave below the mountain called Martirie, which belonged to the hermitage of Fundătura. Having become skilled in the spiritual struggle and a teacher of the ascetic life, he received the gift of priesthood. He gathered disciples around him, nourishing them with words from Holy Scripture, and he knew the writings of the Holy Fathers.

In the second half of the century he moved with a few disciples to the ridge called Crucea Spătarului, half an hour from Fundătura. He carved a small church in the rock with his own hands, dedicated to Saint John Chrysostom, for whom he had great devotion, and a cell beside it. His twelve disciples also carved cells in the stone nearby.

Their rule was this: at night they sang Matins in the church, by day they laboured in their cells with fasting, prostrations and the reading of the Psalter, and in the evening they ate together at a table made from a tree trunk with twelve places, with rusks and boiled vegetables, rarely with oil. On feast days Agathon served the Liturgy and communed them all.

Over three centuries more than a hundred hermits struggled in his hermitage. In the early sixteenth century Prince Neagoe Basarab made gifts and enlarged the cave church, as the commemoration list carved on the altar wall shows. A charter of 1587 mentions for the first time "Agathon's monastery". After years of neglect it was renewed in 1733, then abandoned for good; today part of the stone church survives.