Akakios the New of Kafsokalyvia

Venerable Akakios of Kafsokalyvia (Akakios the New, in the world Anastasios) was a Greek monk and ascetic of Mount Athos, born in the 1630s at Golitsa, in Epirus (according to an English source in the Karditsa region), and fallen asleep on 12 April 1730, in the ninety-⁠eighth year of his life. He renewed monastic life at Kafsokalyvia. The Orthodox Church remembers him on 12 April and on the second Sunday after Pentecost, in the synaxis of all the venerable fathers of Athos.

Beginnings

He was born in the village of Golitsa, to pious parents, and at baptism received the name Anastasios. His father died when the boy was in his teens, and to feed his younger brother and his mother Anastasios had to work, and so he remained illiterate. Feeling a desire for the hermit's life, in 1656, at twenty-⁠three, he went to the region of Zagora, where he entered the monastery of the Holy Trinity of Sourvia, near the village of Makrinitsa, founded by Saint Dionysius of Olympus. Later he was tonsured a monk in this monastery, with the name Akakios.

Athos

Desiring a still more austere life, he moved to Athos, where, after some days spent in a small cave near the skete of Saint Anne, he wished to see other sketes and elders of high ascetic labour. Near the Grigoriou monastery he met in a cell two ascetics, with whom he wished to stay a year to learn the ascetic labours and the making of spoons. Then he settled at Kafsokalyvia, in a cell beside the church of the Transfiguration, where he lived twenty years, eating only bread and wild fruits, no more often than once in three days. After that he withdrew to a small cave in which Saint Maximos of Kafsokalyvia had once struggled. Towards the 1660s he moved to the southern tip of Athos and lived as a hermit in the cave of Saint Maximos, near the skete of Kafsokalyvia. There he had many divine visions, in which Saint Maximos visited him. He also spent time at the Dionysiou monastery and the skete of Pantokratoros.

He was spiritual father of the new martyrs Romanos (5 January), Pachomios (6 May) and Nikodemos (11 July), and was visited also by Pachomius the Russian. He lived a hard asceticism and is said to have eaten dry grass crushed with a piece of marble, rather than bread. In his later years he came down from the high cliffs to a cave near the skete of Kafsokalyvia, which now bears his name. In 1725 Vasil Grigorovich-⁠Barsky visited him and wrote an account of him.

Teaching and repose

Renewing the teaching of Venerable Symeon the New Theologian, Saint Akakios taught that those who wish to see Christ in eternity should acquire already in this life, through the descent of divine grace, a spiritual sensibility, so as to look on spiritual things as clearly as on the things of the material world. He is said to have foretold his death shortly before, and fell asleep on 12 April 1730. His relics are kept at the Dionysiou monastery and at Kafsokalyvia. At Kafsokalyvia there is also a spring called the Holy Water of Saint Akakios: fresh water was found there when Saint Akakios prayed, while a man was digging for it.