Athanasios of Koutloumousiou

Athanasios of Koutloumousiou, with the secular name Asterios, was born in 1875 in Thessaloniki. In 1900 he came to become a monk at Dionysiou Monastery, from where he was sent to the dependency of Monoxylitis to work the vineyards and olive groves. His father opposed his decision and came twice to Athos to take him back to the world, without success. Unfortunately he turned to Turkish and Jewish sorcerers in Thessaloniki to help him with spells bring his child back. So the novice Asterios had a continual demonic temptation: he went to light the lamps and was stoned; if he took the road toward the world the stoning stopped, if he went toward the dependency it began again. They notified the monastery and came by boat to fetch him; as soon as he got into the boat the savage stoning began again. The hieromonk Mark (d. 1938), who accompanied him, put on his stole, read the Akathist of the Mother of God, and the assault ceased. At the monastery the torment continued. They sent him to the great confessor Papa Savvas of Little Saint Anne's (d. 1908). That evening enormous boulders rolled toward the confessor's hut, without harming him. The discerning and clairvoyant confessor kept three days of fasting and fervent prayer, reading the exorcisms. On the third day the young novice, tormented by an unclean spirit, was healed completely, and the spirit came out of his mouth like a strange animal.

After his healing he was tonsured a monk and went to live in the skete of Saint Panteleimon, then in a ruined barn of Koutloumousiou near Karyes, where he stayed forty years. He was a good, very devout, vigilant, fasting monk, usually eating dry food. He made sweets for the Holy Community, the monastery and the huts, free of charge, and so they called him Father Athanasios the Confectioner. On 6 August 1945, at the Transfiguration, the feast of Koutloumousiou Monastery, he went to the service, communed and asked the abbot to send a monk to see him the next day, as he did not feel well. The abbot asked how, since he stayed shut in and opened to no one; he answered: "I will leave the door open so that he may come." The next day a small group of monks found him dead, with his arms crossed on his chest, looking at the icons before him. Beside him was a note asking to be buried as he was, outside the ruin where he lived. The monks did not give great importance to what he had written and began to change his clothes, as is usually done for departed brothers. Then they found that he wore next to the body a wide iron belt, in chains, like the ancient ascetics who wore iron. They understood why he had asked to be buried unchanged, so that even then the hidden virtue of his ascesis would not be revealed. The fathers noticed that his face shone, a sign of his inner purity. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.