Athanasius of Pentaschoinos

Saint Athanasius of Pentaschoinos was a young man of Cyprus, from the village of Pentaschoinon, near Amathous on the southern coast of the island, south of the present village of Agios Theodoros in the Larnaca district. The village no longer exists, and the saint is commemorated on 10 July.

The oldest account of him comes from Saint Anastasios of Sinai, a native of Amathous who lived not long after the events and venerated the saint's relics at Pentaschoinon. According to him, Athanasius was the son of a godly old man; his mother had died when he was small and his father remarried. His father raised him in the fear of the Lord and taught him love of neighbour. At twenty he was wrongly accused by his stepmother of stealing from his father's storerooms. Athanasius answered that he had wasted nothing, unless one counted as waste the hospitality his father himself had taught him: he had given from the storerooms to the poor. Yet to show his father that this was pleasing to God, he miraculously filled again the jars of oil and wine and the bins of wheat. When his father came to look, he found the stores full.

Soon afterwards Athanasius died young, shortly before the first Arab raid on Cyprus in 649. Then it was reported that a ship off the coast, in winter, had been in grave danger. The crew was saved by the timely intervention of a young man who said he was Athanasius of Pentaschoinon and disappeared. Having reached shore, the sailors took him for a local saint and went to the village to offer oil to the church of their rescuer. They were told no such shrine existed; asking about Athanasius, they were led to his tomb by his own father. There the father asked, "Athanasius, was it you?" And the voice from the tomb answered, "Yes; the Lord sent me to them so that they would know there is no evil in our land." The father said, "Sleep again, my child, until you rise in Christ." Saint Anastasios of Sinai adds that the event had many witnesses, among them the Metropolitan of Damascus, who had recently visited the village.

Soon after his death and this miracle a large church was built, where his relics could be venerated. The Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas, writing around 1458, notes that the relics still worked cures, so the veneration lasted eight centuries. The relics were probably stolen not long afterwards, and today no one is known to hold any part of them. From the thirteenth century the saint is often painted as a deacon, which shows how loved he was. It is not known for certain whether he was a martyr, a layman, a fool for Christ, a monk or a hermit; on an icon in the village of Agios Theodoros he appears as a young beardless shepherd.

His church, now in ruins, has been excavated by the Department of Antiquities: its earliest building phase dates to the eighth or ninth century, it was repaired after the great earthquake of 24 April 1491 that had brought it down, and it stayed in use into the Ottoman period, perhaps to the seventeenth century. Beneath the nave floor a burial chamber was found with at least two tombs, one of them decorated with marble panels and painted crosses and possibly the saint's original tomb. The village disappeared in the eighteenth century. The community of Agios Theodoros keeps his feast on 10 July in its main church, with a procession carrying his icon.