Avimelech the Cretan

Saint Avimelech the Cretan, a venerable monk, was born in 1872 in the village of Emprosneros in Apokoronas, Chania, in Crete, with the name Gerasimos Bonakis, the son of John and Despina. As a small child he went to quiet and deserted places to pray from the heart. In 1890 he came to Athos "like a thirsty deer". The next year he was tonsured in the Cell of the Holy Cross, between Kerasia and Kavsokalyvia, under a strict elder, Pachomios. Then for twelve years he lived as a cave-⁠dweller, on the shore of the Skete of Saint Anne, belonging to the Karakallou Monastery, where he built a church of Saint John the Hermit, then in the Skete of Saint Basil, where he built the church of the Holy Macarii. From 1935 he settled in the Cell of the Dormition of the Mother of God in the Skete of Little Saint Anne, above the cave of the venerable Dionysios and Metrophanes. He went on pilgrimage to many monasteries in Greece, Constantinople, Pontus, Asia Minor and the Holy Land.

He was strict with himself, self-⁠controlled, possessionless, free of resentment, and did not judge; his thought was mature and deep, without ambition. He was a friend of Saint Nektarios, whose first biographer he was, and of the writers Papadiamantis and Moraitidis. Asked what he did in the wilderness, he answered: "We guard the mind." Asked why he did not go out to be of use to the world, he said: "God did not tell me such a thing." Archbishop Timotheos of Crete said that he was "serious as a prophet, sweet as an apostle". He wrote hymns to the Mother of God and the saints. In a letter before his death he thanked God for illnesses, which cleansed him. He fell asleep in the Lord on 18 October 1966. He is honoured by the faithful, without synodal canonization.