Enoch of Kapsala

Enoch of Kapsala, with the secular name John Benia, son of Constantine and Cassandra, was born in 1895 at Vintireni in Tutova county, Romania. His father had understood that he wanted to become a monk and built him a large house to lure him into staying. The son went off to the army and, on his return, said he wanted to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain. His father again would not let him. He left secretly by ship from Constanta and reached Piraeus, where he found many refugees from Asia Minor. He had no papers with him. He boarded a train to Thessaloniki and from there by ship arrived gladly at Daphne. He came to the Garden of the Mother of God from Moldavia in 1923. He was tonsured a monk on the feast of the Lavra cell of the Holy Protection at Vigla, on 1 October 1927. His biography is not very well known. The Lord's beatitudes on poverty of spirit and childlike guilelessness applied to him completely. The Romanian Elder Enoch spent his life on Athos as a guest. His last dwellings, from 1946, were deserted cells at Karyes and in renowned Kapsala, without glass in the windows and without any heating. They wanted to steal his clothes. What to steal? He had few, patched ones. He never complained or grumbled. He was content, pleasant, rested and restful.

We met him one afternoon in the courtyard of Stavronikita Monastery. For years he made brooms from the abundant brambles of Kapsala. He used to say: "The monk is like a dog: you give him nothing, you give him bread, you kick him, he accepts everything." Such a "dog" he was, without any demand on others. He went about with old tin cans and asked for a little food. They asked him: "Elder, have you anything to eat?" He answered, smiling and graceful: "If I have, it is good; if I don't, even better." He lived in a daily feast in his pure heart. He was always truly cheerful. He wandered barefoot through woods and on paths, with his shoes in his hand and the Psalter. Every so often he stopped and read the Psalter. When he went to a monastery or to Karyes he put on his shoes. He was full of fleas, he and all his cell. He lived primitively, in rags, like a dog. "Man," he said in his broken Greek, "must not ask for glory. When a man is with glory, it is as if he wants to win both this world and heaven. This cannot be." "The monk must be humble. Not go high but low. With humility one is saved easily. A simple and humble monk is saved easily." He reposed in the Lord in 1979. A poem by the Athos lover I. M. Hatzifotis says of him: "The holy Romanian ascetic Enoch brought brooms to sell at the dependency, and the elder wanted to leave them as a blessing. 'They are God's bushes, I put in only the labour,' he said, and vanished on the road to the skete. The next day, at the Hours, Old Enoch, fool for Christ, fell asleep." He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.