Eugene of Vatopedi

Monk Eugene of Vatopedi Monastery was an Athonite elder who served all his life as dochiaris, the keeper of the storerooms, and reposed in 1961. He is honoured by the faithful as a man pleasing to God, though he has not been formally numbered among the saints. His memory was preserved by Archimandrite Cherubim, and Monk Moses the Athonite included it in his Great Gerontikon of twentieth-⁠century Athonites.

He was born in 1882 at Dereköy near Prusa in Asia Minor, and in the world his name was Efstratios Demetriou. As a small boy he came to the Vatopedi skete of Saint Demetrius and grew up there in the common life. In 1917 he moved to Vatopedi Monastery, then living under the idiorrhythmic rule, because the fathers needed a storekeeper, and he kept that obedience to the end.

A young monk who visited him left a description of his cell: a cassock and a vest hanging on two nails, a sheepskin spread in a corner, a roughly made table, a chair and two or three icons. Astonished, he asked himself whether he was at Vatopedi or at Karoulia, the place of the hermits. Father Eugene confided, with reluctance, that he spent his nights talking with God but did not yet know whether his prayers were accepted, and that he beat his breast like the publican and cried "I have sinned" like the prodigal son. Tears were his frequent companions.

It is told that once, when the storehouse caught fire, the fathers came at midnight to ask for the keys and found him praying motionless before the icons, raised above the ground. As storekeeper he was very generous, above all to the poor cell-⁠dwellers, whom the monasteries did not always take into account.

Every Saturday at one in the afternoon he handed out the fathers' weekly rations. One Saturday he announced that he would hand them out at ten in the morning, and on that day, at one o'clock, he reposed, as if he had foreseen his end. Those who knew him testified that his cell remained fragrant for years after his death. The sources give only the year of his repose, 1961, not the day.