Eugenios

Hieromonk Eugenios of Dionysiou Monastery was an Athonite monk and spiritual father, known for the severity of his ascetic labours and his love for the Mother of God, who reposed on 10 December 1961. He is honoured by the faithful as a man pleasing to God, though he has not been formally numbered among the saints. His life was written by Archimandrite Gabriel of Dionysiou and other fathers, and Monk Moses the Athonite included it in his Great Gerontikon of twentieth-⁠century Athonites.

He was born in 1875 at Hotsista near Korçë in Northern Epirus, and in the world his name was Evangelos Panteleimonos Limonis. He was a schoolteacher in his homeland and an excellent connoisseur of Byzantine music. It is told that when the Turks wanted to burn a Greek school, he turned the danger away by reading the Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God.

He entered Dionysiou Monastery with holy longing and was tonsured in 1909. He was distinguished by obedience and monastic exactness, having cut off his own will entirely. He used to say that the disciple has nothing in this world except Christ. After twenty years of hard struggle in the strict community of Dionysiou, where he also received the priesthood, he spent another thirty years in Piraeus, continuing his labours and helping the Christians there, for whom he became a loving spiritual father.

He was wholly without possessions: he always lived as a guest and never had a home of his own. He slept very little, lit no fire in winter, kept silence by choice and gave away as alms whatever money he received. His joy was the daily Divine Liturgy in humble chapels, and he often ate only the prosphora from the proskomedia. Under his old cassocks he wore heavy iron chains that had eaten into his flesh, and because he slept on a low seat he became bent. From long journeys on foot and long standing, his feet began to break down with sores, and to friends who urged him to see doctors he answered gently that he would go with Saint Anna.

Archimandrite Gabriel of Dionysiou testified that he was most devout, zealous for the tradition of the fathers and a keen reader, and that even in old age and with painful feet he celebrated daily, seated on a stool before the Holy Table.

He loved beyond measure the Mother of God and Saint Anna, whom the Athonites call their grandmother, and he read the Akathist several times a day. His death came at evening on a day when Saint Anna was being celebrated. That morning he had served his last Liturgy and came out of the altar with tears and joy. He reposed seated on his stool, holding his prayer rope. The date of his repose given by his biographers is 10 December 1961.