Eustratius the Wonderworker

Venerable Eustratius the Wonderworker (also called Eustratius of Agauros or Eustratius of Tarsus) was born about 772 or 773 in Cilicia in the Byzantine Empire and died in 867 or 868, at the age of ninety-⁠five. He was a disciple, follower and companion of Saint John the Great and hegumen of the Agauros Monastery on Mount Little Olympus in Bithynia. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on 9 January (22 January by the new calendar, in the Serbian Church).

He was born into a wealthy family, that of George and Megephe. The Serbian source says he was born at Tarsus. At twenty he fled from home to Mount Little Olympus, to the Agauros Monastery, about three kilometres west of the city of Prusa (present-⁠day Bursa). The abbot of the monastery was Gregory, his uncle on his mother's side. After the crushing defeat of the emperor Michael I in the war with the Bulgarians (807 to 815), in 813 Leo V the Armenian came to the throne (813 to 820), in whose time iconoclasm began again. Eustratius, on the advice of John the Great, hid until the emperor's murder, then returned to the monastery. After the death of Hegumen Gregory and of his brother Basil, he led the monastery in the time of the emperor Theophilus (829 to 842). The Serbian source, however, says that he returned after the death of Leo and the accession of Michael II the Amorian and of the empress Theodora, in 843, which does not agree with the Russian source, which puts the return at the murder of Leo (820).

He worked many miracles. He was a great ascetic and a man of prayer. In the seventy-⁠five years of his monastic life he never lay down on his left side, but always on the right, and during the divine service he said within himself, from beginning to end, Lord, have mercy. The Serbian source wrongly calls him a martyr.

The main source on his life is an anonymous Life from the first half of the tenth century, written by a monk of the Agauros monastery from the notes of eyewitnesses of the miracles and from the Life of John the Great composed by the monk Peter, who relied chiefly on the accounts of Eustratius, who accompanied John for decades. On this anonymous Life is based the notice of Eustratius in the Synaxarion of the Church of Constantinople (end of the tenth century).