Gennadius of Corfu

Saint Gennadius of Corfu was a pious hieromonk from Epirus who lived on the island of Corfu in the nineteenth century and founded a women's monastery there. He is venerated as a saint by the faithful of the island and commemorated on 2 January. He reposed in 1859, at the age of fifty-⁠four.

He was born in 1805 in the village of Kalarites in Epirus, one of the seven children of Athanasios and Elisabeth, and was baptized George. In 1820 he moved with his mother and sisters to Corfu. In 1850 he obtained an Ionian passport, which describes him as a monk with black hair and eyes. In the same year he received, for twenty Venetian talers a year, the church of the Mother of God of Kassopitra at Kanoni: a simple and austere monastery that dates from 1530, when before the icon of the Mother of God a blind young peasant named Stephen received his sight. Gennadius's dream was to make it a women's monastery. In 1856 he obtained full ownership of the church and its lands, built the two-⁠storey communal building, adorned the grounds, renovated the church, acquired a silver icon, a lamp and a golden reliquary with relics of holy martyrs, and set up a community of three nuns under the abbess Eupraxia Zampira.

Father Gennadius fell asleep in peace on 2 January 1859. He was a holy hieromonk and a man full of virtue and prayer, who loved God and people. He ate and drank very little and slept on the ground when he sought a little rest. He was also a wonderworker: he healed people possessed by spirits and helped many women to have children. He left the monastery to Maria Mavrogiannis, a friend of Abbess Eupraxia. In 1991 the monastery was changed into a monastery of monks. The elder's cell and grave can be visited today.