George of Vatopedi

George of Vatopedi, called the fool for Christ, with the secular name Demetrius Kazanis, was born in 1899 at Niki in Chalkidiki. He came to Vatopedi in 1914 and was tonsured a monk there in 1916. In 1926 he left the monastery and for 35 years wandered around its boundaries.

Archimandrite Chrysostom Moustakas, who met him, writes that his cap had lost its original colour through age and sweat. He always wore a single garment and went barefoot, and never washed. His summer food was chiefly figs, and in winter walnuts, chestnuts, arbutus berries and acorns. The fig juice stuck his beard together and the fresh walnuts blackened his hands with their uncut nails. He never cooked. At a feast he ate greedily, so as to be accused of gluttony, and left eggs in his beard to be laughed at. He did not know what to do with the two hundred drachmas he was given yearly from the monastery treasury in the 1950s. Asked what the foundation of the monk is, he answered: "First submission and with it humility." And if you asked why such cheap clothes, you heard: "When the earth covers you, costly clothes will not help you at all."

Rags covered his body. Among the brambles where he hid, when you caught sight of him with open arms he looked like an eagle. At times he played the fool and so avoided curious admirers. They went away, and he went away too, from the ravines into the forests and from the slopes to the heights. He received communion with tears. He chanted softly at the vigils, freezing in the narthex. They thought him deranged and mad, and he rejoiced beyond measure. Elders with the gift of foresight admired him for his great humility. Saint Paisios the Athonite writes of him in his book on the Athonite fathers: "He lived like a true bird of heaven on the Holy Mountain, beneath God's heavenly dome, because he had no hut, like the other fathers. Freed from vanity by non-⁠possession and enslaved by the love of God, he wandered Athos like a 'good vagabond' of Christ. All his property was the worn clothes he wore, the same in winter and summer." He was a man of great self-⁠denial, disinterest and humility, which is why he was always alone. As soon as he felt that people understood him, he left for the mountains that kept his secrets. So he mocked human vanity and had a deep sense of the vanity of life. He was a fool for Christ. He reposed in 1966. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.