Irenarchos Sisman

Irenarchos Sisman was a Romanian schemamonk of the Prodromou Skete on Mount Athos, the first Romanian historian of the Holy Mountain. He was born in 1845 and reposed in 1920. He is venerated by the faithful, without a synodal canonization.

He was born in the commune of Milesti, Dolj county. He knew four foreign languages and was well read. In 1884 he went to Athos and became a schemamonk in the Romanian Prodromou Skete. He was silent, humble, patient and zealous in his asceticism. From the venerable Nectarios the Protopsaltes he learned the work of the Jesus Prayer. By day he worked in the garden with his hands and prayed with his mind, and at night he went to church, read holy books and kept stillness in his cell.

In 1898, wishing to write at length the history of Athonite monasticism from the sources in the libraries of the Mountain, he took the blessing of the wonderworking icon of the Mother of God Prodromitissa and of the abbot of the skete, Gedeon Georgescu. The work, History of the Holy Mountain, has twenty volumes and more than ten thousand pages: the first seventeen narrate the history of the twenty great monasteries, the eighteenth deals with the wonderworking icons, the nineteenth contains plates, and the twentieth the history of Romanian Athonite monasticism to 1916 and the history of the Prodromou Skete. He wrote it in beautiful calligraphy with borders, ornaments and miniature icons made by his own hand, and finished it on 6 September 1916, after many labours and temptations, among them a stone that fell through his window in 1905. A great man of prayer as well, he spent his last years in fasting and prayer, received the Holy Mysteries and departed in peace to the Lord.