Isidore of Kavsokalyvia

Isidore of Kavsokalyvia, a very devout elder and lover of learning, with the secular name Theodore Pantelopoulos, was born in 1885 at Androusa in Messenia. He came to the Holy Mountain in 1904 and was tonsured a monk in 1905 by Elder Charalambos of the hut of Saint Haralambos in the skete of the Holy Trinity of Kavsokalyvia. He engaged in writing, poetry, copying of important texts, medicine, pharmacology, botany, drawing, wood carving and the decoration of kollyva. The writer Alkis Angelou, when he first saw him, wrote: "The door opens and a monk enters noiselessly. I had the impression that he had come down silently from the walls, from some old Byzantine icon, and suddenly taken flesh and bones, there in the house." He was a friend of the great icon painter and prose writer Fotis Kontoglou. In a letter, Elder Isidore wrote to him: "All things fade and are lost, dissolve into a vastness and nothing more. Glory is trampled, wealth rolls away, youth shrivels by the hearth and repents of its past deeds. Only friendship remains written and rooted, and in the other world meets and is sanctified." Kontoglou wrote to him: "My brother Isidore, write to me as often as you can. Your letters are so poetic that I keep them all to publish the best later... When I think of you, my enslaved mind also takes wings and flies above Athos. Greet for me the shores, the troubled sea and the ascetics."

In the poetic pilgrim's guide he wrote in 1915 about his skete, he said among other things: "All this you will think when you pass there, but on the paper of your soul you will write more. Alone you will take the sword like a tyrant to cut off the passions that tyrannize you, to save your spirit. I do not believe, brother, that you will change your mind; you will throw worldly thoughts far away. The cassock alone you will embrace like a king's mantle, and the light burden, the armour of Christ. The sweetness of stillness, the honey of the wilderness, you will savour, my friend, and pray for my soul." He reposed in the Lord on 19 September 1968. He was succeeded by the virtuous Elder Seraphim (d. 1992), who had asked the prayers of all his fellow ascetics for his departure to the Lord. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.