Joachim Makrygenis

Joachim Makrygenis was abbot of the Monastery of Grigoriou on Mount Athos in the second half of the eighteenth century, venerated by the faithful without synodal canonization. He came from Acarnania and was called Skevophylax; the nickname Makrygenis, meaning the long-⁠bearded, comes from a miraculous sign.

After a fire, the monks came to him in the neighbourhood of the Small Skete of St Anne, where he had withdrawn for ascetic struggle, and asked him to see to the restoration of the monastery. He said the monastery would be reborn when his beard grew. At that moment his beard, until then lacking, grew down to the ground. According to another version of the tradition, he saw the burned ruins from the kellion of the Holy Archangels and called for help on Saint Nicholas, patron of the monastery, who appeared to him and said the monastery would live again, the sign being his beard.

Between 1762 and 1783 he rebuilt the monastery. He gathered funds in Constantinople and in Moldavia. According to tradition, in Constantinople he met the sultan by chance, who gave him 25,000 nomismata for the monastery. He was helped by the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia, Alexander Ghika (chrysobull of 1777) and Alexander Ypsilanti (chrysobull of 1778), by Metropolitan Gregory II of Ungro-⁠Wallachia and by many Phanariots. He had won their respect also because he used part of the sultan's gift to ransom many Christians, chiefly Romanians, from captivity among pirates, and helped them return home. The four-⁠storey west wing was built in his time.

His likeness is painted in the narthex of the katholikon, beside Saint Gregory the Younger, in a painting of 1768-1779. After him the monastery again passed to the idiorrhythmic rule.