Jonah Balasescu of Kavsokalyvia

Iona Bălășescu, born in 1885 at Băilești, in Gorj, was a Romanian schemamonk on Mount Athos for fifty-⁠two years, a hermit at Kavsokalyvia and translator of the Christoetheia. He fell asleep in the summer of 1955. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon, on the testimony of his disciples, and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

After a trade school he went at eighteen to the Holy Mountain to serve Christ. He spent his years as a novice at the Romanian cell of Colciu, where he received monastic tonsure and learned the spiritual struggle from the most distinguished Romanian confessors. He lived three more years as a hermit at another Romanian cell, near Pantokrator Monastery. In 1911 he settled permanently at the Skete of Saint Basil in the Kavsokalyvia hermitage, in the south-⁠east of Athos, where the monks who loved stillness and labour most lived, among them many Romanian hermits. They lived from the work of their hands and the mercy of the coenobitic monasteries. They brought their food by boat, because of the deserted, rocky place, and gathered water in winter from rain.

Iona stayed there more than forty years, at a small Romanian cell dedicated to Saint Macarius. He received the great schema and gathered four disciples, all named Macarius, with whom he laboured in sleepless prayer, vigil and joys of the Spirit. Later, having learned Greek well, he wished to enrich Romanian patristic literature with some writings of the Fathers. His most important translation is the Christoetheia, printed at Bucharest in 1937, the only one to reach print. The Paterikon regards it as a treatise of practical Orthodox morality that guides many souls even today.

He lived on Athos fifty-⁠two years, in poverty, humility, fasting and unceasing prayer. In the summer of 1955 he kissed his four disciples and fell asleep in peace. His bones rest at the Skete of Saint Basil, near the Aegean shore.