Makarios of Lakkoskiti

Makarios of Lakkoskiti, a hieromonk, with the secular name Moses Utan Ilanides, son of Moses, was born in 1893 at Apoldu near Sibiu in Romania. He came to the Garden of the Mother of God at thirteen. He was tonsured a monk in 1912 with the name Makarios in the hut of the Presentation of the Lord in Lakkoskiti, where about a hundred Romanian fathers then lived, in great poverty and asceticism, chiefly from farm work.

Unfortunately for years he had a great temptation: a difficult neighbour, who tormented him with many and various problems and hardly left him in peace any day. He cut off his water, shouted at him, and so on. So as not to become angry and lose patience, seeing that the man did not listen or mend, he was forced to leave the hut he loved so much, for he had come to it from childhood, and went to Saint Paul's Monastery, to which it belonged. The fathers received him with much love. He chanted beautifully, read, celebrated, read the prayer of absolution when the abbot was absent, and was much loved by all the monks of St Paul's. He was an outstanding confessor; fathers came to him from all over the Holy Mountain, especially Romanians, to confess and lay the burdens of their souls under his stole. He reposed in the Lord Jesus our God on 19 June 1973, after the vigil of the Venerable Athonite Fathers, whose lives he had striven to imitate. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.