Mark of Dionysiou

Mark of Dionysiou, an abbot, was born in 1852 in the village of Perivolakia in Chania, Crete. As a young man he came from the southern Aegean to the calm harbour of Athos and landed with longing at the arsenal of Dionysiou Monastery in 1882. He was tonsured a monk in 1885. With the same zeal he served the monastery in many obediences, from the lowest to the highest.

He was a diligent servant, a self-⁠controlled monk, a lover of the services, a faster and a good confessor. Monk Lazarus of Dionysiou writes of him that he was an ornament of the monastery, a statue of virtue, a fighter to the utmost; all his life he worked in three or four obediences: bookbinder, librarian, sacristan, chanter in the right choir like an unshakable pillar, and parish priest in his week. He was also abbot in a troubled time, when the dispute over the patriarchal commemoration lasted five years (1926-1931). All his life he ate once a day, the common meal; in the evening he did not come to the refectory, fasting. Only at vigils, to chant in the choir, he drank a tea with a piece of dry bread.

Before the end, demons came to tempt him in his illness. On the morning of 14 January 1938 he communed from Abbot Gabriel, and in the evening he ended his life. Lazarus, an eyewitness, relates that the hospital room was filled with a wonderful fragrance for more than twenty minutes, and that in twenty years' service at the monastery this had not happened with any other departed brother. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.