Michael Maleinos

The Venerable Michael Maleinos was a Byzantine monk greatly honoured by the Christians of Asia Minor, uncle of Nikephoros Phokas, the future emperor, and teacher of Saint Athanasius the Athonite. He fell asleep on 12 July 961 (in other sources, 963). His feast is on 12 July.

Family and youth

He was born Manuel Maleinos around 894, in the Charsianon region of Cappadocia, into a wealthy and powerful family. Both grandfathers had been senior officers and had risen to be patrikios; his father, Eudokimos, was also a patrikios, and his mother, Anastaso, was a relative of the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos. He had brothers, among them the general Constantine Maleinos, and a sister who married the general Bardas Phokas the Elder, thus binding the family to the powerful clan of the Phokades. He was taken early into the service of the court at Constantinople, as a relative of the emperor Leo the Wise, where he received the rank of spatharokandidatos.

The monk

At eighteen he left the world and withdrew to Bithynia, on Mount Kyminas, where he came as a disciple to the elder John Heladites, from whom he received tonsure with the name Michael. He was ordained hieromonk. After a time the elder allowed him to live alone in a nearby cave: five days a week he prayed in recollection, and on Saturday and Sunday he came to the monastery for services and communion. He is said to have been compassionate and gentle with people. His example drew many to the strict life in those places; in a desolate place called Dry Lake he founded a monastery and gave it a strict rule. When the monastery was established he moved to a still more remote place and built another, so that through his labour Mount Kyminas was covered with monastic communities. His disciple Theophanes wrote his life.

He had great influence on his nephew, the general and later emperor Nikephoros II Phokas, and on Saint Athanasius the Athonite, who began monastic life at his monastery, about 953, and later took it as the model for the Great Lavra on Athos. After more than fifty years of monastic life he fell asleep on Mount Kyminas.

Veneration

Tsar Michael Feodorovich, the first Romanov, born on 12 July, the saint's day, had him as patron, so the dynasty greatly honoured him, and in Russia in the seventeenth century many chapels were raised in his name, among them in the Ascension monastery in the Kremlin. His relics and icon were brought to Moscow in 1627 from Patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople, and the next year the relics were placed in a reliquary (now in the Kremlin museums). The Russian writer Mikhail Zagoskin, born on 25 July, his day in another calendar, was also named for him.