Neophytos the Cypriot

Saint Neophytos the Cypriot (so called in some lists, though the source shows him born at Kymi in Euboea), a venerable monk, was a monk of the New Skete on the Holy Mountain. He was born in 1866, with the name Nikolaos Margaritis, the son of Constantine and Catherine, to pious parents. At eighteen, in 1884, he came to the Cell of the Life-⁠giving Spring in the New Skete and was tonsured a monk in 1885. He had three disciples: the monk Paisios (died 1956) and the brothers in the flesh Kyrillos (died 1960), an exceptional woodcarver, and the hieromonk Neophytos (died 1975), the confessor. Towards the end the father of the two brothers, George, also came to live near them, and for his simplicity and humility he saw in the church of their cell the Mother of God with the Christ Child.

Neophytos left a large woodcarving, with the Annunciation and scenes from the life of the Mother of God, valued before the war at several million drachmas. For sixty-⁠five years he remained in the skete, a quiet man, a lover of good and beauty. According to Sotirios Schinas, he was "a most holy elder, close to God", a living example of virtue, and he died in peace; he was buried by a metropolitan, Kyrillos of Zichna, in the presence of all the fathers of the New Skete and of the neighbouring sketes. He fell asleep in the Lord on 10 September 1949, in his cell. Father Moses counts him among the virtuous confessors of the New Skete. He is honoured by the faithful, without synodal canonization.