Neophytos the Spiritual Father

Neophytos the Spiritual Father, also called Neophytos Karamanlis, was a confessor and schemamonk of Cappadocian origin in the skete of Kavsokalyvia on the Holy Mountain, who died in 1860. He is known above all as the spiritual father of Hadji-⁠George, the great ascetic from Cappadocia.

While he was at the cell of the Holy Great Martyr George at Kavsokalyvia, he received the young Gabriel, his compatriot, who had left Gregoriou Monastery. So as not to break the prohibitions on receiving beardless youths and to protect him from the Turks, he settled him at the cave of Saint Nyphon, where Gabriel struggled for three or four years unseen by anyone. After the end of the Greek war of independence, Neophytos gave away his cell and bought from the Lavra an abandoned cell at Kerasia dedicated to the Holy Apostles, then another dedicated to Saint Demetrius. There, after a vision, he resolved to give his disciples a rule of perfect fasting: never cheese, eggs, milk, fish, oil or wine. He tonsured Gabriel into the great schema with the name George, and taught him Greek.

A Russian source says of him that he lived eighty-⁠eight years on Athos and one hundred and six years in all, and that he was the confessor of many monasteries, of hermits and of two patriarchs. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.