Paisius Nichitencu of Sihastria

Paisie Nichitencu, born in 1892 in northern Bukovina, was for almost half a century the cook of the Dragomirna and Sihăstria monasteries. He fell asleep at the end of 1970. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

He entered monastic life in 1933, and after a year received tonsure at a skete near Cernăuți. The Paterikon describes him as full of love, obedient and without any malice, like a child. All his life, almost fifty years, he carried the hardest obedience in the monastery, that of cook. He kept silence, worked with his hands, and with mind and heart prayed unceasingly. He had acquired the gift of tears, with which he consoled himself day and night in his cell, in church and at obedience. He was so gentle and radiant of face that the sight of his face calmed those who met him.

He never left the monastery to see his relatives. In 1950 the abbot let him go for a few days to his native village, but at Suceava station a brother came and told him the abbot was calling him back, because he had no one in the kitchen. Father Paisie cut off his own will, made the sign of the cross, returned to the monastery and never again asked to leave. After twenty-⁠eight years of obedience at Dragomirna, in 1960 he was moved to Sihăstria, where he continued the same obedience six more years.

All benefited from his life and wanted at least to see his face, but he spoke very little. Ten hours a day he stood in the kitchen, peeling potatoes, cutting vegetables, lighting the fire and praying in secret with the Jesus Prayer, while tears constantly dripped from his eyes. He carried a white towel in his breast with which he wiped his face, so as not to be noticed, and looked into no one's eyes. If someone asked his blessing in the yard, he made a prostration to the ground, took the person's hand in his palms and answered with moist eyes: bless me, father. In church he stood motionless on his feet until the service ended, and in his cell he read mostly the Psalter and the paraklesis of the Mother of God.

He spent his last years only in prayer. He confessed weekly and received the Holy Mysteries twice a month. At the end of 1970 he fell asleep in peace, with the name of Christ in his heart and on his lips. The Paterikon counts him the best-⁠known practitioner of the prayer of the heart of the second half of the twentieth century.