Philotheus of Dionysiou

Venerable Philotheus of Dionysiou, an Athonite struggler, was born in 1526 at Elateia. Fearing the Turks, his parents moved to Chrysoupolis in Macedonia, where his father soon died. The child and his brother were seized by the Turks and thrown into prison, but the Mother of God appeared to them in the likeness of their mother and led them out of prison to the monastery of the Mother of God in Neapolis in Asia Minor. There the brothers were tonsured monks and became ecclesiarchs. Their mother, Eudokia, had entered a nunnery in the same city and for a long time knew nothing of her children's fate. When she recognized them one day, they told her that she herself had brought them out of prison, and the mother was convinced of the protection of the Mother of God.

In 1551, after his mother's death, Philotheus left for Mount Athos at twenty-⁠five and joined the community of Dionysiou Monastery. The enemy of good envied the young Philotheus and always sought a way to harm him, but the saint stayed unshaken. Wishing for greater stillness, he feigned illness and deafness and withdrew to a cave outside the monastery, where he became an ascetic and a conqueror of demons. When his feigned illness was discovered, he had to change his dwelling, so that people would not honour him, and in his new cell he gathered three disciples. He rose to high spiritual perfection and received the gift of foresight. He fell asleep peacefully in the Lord in 1610, at the age of eighty-⁠four. Before his death he ordered his disciples not to bury his body but to throw it into the forest, a prey to beasts and birds. They carried out the wish of their elder, but God glorified the relics with a wondrous radiance. A monk took the skull and gave it to his disciples.

His Life was written by the monk Daniel of Dionysiou, from an older manuscript compiled by Agapios Landos in 1802, and published in Venice in 1872. He is commemorated on 21 October (new style).