Sabbas of Rossikon

Sabbas of Rossikon was a Greek schemaarchimandrite, abbot of the St Panteleimon Monastery on Athos, regarded as founder and builder of the new monastery by the sea. He reposed on 14 April 1821, on the day of Pascha, aged 103. He is venerated by the faithful, without a synodal canonization.

Until the 1770s the Russian monastery stood on the heights, at what is now Old Rossikon. Because of the reforms of Peter the Great and the Russo-⁠Turkish wars, the number of Russians fell, and in the second half of the eighteenth century the monastery was inhabited almost only by Greeks. Cut off from Russia, it fell into poverty, and the brethren moved down to the sea, near the harbour. In 1803 the Protaton asked Patriarch Callinicus either to abolish the monastery or to make it cenobitic, and pointed to an ascetic of the skete, the elder Sabbas, who might raise it. Sabbas accepted, after the patriarch threatened him with God's judgment, chiefly because help was promised for the restoration of the Russian cenobium. As abbot he moved the monastery to its present site and began works on an unprecedented scale: the katholikon of the Holy Great Martyr Panteleimon (consecrated in 1815), the church of the Dormition (1818), the refectory and the cell buildings.

His successors rightly call him renewer and builder of the monastery, and on the day of the founder's memorial pancakes with honey (thalanites) are served to the brotherhood at table, according to the custom of eastern monasteries.