Silvester the Hermit of Mount Ceahlau

Silvester was a hieroschemamonk and one of the earliest hermits of Mount Ceahlău, in the fifteenth century, founder of the first known hermitage near the mountain. 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 had taken his vows at Neamț Monastery, where he had laboured from youth and become a skilled spiritual father. Hearing of the hermits of Ceahlău and of its solitary places, he withdrew with a few disciples to the Bistrița Valley and, going up the stream now called Pârâul Schitului, lived for many years near the mountain, unknown to anyone.

Later other hermits gathered around him. In the time of Prince Alexander the Good he founded a small hermitage in the clearing, with a wooden church dedicated to the Descent of the Holy Spirit. The place was called first Silvester's Hermitage, then Silvester's Skete. Local tradition counts him the first hermit remembered on Ceahlău.

He guided the skete for more than twenty years and established a fine common life. Their practice was unceasing prayer. Silvester was also confessor to many hermits who lived on the mountain; on feast days they came down to the skete, received the Holy Mysteries and climbed back to their dugouts. During fasts even the monks of the skete withdrew into the mountain and struggled alone.

Around the middle of the fifteenth century he passed to the Lord, leaving many disciples. His hermitage, renewed later, was called Hangu Skete, and from the seventeenth century Pionul Monastery, after the hermit Peon.