Theodosius of Trebizond

Saint Theodosius was metropolitan of Trebizond in the fourteenth century. He was born in 1300 and reposed in 1392. The Church remembers him on 11 January by the old calendar. The main sources for his life are the chrysobull of the emperor Alexios III Megas Komnenos of 1375 and the Life of Saint Dionysius, his brother, composed in the sixteenth century by the hieromonk Mitrophanes and published by Agapios Landos in the collection "New Paradise" (1641).

He was born in the village of Gorentsi, in the Kastoria region, which was then under the rule of the principality of Thessaly of John Angelos Doukas, into a family of middling means. He received a classical education at the Patriarchate of Constantinople. He was ordained presbyter and then settled on the Holy Mountain, at the monastery of Philotheou, then inhabited by Bulgarian monks. Later he became its abbot, and during his abbacy, in 1335, his brother Dionysius also settled there.

Theodosius was captured by pirates but Christians ransomed him, and he came again to Constantinople, where he became abbot of the Mangana monastery and, in 1370, metropolitan of Trebizond. When Dionysius learned that his brother Theodosius had become metropolitan of Trebizond, he went to him in 1374, in order to obtain through him money from the emperor Alexios III Megas Komnenos (1349 to 1390) for the completion of the monastery. In this way the present monastery of Dionysiou came to be built.

Theodosius reposed in 1392 at Trebizond.