Varlaam of Xenophontos

Monk Varlaam of Xenophontos Monastery was an Athonite elder who lived for more than seventy years on the Holy Mountain and reposed on 17 January 1983, close to a hundred years old. He is honoured by the faithful as a man pleasing to God, though he has not been formally numbered among the saints. His life was gathered by Monk Moses the Athonite in his Great Gerontikon of twentieth-⁠century Athonites.

He was born in 1886 at Kouklina near Stenimachos in Thrace, and in the world his name was Vasilios Athanasiou Rizoglou. Young, poor and a refugee, he reached Thessaloniki and venerated Saint Demetrius in his church. In 1910 he entered the Monastery of Saint George, Xenophontos, and in 1912 he was tonsured a monk. He was one of the monastery's council of elders until 1977 and served as its representative in the Holy Community.

In 1927 he caught malaria together with many of the fathers, several of whom died. The brethren carried the wonderworking icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria in procession around the walls, and the sickness ended. Father Varlaam survived and thanked the Theotokos for the rest of his life. He also recounted that once, serving as cook on the feast of Saint George and grieved that he could not attend the vigil, he saw the saint in the kitchen, comforting him that he was there with him.

For many years he served at the monastery's dependencies: the Holy Theodores at Vourvourou, Saint Nicholas in Chalkidiki, and the cells of Saint Philip and Saint Tryphon above the Xenophontos skete. He loved work: pruning trees, hoeing gardens, making and mending, and his cell was full of tools. When caterpillars attacked his garden, he brought the holy skull of Saint Tryphon with faith and a blessing of the waters was served, and the caterpillars rose like a cloud and vanished.

He never ate meat, lit no stove in winter and kept warm by making prostrations. He received weary travellers and monks caught by nightfall with great love. His hardest trial came when he was sent to defend the monastery's rights at one of its dependencies: the local people trampled him and smeared him with paint. He returned with difficulty and was slow to recover, but he forgave them all from the heart.

He went every day to the long services in the katholikon with his prayer rope, neither reading, writing nor chanting. He had never looked at his face in a mirror, and he called himself "a log" and "an ox". Obedient, meek, temperate and full of love for the saints, he reposed on the feast of Saint Anthony the Great. The brotherhood of Xenophontos remembers him on the day of his repose, 17 January.