Vikentios of St Anne's Skete

Vikentios of St Anne's Skete, with the secular name George Drakos, son of Demetrius and Vasiliki, was born in 1872 in the village of Stanos in Valtos near Mesolonghi. He came in 1915 to the hut of Saint Demetrius in Saint Anne's Skete and was tonsured a monk in 1916. Elder Cherubim writes beautifully of this struggler: "Old Vikentios was full of natural simplicity. Wherever he was, he prayed in a loud voice on the paths, in the kyriakon, in his meetings with others. 'Save me, my Panagia. Save me. Have mercy on me,' we often heard him cry. His voice came out with pain, with anguish, as if from a wounded breast. His anguished cry recalled the wise words of Saint Macarius: 'If the soul sighs and cries out to God, he sends the spiritual Moses, who delivers it from the slavery of the Egyptians. But first it cries and sighs, and then it receives the beginning of deliverance.'

Salvation occupied him ceaselessly. It caused him spiritual pain. When he met someone on the road, after 'Bless,' he used to ask, in his heavy Roumeliote accent, since he came from the region of Karpenisi: 'What do you say, father, shall we be saved?' He said nothing else. Nothing else concerned him. He was another Ephraim the Syrian in compunction. 'Save me, my Panagia,' he begged, and tears ran like a river. 'Do not let me perish. For love of your Son I came here from childhood. Save me, my Panagia, save me.' Whether he worked or walked on the road, he cried out constantly and wept almost without ceasing. 'Save me, my Panagia'... In the simple heart of Elder Vikentios, where the Mother of God rested with her Son, 'the Beloved,' it seemed to me that this lament and these tears gave birth to a secret, unspeakable joy. I always asked to learn what this blessed man was doing. Until his repose he prayed in the same manner, lamenting and mourning. His death, as the Kartsonaioi brothers informed me, was the death of a holy man, a hero of the prayer of lament." It cannot be that the Theotokos's intercessions were not heard and that so many invocations and tears of joyful sorrow went for nothing. He reposed quietly and beautifully on 12 October 1961. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.