Dionysius of Korisos
Our Venerable Father Dionysius of Korisos, Founder of the Monastery of the Honourable Forerunner on Mount Athos
Venerable · Priest · b. early 14th century, at Korisos near Kastoria — d. c. 1388, at Trebizond
Commemorated 25 June — Repose at Trebizond
Dionysius was a peasant's son from Korisos near Kastoria in western Macedonia who went young to the Holy Mountain, was formed there by his elder brother Theodosius — later abbot of Philotheou and Metropolitan of Trebizond — and in old age founded, on a sheer cliff of the south-western shore of Athos, the monastery of the Honourable Forerunner and Baptist John, which the Mountain has called Dionysiou ever since. Its building was paid for by Alexios III Grand Komnenos, emperor of Trebizond, whose gold-sealed charter of September 1374 survives in the monastery archive and is one of the great documents of late Byzantine monastic patronage. Dionysius died at Trebizond about 1388, having gone there to beg further money for the painting of the church. He is commemorated on June 25, together with his fellow-ascetic Dometius.
Korisos, and the Holy Mountain
He was born in the village of Korisos (Κορησός), in the hills south of Kastoria, to farming parents of a piety the sources take care to record. His elder brother had already gone to the Holy Mountain; when Dionysius followed him there as a young man, it was the brother who became his teacher. The two studied the Scriptures together, and the tradition remembers Dionysius from the beginning for the two qualities that governed the rest of his life — humility of mind and a habitual open-handedness that would later make his monastery a byword for hospitality.
The brother was Theodosius, who rose to be abbot of Philotheou about 1375, and was then raised — for the holiness of his life, and by the emperor of Trebizond's request — to the metropolitan see of Trebizond, the Greek capital on the southern shore of the Black Sea. This reference's entry for Theodosius is at January 11, and the two lives are read together: it was the brother's standing at the Komnenian court that made the foundation possible, and Theodosius's own commemoration names the endowment of Dionysiou among his works.
The cliff of the Small Athos
Ordained priest, Dionysius withdrew from the community and settled as a hesychast in the rough country of the Small Athos (Μικρὸς Ἄθως), the south-western flank of the peninsula, at a place the older documents call Old Prodromos — a spot already associated with the Forerunner and with the Theotokos. The tradition relates that he saw, over several nights, a light standing like a pillar upon a bare cliff above the sea, and understood it as the sign that a house of the Forerunner was to be built in that impossible place. The site he chose is a narrow shelf some eighty metres above the water on a vertical rock face, and the monastery built on it was called at first Nea Petra, "the New Rock" — the name it bears in the founding charter, before the founder's own name displaced it.
He had no money, and the Mountain had none to give: Athos in the 1370s was between the Serbian collapse and the first Ottoman pressure. So Dionysius appealed through his brother to the emperor Alexios III Grand Komnenos of Trebizond (reigned 1349–1390), who kept a court rich enough to be the last real patron of Greek monasticism in the east.
The chrysobull of 1374
The emperor answered with a chrysobull — a gold-sealed imperial charter — dated September 1374, which is still in the archive at Dionysiou and is the monastery's foundation document. Its preamble states the principle plainly: that emperors and rulers build monasteries on the Holy Mountain for their eternal memory. With it Alexios gave fifty somia — the sources reckon the sum at some four hundred thousand aspra — and undertook a further annual grant, and he attached to the gift the obligation that the monastery pray perpetually for him and for the empress Theodora. A second grant of a thousand Komnenian coins followed for the work. The building went up between 1374 and 1379 or thereabouts: the katholikon of the Forerunner, the tower, the cells hung over the drop, and the great cistern.
Dionysius governed the house as its first abbot under a rule of strict cenobitic common life. It took its rank among the ruling monasteries of the Mountain and holds the fifth place in the Athonite hierarchy to this day.
Repose at Trebizond
The church was built but not painted, and painting a katholikon was the most expensive part of the work. Dionysius took ship for Trebizond to ask the imperial house for the money, and died there, in the city where his brother had been metropolitan, about 1388. The Greek notices are unanimous that he ended his life on that errand and away from the Mountain, and this is why the monastery keeps his memory rather than his tomb.
His foundation survived him hard. It was taken by pirates in 1520, when many of the brethren were carried off; it burned in 1535 and was rebuilt with Moldavian money under the voivode Peter IV Rareş; and it holds today the sixteenth-century frescoes of the Cretan Tzortzis in the katholikon, a library of some eight hundred manuscripts, and the relic of the right hand of St John the Baptist among its treasures.
Feast and commemoration
June 25 (church date; New Calendar civil June 25, Old Calendar civil July 8). The commemoration is Athonite and Greek, carried into the OCA calendar; it is not in the Slavonic books. On the Mountain it is kept at Dionysiou with the memory of Dometius, his counsellor and fellow-ascetic, so that the two are regularly named in one breath as "Dionysius and his companion Dometius." The house's own great feast is that of its patron, the Nativity of the Forerunner on June 24, so that the founder's day falls immediately after the panegyris and within its leavetaking.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful; with sighs from the depth thou didst bring thy labours to a hundredfold increase; and thou wast made a beacon to the whole world, shining with miracles, O Dionysius our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Dionysius is painted as a venerable priest-monk: an old man with a long, forked white beard, in the black mandyas and koukoulion of the great schema, one hand raised in blessing or holding a scroll, the other supporting a model of the monastery — the vertical cliff, the tower, and the church of the Forerunner set on it — which is the standard attribute of a ktitor, a founder. Where the composition allows, the Forerunner himself is shown above, blessing the foundation, or the pillar of light stands on the rock behind him. At Dionysiou he appears in the founder's place in the katholikon and in the refectory cycles, and in the monastery's later engravings he is set beside the emperor Alexios III, who holds the chrysobull.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located that could be verified for this collection: Wikimedia Commons returns nothing for the founder under either his Greek or his English designations, and the Menologion of Basil II — the usual first resort for a minor saint of the fixed year — covers only September to February and in any case predates him by four centuries. The entry is listed in the the list of icons still being sought index.
Disputed questions
- The date of the foundation. The chrysobull is dated September 1374; several hagiographic notices, including the OCA's, give 1375 for the approval of the building, which is probably the year the work began rather than the year of the charter. The two are not in conflict.
- The date of his repose. Commonly given as 1388; some Greek notices leave it open, saying only that he died at Trebizond. The year 1390, the death of Alexios III, is sometimes substituted, and cannot be right if the appeal was made to that emperor in person.
- Which Dionysius? He is not Dionysius of Olympus (†1541), also an Athonite, who founded the monastery on Mount Olympus and had been abbot of Philotheou — the resemblance of career makes this the likeliest confusion; nor Dionysius of Zakynthos, nor Dionysius of Radonezh, nor Dionysius of Glushitsa, nor the Areopagite. The epithet of Korisos — his birthplace — is the surest identifier, and is the one the Greek notices use.
- His name for the house. The monastery's own documents call it the monastery of the Honourable Forerunner, or Nea Petra; "Dionysiou" is a later usage of the Mountain, from the founder's name in the genitive, and the dedication has never changed.