Dionysius the Rhetor and Metrophanes
Our Venerable Fathers Dionysius the Rhetor and Metrophanes his disciple, founders of the Little Skete of Saint Anna on the Holy Mountain
Venerable · d. Dionysius 9 July 1606; Metrophanes a short while after
Commemorated 9 July — Repose of Dionysius at the Little Skete of Saint Anna, kept with his disciple Metrophanes
Two monks of the Monastery of Stoudios at Constantinople who came to the Holy Mountain at the turn of the sixteenth century in search of stillness, and who, after passing through Karyes and the Skete of Saint Anna, settled in a cave on the steep and stony ground between Saint Anna's and Katounakia: the elder Dionysius, honoured by the Great Church with the office of Rhetor, a learned man, a fine calligrapher and a writer; and his disciple Metrophanes, a spiritual father who left the Mountain for a time to hear confessions in the villages of Chalkidiki under Ottoman rule. Their cave became the nucleus of what is now the Little Skete of Saint Anna (Mikragianna), and they are honoured as its first inhabitants and founders. Dionysius reposed on 9 July 1606, Metrophanes not long after.
From Stoudios to the Holy Mountain
Dionysius was tonsured at the Monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople — the house of Theodore the Studite, and still, in the late Byzantine and early Ottoman centuries, the standard of urban cenobitic life in the capital. He and his disciple Metrophanes lived at a metochion (dependency) of Stoudios; the Athonite tradition is unanimous that this is where they came from. Dionysius had been given by the Great Church the ecclesiastical office of Rhetor — one of the senior teaching and preaching dignities of the Patriarchate — and both men were reckoned learned. Wanting a harder and quieter life than the capital could give them, they left "the monastery of their repentance" and came, at the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, to the peninsula of Athos, settling first in a cell near Karyes, the administrative centre of the Mountain.
The flight from disciples
The cell near Karyes did not stay quiet. Dionysius's learning and his gift of discernment drew people to him; disciples gathered, and the work of forming them consumed the time he had come for. The tradition is candid about the result: with so many about him his own soul had no peace. So the two went further out, into the wilderness of the southern tip of the peninsula, past the Skete of the Lavra — the place now called Saint Anna's — and came at last to a cave on the rocky slope between Saint Anna's and Katounakia. That cave was their home and, as it turned out, the seed of a settlement.
Their asceticism there is described in the terms the Athonite sources use for the strictest of the desert-dwellers: warfare against the stomach and against sleep, limiting not only what they ate but how much, and cutting back the hours of rest so as to give the night to repentance and prayer. They are called men who lived in the flesh a life equal to that of the angels.
The Little Skete of Saint Anna
The Little Skete of Saint Anna (Μικραγιάννα), a dependency of the Great Skete of Saint Anna, occupies that slope to this day: some ten kalyves — cells gathered about a church — on ground so stony that little grows on it, two of the cells without a chapel of their own. Both the written testimonies and the oral tradition of the place make Dionysius and Metrophanes its first known inhabitants, and every later father of Mikragianna reckons his descent from them. The skete's later fame as a nursery of iconographers, copyists and hymnographers is a direct inheritance of what the two founders were.
Dionysius was an excellent calligrapher and author. Manuscripts written or signed by him are preserved in the Great Lavra, in other monasteries of the Mountain, and in the library of the Skete of Saint Anna, where an autograph miscellany survives bearing his signature under the title Kouvaras — a working book on the benefiting and instructing of the brethren, with material on inner watchfulness and the noetic work of prayer. His repose was recorded as something out of the ordinary in the codices of the monasteries of Dionysiou and Docheiariou, which is itself evidence of the regard in which the Mountain held him.
Metrophanes excelled as a disciple, and afterwards, with the blessing of the Athonite fathers and of his elder, was asked to leave the Mountain for a season to preach in the villages of Chalkidiki and to serve there as a spiritual father, hearing confessions and holding the people together in a country under Turkish rule. Having completed that obedience he returned to the Holy Mountain. He is also the transmitter of a famous vision of Paradise and Hell seen by a man named Demetrius from Stratoniki, which circulated widely in the Greek world.
Repose
Dionysius reposed on 9 July 1606; Metrophanes followed him a short time later. Their memory is kept together, as their life was lived, elder and disciple in one commemoration.
Feast and commemoration
July 9 (church date; New Calendar civil July 9, Old Calendar civil July 22). On the Holy Mountain the day belongs to the Little Skete of Saint Anna, whose founders they are; in the Greek day-calendars they stand with Pancratius of Taormina and Michael Pakhnanas as the three principal names of July 9. The Athonite fathers keep them as a pair, elder and disciple, and no separate day is given to Metrophanes. The service composed in their honour is a modern Athonite composition and is under copyright; it is not reproduced here.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of venerable fathers)
In you, O Fathers, was preserved unfailing that which is according to the image, for taking up the Cross you followed after Christ, and by your deeds you taught us to overlook the flesh, which passes away, and to attend to the soul, which is a thing immortal; wherefore your spirits, O holy Dionysius and Metrophanes, rejoice with the angels.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Fleeing the praise of men and the burden of teaching, you found a cave on the rock above the sea, and made it a house of prayer and a mother of ascetics; wherefore the Little Skete honours you as its founders, O Dionysius, wise in speech, and Metrophanes, obedient son.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The two are painted together, as they are commemorated: Dionysius the elder, in the full monastic schema, grey- or white-bearded, holding a scroll — the attribute of the teacher and the writer, and appropriate to a man whose office was that of Rhetor and whose craft was the pen — and Metrophanes at his side or slightly behind him, younger, dark of beard, in the monastic mandyas and koukoulion, sometimes with a scroll of his own or with the hands crossed in the posture of the disciple. Behind or beneath them the painters show the cave and the cliff of Mikragianna above the sea, with the kalyves of the skete on the slope, which fixes the identification beyond doubt.
No storable image has been found. Every icon of these two now in circulation belongs to the recent Athonite revival of their cult and is the work of a living iconographer; on Wikimedia Commons no candidate of any date exists. It is worth stating the reason explicitly, because the trap is a common one: a photograph of a modern painted icon, uploaded with a free licence by the photographer as "own work," licenses only the photograph. The iconographer's rights in the painting underneath are untouched by it, and such a file is not storable here whatever tag it carries. No image is stored, and the entry is listed under wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- The date of Dionysius's repose. The Athonite tradition followed here, and the calendars that keep the feast, give 9 July 1606. Other manuscripts of the Mountain record his repose on 6 October, in the year 1596 or 1602. The variance is recorded and not resolved; July 9 is the day of the commemoration in every calendar that keeps it.
- Dionysius the Rhetor and the other Athonite Dionysii. He is not Dionysius of Olympus, the sixteenth-century founder on Mount Olympus who was also for a time on Athos, nor the founder of the monastery of Dionysiou (Dionysius of Koresos), nor Dionysius of Zakynthos. The epithet ho Rhētōr is what distinguishes him, and it should always be carried with the name.
- Metrophanes. He is not Metrophanes of Constantinople, the fourth-century patriarch, with whom the bare name would otherwise confuse him.
- The reach of the commemoration. The veneration of the two is Athonite and local in origin, kept at Mikragianna and in the sketes about it; it has entered wider calendars — the Greek day-lists and the American calendar among them — only recently, which is why older synaxaria do not name them.