Eustratius the Wonderworker
Our Venerable Father Eustratius the Wonderworker, Abbot of the Agauros Monastery
Venerable · Confessor · Wonderworker · b. c. 751, at Tarsion in Bithynia — d. c. 846, at the Agauros Monastery on Mount Olympus of Bithynia — aged about 95
Commemorated 9 January — Repose at the Agauros Monastery
Eustratius the Wonderworker (c. 751 – c. 846) was a monastic saint of the ninth century, abbot of the Agauros Monastery on Mount Olympus of Bithynia, the great monastic mountain of Asia Minor. Born in the Bithynian village of Tarsion, he left home at twenty to enter the monastery where his own kinsmen were monks, and there gave himself to a life of extreme asceticism — bread and water, and nights passed in prayer and prostration. Chosen abbot, he ruled as the humblest of the brethren, sharing their labour by day. When the iconoclast persecution was revived under Leo V the Armenian, the community was scattered and Eustratius himself imprisoned; only after the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 842 could he gather his monks again and resume his rule. Renowned for a great abundance of miracles and for a boundless charity, he reposed in deep old age, about ninety-five years old, and is kept on January 9.
Eustratius was born about the year 751 in the village of Tarsion, in the region of Bithynia in north-western Asia Minor. (Some accounts, rendering the name, place his birth at "Tarsus," but the sources point to the small Bithynian town of Tarsion rather than to Cilician Tarsus.) He had kinsmen — the tradition names an uncle, and speaks of monks of his own family — already living the ascetic life at the Agauros Monastery (Greek τοῦ Ἀγαύρου; the name appears also as "Abgar" in some retellings) on Mount Olympus of Bithynia, the mountain that in these centuries was covered with monasteries and was the chief centre of Byzantine monasticism outside Constantinople. At the age of twenty, about the year 771, Eustratius secretly left his parents' house and came to this monastery to be a monk.
His ascetic struggle was severe from the first. He ate only bread and water, kept long vigils, and passed the greater part of his nights in prayer and prostrations, serving all the brethren with a ready and humble heart. After some years, and against his own will, he was chosen abbot (hegumen) of the monastery. The office did not alter his manner of life: as superior he continued to live as the lowliest of the community, taking his share of the manual labour by day and giving the night to prayer, and travelling among the dependencies and outlying cells of his large monastery to counsel and encourage the brethren. His charity became proverbial — the tradition tells that he once gave away the monastery's only ox to a poor peasant who had lost his own.
His long life spanned the second period of Iconoclasm. When the emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820) revived the heresy and renewed the persecution of the holy icons, the monks of Olympus, staunch defenders of the veneration of images, were driven from their monastery and scattered to caves and forests; Eustratius himself was imprisoned for a time. He lived to see the heresy overthrown: with the restoration of Orthodoxy in 842 — the Triumph of Orthodoxy under the empress Theodora — he was able to re-gather his dispersed community and resume its direction. For this witness under persecution the Church numbers him among the confessors.
He was granted so great an abundance of miracles — healings, and, the tradition says, even raisings of the dead and the quenching of fire — that his biographer professes himself unable to record them all, and the epithet the Wonderworker (ὁ Θαυματουργός) is his in the calendars. He reposed in peace in extreme old age, about ninety-five years old, around the year 846, having spent some seventy-five years in the monastic life; his last charge to his disciples was to guard faithfully the sacred trust of the holy monastic schema.
Feast and commemoration
Eustratius is commemorated on January 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil January 22), within the afterfeast of the Theophany, together with the martyr Polyeuctus of Melitene whom the day chiefly honours. The Greek and Slavic calendars keep his memory; the OCA lists him among the day's saints.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
With the streams of thy tears thou didst till the barren desert, and by thy sighings from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours, and thou becamest a luminary, shining upon the world by thy miracles, O Eustratius our father. Intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Eustratius is depicted in the settled type of a venerable abbot: an aged monk with a long beard, in the monastic schema and mantle, holding a scroll or a cross and raising his hand in blessing. No public-domain image identified as this Eustratius has been secured for storage: the images that surface under his name are almost all of the Great-martyr Eustratius of Sebaste (December 13), a different saint, and storing one of them would prejudge the identity. The entry therefore keeps no icon image and is noted as wanting an icon pending a securely identified portrait of the ninth-century wonderworker of Olympus.
Disputed questions
- Tarsion or Tarsus; Agauros or "Abgar." The place-names in the retellings vary: his birthplace appears as the Bithynian Tarsion and (by assimilation) as Tarsus, and his monastery as Agauros (τοῦ Ἀγαύρου) and as "Abgar." The Bithynian setting — the village of Tarsion and the Agauros monastery on Mount Olympus — is the one the sources support and is followed here.
- Not to be confused with the Great-martyr Eustratius of Sebaste, one of the Five Companions martyred under Diocletian (kept December 13), a wholly different and much earlier saint; nor with the several other Eustratii of the calendar. This Eustratius is the ninth-century abbot and wonderworker of Olympus.