Euthymius the New of Thessalonica

Origins and early life

Euthymius was born about 823 in the region of Ancyra in Galatia — his native village is given as Opso — and received in baptism the name Nicetas. His parents, Epiphanius and Anna, were devout Christians of modest substance; the boy, meek and obedient, lost his father at the age of seven and became the stay of his mother's household. Like his father before him he was enrolled for military service, and at his mother's insistence he married; a daughter, Anastaso, was born to him. But the pull of the monastic life, conceived in him from childhood, prevailed: at about the age of eighteen — the year 841/842, as his Life reckons it — he secretly left home, family, and service, and took the road to the monasteries.

Ascetic struggle: Olympus, Athos, the pillar

For some fifteen years Euthymius laboured on Mount Olympus in Bithynia, the great monastic mountain of the age, learning the ascetic craft in obedience to its elders; the tradition of his Life sets his departure in the era when the veneration of the icons had just been restored, and joins his beginnings to the blessing of the greatest Olympian of the day. From Olympus he removed to Mount Athos — then still a wilderness of scattered hermits, a generation before the Great Lavra was founded — and his coming stands near the head of the Holy Mountain's recorded history: Euthymius is one of the earliest Athonite ascetics known by name, and the tradition honours him as a forerunner and father of Athonite monasticism. On the way he learned that his mother and wife were alive and well; he wrote to them that he had become a monk, sent them a cross, and called them to follow his example — a call both women in time obeyed, ending their days as nuns in his own foundation. On Athos he was clothed in the great schema and shut himself for three years in a cave in utter silence, wrestling with the assaults of temptation and eating only what grew wild.

His holiness becoming known, Euthymius also took up, for a time, the rarest of ascetic stations: he lived as a stylite upon a pillar in the neighbourhood of Thessalonica, teaching from it those who gathered below, counselling, and healing the sick — a bridge between the ancient Syrian discipline of the pillar-saints and the new monastic world of the Greek north. It was at Thessalonica in this period that he was ordained deacon; out of humility he never accepted a higher order to the end of his life.

The founding of Peristerai

So purified, the Life says, was his mind and heart that he was granted divine visions; and at the Lord's command he left his solitude to build for others. In 863, on the hill called Peristerai ("the doves"), a half-day east of Thessalonica, he raised from the ruins of an ancient shrine of the unmercenaries a monastery of Saint Andrew — the tradition speaks of two communities, for men and for women — and governed the brotherhood for fourteen years, still a deacon. Into the women's house he received his own mother and his wife; his granddaughter, tradition adds, was among those he dedicated to God. The monastery of Peristerai endured for centuries and was later numbered among the dependencies of the Great Lavra of Athos — the founder's link to the Holy Mountain outliving him in stone.

Repose and relics

Desiring to die in silence, Euthymius withdrew at the last to the little island of Hiera ("Holy Island") off Athos, and there reposed on October 15, 898. His disciple Basil — later archbishop of Thessalonica, and the author of his Life — translated the relics to Thessalonica, where they were received with honour; the city has kept his memory since, and from his repose on the island and his long labours by the city he bears the double surname "of Thessalonica" and "the New" — the latter to distinguish him from Euthymius the Great, the fifth-century father of the Palestinian desert (January 20). He is likewise not to be confused with the Athonite new martyr Euthymius (†1814), commemorated on May 1 with Ignatius and Acacius, whose epithet in some English notices is also "the New" — nor, most importantly, with the Georgian Euthymius the Iberian (c. 955–1028), builder and second abbot of Iviron and the great translator of the Holy Mountain, whom the English calendars likewise style "Euthymius the New" and who is commemorated on May 13. Both men are Athonite, both are called "the New," and both are honoured as fathers of Athonite monasticism; where a source gives only the epithet, the feast day decides — October 15 is this Thessalonian, May 13 the Iberian, May 1 the new-martyr.