Gerontios of Saint Anna's Skete
Our Venerable Father Gerontios, first founder of the Skete of Saint Anna on the Holy Mountain
Venerable · d. 14th century, on Mount Athos
Commemorated 26 July — Commemoration of the founder of the Skete of St Anna
Gerontios was the abbot of Bouleuteria, one of the small ancient monasteries of the Holy Mountain, which stood exposed on the coast and was raided repeatedly by pirates. When the community was at last driven out, he withdrew with a disciple to the steep and waterless slopes above the sea on the south-west face of Athos, at the foot of the peak, and there built a hesychasterion and a church of St Panteleimon. Shown a spring in a place where no water was, he opened it, and it still runs. Around his cell grew the settlement that became the Skete of St Anna, the oldest and largest of the Athonite sketes, which has given the Church some fifteen canonised saints. He was a friend of Maximus Kavsokalyvites, and died at a great age. He is commemorated on July 26.
The abandonment of Bouleuteria
The coastal monasteries of the fourteenth-century Holy Mountain lived under a standing threat. Catalan mercenaries in the first years of the century and then Turkish and Latin corsairs through the whole period stripped the shore; a series of small foundations — Bouleuteria among them — were abandoned in these decades, their monks moving inland and upward to positions that could not be reached from a boat.
Gerontios was igoumen of Bouleuteria when this happened to his house. He did not attempt to rebuild on the same site. With one disciple he went up into the wild ground on the south-western flank of the mountain, above the sea and below the summit, and settled in what is now the upper part of the Skete of St Anna.
The hesychasterion, the church, and the spring
There he built a hesychasterion — a hermitage with a chapel, the standard Athonite unit of the semi-eremitic life — and dedicated its church to St Panteleimon, the great-martyr and unmercenary whose feast falls on July 27, the day after the one on which Gerontios himself came to be commemorated.
The site's difficulty was water: the slope is rock, and it is dry. The tradition of the skete relates that Gerontios was shown by God the place to dig, and that a spring was opened there which had never run before. It runs still, and the fathers of the skete use it as agiasma, holy water. This is the founding miracle of St Anna's and is repeated in every account of the place.
Companions, and what grew from the cell
He is remembered as a friend and spiritual companion of St Maximus Kavsokalyvites (†c. 1365), the great hesychast fool-for-Christ of the same quarter of the mountain — the pairing places Gerontios firmly in the fourteenth century and among the hesychast fathers of the Palamite generation.
Other hermits came and built beside him; the settlement grew, acquired its kyriakon (the common church, later dedicated to St Anna after the relic of her foot was brought there in the seventeenth century) and its rule, and became the senior skete of Athos. Its output of saints is the measure of Gerontios's foundation: the tradition counts about fifteen canonised saints and a long line of fathers of note — hymnographers, new-martyrs formed there for their confession under the Turks, and the copyists and painters for whom St Anna's was famous.
Gerontios lived to a great age and reposed in his cell.
Feast and commemoration
July 26 (church date; New Calendar civil July 26, Old Calendar civil August 8). This is a local commemoration of the Holy Mountain, kept above all at the Skete of St Anna itself and among the sketes and kellia that descend from it; the Athonite houses keep the Old Calendar, so the day falls on civil August 8.
The placement is not accidental: the eve of St Panteleimon (July 27), to whom Gerontios dedicated his first church, and one day after the Dormition of St Anna (July 25), the patron the skete afterwards took. The three days form a small cycle proper to the place.
An akolouthia (full service) in his honour was composed in the twentieth century by the monk Gerasimos of the Skete of Little St Anna (Gerasimos Mikragiannanites), the most prolific Greek hymnographer of the modern period; that text is under copyright and is not reproduced here.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
In thee, O father, was the divine image surely preserved: for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Gerontios, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
Gerontios is painted as an elderly Athonite monastic: long white beard, the black mantiya and the koukoulion of the great schema, a scroll in the hand. As a ktitor — a founder — he takes the founder's attribute, and is shown holding a small model of a church or of the skete, offered forward in both hands; where the composition allows, the spring he opened is indicated at his feet. He appears in the modern wall-paintings of the kyriakon of St Anna's and in the composite icons of the Synaxis of the Athonite Fathers (kept on the second Sunday after Pentecost), among the founders.
No pre-1900 image of him has been identified: his cultus received its liturgical form only in the twentieth century, and the depictions that exist are modern works by living or recently deceased iconographers, which this collection does not store. None has therefore been stored.
Disputed questions
- Dates. No year of birth or repose is transmitted. The association with Maximus Kavsokalyvites is the only fixed point and places him in the fourteenth century; fifteenth-century datings occur in some modern accounts and are less likely.
- Bouleuteria. The monastery's location is disputed among Athonite topographers; it is usually placed on the western coast, in the region later occupied by the sketes. Nothing of it survives above ground.
- How old is the commemoration? His name does not appear in the older printed menaia. The feast is a local Athonite commemoration taken up more widely in the twentieth century, when the akolouthia was written for it; it now appears in Greek calendars and, in translation, in the OCA's calendar.