Gregory of Grigoriou
Our Venerable Father Gregory, Founder of Grigoriou Monastery on Mount Athos
Venerable · d. after 1405
Commemorated 7 December — Commemoration of the founder of Grigoriou Monastery, Mount Athos
Gregory of Grigoriou was the founder and first builder of the monastery of Grigoriou on Mount Athos, one of the twenty great houses of the Holy Mountain. A Serbian by birth, he pursued the ascetic life on Athos and raised a monastery dedicated to St Nicholas, which was afterward renamed Grigoriou in his honour. His signature is preserved in an Athonite document of 1405, fixing him to the close of the fourteenth and the opening of the fifteenth century; the tradition holds that his relics were later carried off from the Mountain by Serbian monks. He is commemorated on December 7.
Little of Gregory's life is recorded beyond the fact and character of his foundation. He was born in Serbia and came to Mount Athos, where he gave himself to asceticism and gathered a brotherhood, building and dedicating a monastery in honour of St Nicholas the Wonderworker on the south-western shore of the peninsula. After his death the house came to bear his own name — Grigoriou — as its founder's memorial, and it endures among the ruling monasteries of Athos.
His historical footing rests on an Athonite act of 1405 bearing his signature, which places his activity around the turn of the fifteenth century. According to the tradition of the Mountain, his relics were at some later time removed from Athos by Serbian monks and carried to Serbian lands. The scantiness of the record has led to some confusion of the founder with a later "Gregory" of the same house and with other Athonite Gregories; the monastery keeps his memory as its ktetor (founder) on December 7.
Feast and commemoration
December 7 (church date; Old Calendar civil December 20), within the Nativity Fast. His veneration is centred on his monastery of Grigoriou and in the Greek and Serbian traditions.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert bloom, and by thy deep sighs thou didst make thy labours bring forth fruit a hundredfold, becoming a beacon that shone upon the world with wonders. O Gregory our venerable father, intercede with Christ God that our souls be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Gregory is depicted as a monastic founder — an aged monk in the schema, holding a model of his monastery or a scroll, with a long beard — in the manner of the ktetor-saints of Athos. No public-domain image securely identified with this saint has been located; he is entered in the the list of icons still being sought list.
Disputed questions
- Dates and identity. The saint's precise dates are uncertain; the 1405 signature places him around 1400, but some accounts push his floruit into the mid-fourteenth century, and he is sometimes confused with a later Gregory of the same monastery. The century of repose is given here as the fifteenth on the strength of the dated document, and is flagged for verification.