Saint Meletios and his Monastery in Kithairon
By Photios Kontoglou
By Photios Kontoglou
Many of us have heard of the Monastery of Saint Meletios in Kithairon, but we do not know who this Saint was who founded it.
Saint Meletios is not local, but came from the East. He was born in Moutalaske in Cappadocia in 1035. As every man born in the world has some inclination, one to letters, another to arms, another to trade, and another to something else, so was Meletios who as a child had an innate inclination towards religion. He loved the church more than anything else, showing that he was one of those whom Saint John the Evangelist says, "who were not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but who were born of God." He learned few letters. And because his parents wanted to marry him off, he left his place, leaving parents, relatives, friends, fields and everything else he had, and went to Constantinople and became a monk in a monastery of Chrysostom. After staying for three years in this monastery, he left it and went to Thessaloniki and venerated the tomb of Saint Demetrios. From there he went to the area of Thebes, and found a small monastery of Saint George and there he lived in silence.
Over time, his piety was learned and peasants from the surrounding villages came to him and put on goat hair cassocks and established a coenobitic monastery ruled by Saint Meletios. After a while, he left an elder to stand in for him and went to Rome to venerate Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and from there he went to Jerusalem. Having fulfilled what he desired, he returned to the monastery and was welcomed by the fathers with great joy and tears in their eyes. This was because they no longer hoped to be found worthy of such an abbot, a sympathetic father, who would carry all the burdens upon himself and not completely separate his office from the other fathers. But he was the most humble of all, the first in all hard work, the first in fasting, the first in meekness. He made sure that the brothers were not deprived, he saved them clothes and shoes, and for years he wore an old goat's hair cassock and a pair of old shoes, and he constantly patched them up and stitched them with his hands without anyone seeing him. He ate a little dry bread and drank water. However, he always sat at the refectory with the brothers and forced the sick and the weak to eat oil, except for the fasting days. But he spent most of the time on dry food, and for many days he did not put anything in his mouth at all. As for the work, he himself lifted the heaviest stones with his sanctified hands to build the cells, he dug and planted the most gardens according to the apostle Paul who says to the Corinthians: "We toil working with our hands." With such a governor, that monastery looked like a sanctified ark, in which the fathers sat, protected from the world's deluge, and praised God with joy, following the abbot who always had hymns in his mouth and said before entering the church: "Open for me the gates of righteousness, entering them I will confess to the Lord. In Your churches I will bless you, Lord. Evening and morning and at noon I will recount and recite your wonders. Seven times a day I praise You. All day long I lift up my hands to You." At night he would stay awake with prayer and whenever the need of nature forced him, he would lie down on a mat for a little while and then he would get up and say the Psalm of David: "At midnight I will rise to confess You, because of Your righteous judgments." For eight years the saint sat in this monastery of Saint George, and many people came from near and far places, and he saw many miracles. But Saint Meletios was distressed by this glory of the world and why he was not able to give himself over to his beloved silence. For this reason he decided to leave the monastery and go to a more secluded place.
So he left as abbot a brother named Nicholas, and he set out to find some deserted place, until he reached a mountain called Philagrion and began to build a cell. But he changed his mind, and got up and walked rough mountains, towards the places where the present-day village called Vilia is located, on top of the mountain of Kithairon. At that time it was called "Mount Myoupolis". At that place was built a monastery called Symbolon, dedicated to the Bodiless Taxiarchs. The saint went to this monastery and begged Abbot Theodosios to receive him into his synodeia. And he gave over to him the Chapel of Savior to live in silence. When Theodosios reposed, the fathers made Saint Meletios the abbot in the Monastery of the Bodiless Ones. And because he was attracting a lot of people to become monks, he enlarged the monastery and it became a large lavra, he built other dependencies around the monastery, the so-called paralavras, and they gathered as many as three hundred fathers. God provided for everything and they lacked nothing during the life of the saint and after his repose, even though they had no fields, no vineyards, apart from a small vegetable garden. This was because the saint did not accept various estates that many Christians wanted to dedicate to the monastery, so that the brothers would not become greedy over time. He only accepted a donation made to the monastery by Emperor Alexios Komnenos for the maintenance of the monastery. He wanted the fathers to live from their hands, to give to the poor as much as they could from their labor. So this monastery became the treasury of Orthodoxy and the school of virtue, a revered castle of peaceful life above the tumult of the world and the disturbances of that time, so that one could say of the fathers who were inside: "The life of desert-dwellers is a blessed one, for by divine eros they are raised up." Saint Meletios performed many miracles, sick people became healthy, wild hearts were calmed, he read the secrets of the heart. And with all this, he was always humble and simple. He reposed at the age of seventy, in 1105 on September 1, and his weary relics were buried in the narthex of the church of the Bodiless Ones.
The Monastery of Saint Meletios still stands today. The place where it is located is called Pastra, and there is a peak near it called Bouzouriza. To the south of the monastery there are some foundations and old stones and they say that Myoupolis was located there. An hour's drive from this place is a castle called Gyftokastro. The location where the monastery is built is beautiful and religious. The old, vaulted church is preserved, but it is no longer decorated with the ancient iconography, because it was damaged by the weather. Only in the narthex there are still some icons on the wall, painted around 1600 or so, and they depict some martyrdoms of saints, the righteous Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Lamech, etc., as well as a few saints, among whom is Saint Meletios, Saint Moses the Ethiopian and a few others. The Dormition of Saint Meletios is also depicted there. There is also an icon of him on a board, dated to the 1700s. At Meteora, in the Monastery of Barlaam, there is a icon of Saint Meletios "of the mountain of Myoupolis", painted with compunctionate art, by the hand of George, the priest and sakellarios of Thebes, in the year 1566.
Source: From the book Humble Giants. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
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