The Life
built the Great Lavra that turned Mount Athos into the heart of Orthodox monasticism. Athanasius was born about 920 in Trebizond on the Black Sea coast, and was given the baptismal name Abraham. His parents died when he was a small child. He was raised by a pious nun who taught him fasting and prayer from the earliest age. After her death he was taken to Constantinople, where he became a student under the rhetorician Athanasius, the most famous teacher in the city. The boy soon outpaced his master and became himself an instructor of youths in the imperial capital. But his heart was set on the monastic life. He met the elder Michael Maleinos, abbot of the Kyminas Monastery in Bithynia, who had come to Constantinople. Through Michael he also met Michael\'s nephew, the general Nikephoros Phocas, who would one day be emperor. Abraham confided his desire to become a monk. He left everything in Constantinople, went to Kyminas, was tonsured by Saint Michael with the new name Athanasius. He spent years at Kyminas in severe asceticism. About 958, seeking deeper solitude, he left Kyminas and made his way to Mount Athos, the great peninsula in northern Greece that was even then a center of scattered eremitic monasticism but had no large organized monasteries. He took the name "Barnabas" to remain hidden. Eventually Nikephoros Phocas, now the leading general of the Byzantine Empire, found him and asked him to build a monastery on the Holy Mountain. Athanasius reluctantly agreed. Construction began about 961. The Great Lavra was dedicated in 963, the same year Nikephoros became emperor. Athanasius established a strict cenobitic Rule modeled on the Studite tradition. Disciples flocked to him from across the Christian world. He founded other monasteries (Iviron, Vatopedi, Esphigmenou) during his lifetime. The Theotokos herself appeared to him during a famine and promised to be the Steward of the monastery -- a title the Lavra honors to this day. He reposed about 1003 when the dome of the new church collapsed during inspection; five brethren died at once, and Athanasius shortly after.
Abraham was born about 920 in Trebizond, the great Greek city on the southern Black Sea coast that was famous for its commerce and learning. His parents died when he was very young -- both of them -- and there was no surviving family to take him in. He was adopted by a holy nun of the city who treated him as her own son and taught him the basics of Christian life: the prayers, the fasts, the seasons of the Church, the elements of Greek letters. The boy was unusually bright and unusually devout. He absorbed everything she taught him. When he was perhaps twelve or thirteen the nun also died. The boy was again alone. But news of him had reached Constantinople, where a wealthy patron heard of the orphan\'s gifts and arranged for him to be brought to the imperial capital and placed in the household of the Emperor Romanus the Elder. There he was enrolled as a student in the school of the rhetorician Athanasius, the most renowned teacher of rhetoric in tenth-century Constantinople. The classical-Christian curriculum of the school covered everything: Scripture, patristic theology, the works of the great Greek classical authors, philosophy, mathematics, music, and the arts of rhetoric and oratory at the highest level. Abraham mastered it all rapidly. Within a few years he had surpassed his teacher\'s expectations. The teacher Athanasius made him an instructor of younger students in the same school. He became, while still in his early twenties, one of the most respected teachers in the imperial capital. He had also developed a personal ascetical regime of remarkable severity: he slept only sitting on a stool (never lying down), he ate only barley bread and water, he kept long vigils every night. The combination of intellectual brilliance and ascetical depth marked him out from his peers. Everyone who knew him understood that he was destined for something extraordinary.
About 952 a remarkable old monk named Michael came to Constantinople. He was the abbot of the Kyminas Monastery in the mountains of Bithynia, perhaps a hundred miles east of the capital, and he had a reputation across the Byzantine world as one of the great living spiritual fathers. Abraham, who had been waiting for an opportunity to escape his successful career in Constantinople, sought him out. He told the old man everything: his orphaned childhood, his adoptive nun-mother, his classical formation, his secret desire for the monastic life, his dissatisfaction with the career he had built. The elder Michael listened carefully. He saw immediately that this young man was a chosen vessel of the Holy Spirit. He gave Abraham detailed spiritual instruction over the following days. During one of these conversations Michael\'s nephew Nikephoros Phocas came to visit his uncle. Nikephoros was already a rising military officer, the eldest son of the great general Bardas Phocas, and he would in time become emperor of the Romans. He met Abraham and was profoundly impressed. The two men formed a friendship that would shape both of their lives. When Michael returned to Kyminas, Abraham followed shortly after. He left his teaching position, his prestige, his secure career, and traveled to the remote monastery in the Bithynian mountains. He fell at Michael\'s feet and begged to be received as a monk. Michael tonsured him with joy and gave him the new monastic name Athanasius -- "the immortal one" -- in honor of Saint Athanasius the Great, the great Alexandrian father who had defended the divinity of Christ against Arius. The new monk Athanasius spent the next several years at Kyminas in severe ascetical practice. He was given the most demanding tasks. He fasted longer than the rest. He kept watch through the nights. He learned the discipline of obedience to a spiritual father. After several years Michael blessed him for the practice of solitary silence in a cell near the monastery, the deeper hesychast practice of inner prayer.
He came to Mount Athos. He hid under a false name. After a year of demonic temptation, divine light filled his cell. About 958 Athanasius felt that his time at Kyminas was complete. He needed deeper solitude than the monastery could provide. He took counsel with Saint Michael, received the elder\'s blessing, and left. He wandered for some time through various solitary places, looking for the right spot. Eventually he came to Mount Athos, the great peninsula in northern Greece that was already known across the Christian world as a place of holy hermits. The Holy Mountain at this period was populated by scattered monks living in caves and small hermitages, but had no large organized monasteries. The Protos at Karyes (the central village) provided loose oversight, but each hermit lived essentially alone. Athanasius made his way to the southern extremity of the peninsula, to a remote spot called Melanos at the very tip of Athos. He was determined to hide. He took the assumed name "Barnabas" and presented himself as an unlearned monk, refusing to reveal his identity even when asked. He built a small cell of branches and stones. He began the deepest ascetical practice of his life. The devil immediately attacked him with what the hagiographies call "the temptation of place" -- overwhelming suggestions that this place was wrong for him, that he should leave, that nothing good would come of staying. Athanasius decided to endure it for a year. Then he would go wherever the Lord led. The temptation grew worse for many months. On the very last day of the year, as he prayed, a divine light suddenly filled his cell -- bright, warm, indescribable, full of joy. The temptation evaporated instantly. From that moment forward Athanasius received the gift of tears. He understood that this place was his place. He would never leave it.
Construction began. The Great Lavra was dedicated in 963. After the Cretan victory of 961, in which Nikephoros Phocas had recaptured the great island from the Arab Caliphate, the general remembered his old vow to become a monk himself. He came to Mount Athos to find Athanasius. He found him at Melanos -- the disguise had been broken open by the saint\'s growing reputation among the hermits. The two old friends met again. Nikephoros said that he wanted to build a monastery on Athos where he himself could one day come to live, and where many monks could be supported. He had the imperial money to make it happen. Athanasius initially refused. He had not come to Athos to build buildings; he had come to pray. But Nikephoros pressed him. After prayer Athanasius discerned the will of God in the request. He accepted. Construction began about 961 or 962. The site chosen was at the southeastern foot of the great central mountain of Athos, a sloping plateau facing the sea. Workers were brought in. Stone was quarried. The principal church (katholikon) was begun, dedicated to the Annunciation. Cells for the monks were built around it. A refectory, a hospital, hostels for visitors -- all the structures of a substantial cenobitic foundation. The monastery was dedicated in 963. The same year Nikephoros Phocas was crowned Emperor Nicephorus II of the Byzantine Empire (he never did become a monk himself; the circumstances of his elevation prevented it). Athanasius established at the Lavra a strict cenobitic Rule modeled on the typika of Saint Basil the Great and Saint Theodore the Studite, adapted to the specific conditions of the Holy Mountain. Disciples flocked to the foundation from every direction. By the early eleventh century the Lavra had perhaps three hundred monks; at its peak it would have over seven hundred.
As Athanasius walked away in despair, the Mother of God appeared to him and promised to be the monastery\'s steward herself. Some years after the foundation, perhaps in the 970s, a severe famine struck the region. The Lavra had no food. The monks could not be fed. One by one the brethren left, until only a small number remained. The conditions kept worsening. Eventually even Athanasius decided that he had to leave temporarily to find help and supplies. He set out from the monastery on foot, walking westward toward Karyes. He was in despair. As he walked, a woman in a long blue veil came up the path toward him. She asked where he was going. Athanasius explained: the Lavra was failing, there was no food, the brethren were leaving, he was going to look for help. The woman said: "Go back. You will have everything you need if you do not abandon the monastery." Athanasius asked who she was. She answered: "I am the Mother of your Lord." Athanasius asked for a sign. She told him to strike the rock beside the path with his staff. Athanasius struck the rock. A spring of water poured out -- a spring that had not existed before and has continued to flow ever since (the Holy Spring of the Theotokos, still venerated at the Lavra today). The Theotokos said that she would be the Steward (Oikonomissa) of the monastery -- the one responsible for the provision of all its needs. She vanished. Athanasius turned around and went back. He found the monastery completely restored: the storerooms full, the brethren returning. From that day to the present the Great Lavra has had no formal abbot called Steward (oikonomos), because the office is held permanently by the Mother of God herself. There is only an "Assistant Steward" (parathlios oikonomos) under her direct authority. The Theotokos has been continuously venerated as the personal patroness of the Lavra and of Mount Athos as a whole.
Athanasius\'s achievement was bigger than founding a single monastery. Before him, Mount Athos was a place where individual hermits prayed in caves with no organized common life. After him, it became the heart of Orthodox monasticism. The Great Lavra was the first organized cenobium on the Holy Mountain, but it was not the last. During Athanasius\'s own lifetime three other major foundations were established under his guidance: Iviron, founded by Saint John the Iberian and his Georgian disciples as the principal Georgian-Athonite house; Vatopedi, founded as another major cenobitic foundation; and Esphigmenou, founded as a more austere community. After his death the foundations multiplied: by the eleventh century there were dozens; by the medieval period the system stabilized at twenty ruling monasteries (lavrai), with numerous skites and individual kellia under their authority. Each monastery has its own typikon and abbot, but all participate in the corporate life of the Holy Mountain under the authority of the Holy Community at Karyes. The system that Athanasius initiated has continued, with adaptations across the centuries, for over a thousand years. Mount Athos today still has its twenty ruling monasteries, its sustained monastic population (currently about two thousand monks, with periodic revivals expanding the numbers), its continuous liturgical practice, its preservation of patristic-Byzantine spiritual practice. From the Athonite monasteries, generation after generation, monks have gone out to plant authentic monastic foundations across the Eastern Christian world: Saint Anthony of the Kiev Caves to Russia; Saint Sava of Serbia to the Balkans; Saint Cosmas of Aitolia and the Kollyvades fathers in the eighteenth-century revival; the modern Athonite revival that has reshaped Orthodox spirituality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Athanasius did not just found a monastery. He established the pattern of organized monastic life that would shape Orthodoxy for a thousand years.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that Mount Athos is the personal possession of the Most Holy Theotokos. According to the foundational Athonite tradition, the Mother of God herself was traveling by sea to visit Saint Lazarus on Cyprus when her ship was driven by storms to the eastern shore of the Athonite peninsula. She came ashore. She walked the length of the peninsula. She blessed it. She asked her Son to give it to her as her personal possession. The Son granted the request. From that moment Mount Athos has been the Garden of the Theotokos (Perivoli tis Panagias), her personal territory, under her unique sovereignty and protection. No woman has been allowed to set foot on Athos since the apostolic period -- out of deference to the unique sovereignty of the Mother of God, no other woman should compete for the maternal presence on the Holy Mountain. (The prohibition is enforced by both Greek civil law and the canonical statutes of the Holy Community of Athos to the present day.) The foundational tradition was inaugurated through Saint Athanasius. Before him, the Marian patronage of Athos was implicit and undeveloped. Through his foundation of the Great Lavra, the appearance of the Theotokos at the Holy Spring, her acceptance of the title of Stewardess, and the subsequent dedication of the principal Athonite katholikons to Marian feasts (the Great Lavra to the Annunciation, Vatopedi to the Annunciation, Iviron to the Dormition, etc.), the comprehensive Marian patronage of Mount Athos was inaugurated. The peninsula remains, more than a thousand years later, what Saint Athanasius established: the personal Garden of the Mother of God, the principal Marian sanctuary of the Eastern Orthodox world, the unique territory under the comprehensive maternal protection of the Theotokos.
The hagiographical tradition records that Saint Athanasius received providential foreknowledge of his approaching death. He gathered the brethren and gave them his final spiritual counsel. He instructed them that they should not be troubled by what they were about to see -- that "Wisdom disposes otherwise than as people judge." The brethren were perplexed by these words but did not press him on the meaning. Some time after, with construction continuing on a new church at the Lavra, Saint Athanasius and six of the brethren ascended to the top of the church to inspect the work. The dome was nearly complete. As they stood on the upper structure, suddenly the dome collapsed. Five of the brethren died immediately. Saint Athanasius was trapped in the rubble. The other monks rushed to dig out the debris. They found the saint still alive but mortally injured. He gave them final blessing. He commended his soul to God. He reposed shortly after, about 1003, at approximately eighty-three years of age. The tradition received the manner of his death not as catastrophic accident but as significant: the saint who had founded the Great Lavra died in the very work of its continuing construction, together with five of his disciples; the pattern of the saint\'s death together with his brethren in the foundational work of the monastic construction has been received throughout the Athonite tradition. He is venerated as the founder of cenobitic Athonite monasticism. His feast is July 5, the day of his repose. The Great Lavra he founded continues in active monastic life to the present, holds first place among the twenty ruling monasteries of Mount Athos, and remains the mother house of organized Athonite monasticism. His relics are preserved at the Lavra and continue to work miracles for those who venerate them.