Venerable (Monastic) 15th century

Venerable Gregory of Grigoriou

Also known as Gregory of Mount Athos

A Serbian Athonite ascetic who founded the monastery later called Grigoriou.

Feast Day

December 7

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Commemorated as

Venerable Gregory, Founder of Grigoriou Monastery, Mount Athos

Life

Gregory of Grigoriou, also called Gregory the Younger, was a Serbian-born ascetic of Mount Athos remembered as the founder of the monastery later named Grigoriou in his honor. He is commemorated on December 7. The few firm details of his life place him within the hesychast monastic movement that spread through the Balkans and the Holy Mountain in the fourteenth century, and sources connect him by discipleship to the circle of Saint Gregory of Sinai.

By the surviving traditions, Gregory was born in Serbia and pursued the ascetic life on Athos, settling near the place where he would gather a brotherhood and build a monastery dedicated to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker. The community he established came to be known by his own name, Grigoriou, which ranks among the twenty ruling monasteries of the Holy Mountain. According to tradition, his relics were later taken from Athos by Serbian monks.

The historical record concerning Gregory is sparse and not fully consistent, and sources hedge on both his dates and the precise circumstances of the foundation. A monastic signature attributed to him has been dated to 1405, and some accounts place his repose in 1406, while other traditions set the monastery's founding considerably earlier in the fourteenth century. There is likewise long-standing confusion between this Gregory and Saint Gregory of Sinai, to whose disciples Gregory the Younger is said to have belonged.

Contributions & Legacy

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Foundation of Grigoriou Monastery

Gregory is credited with building and dedicating a monastery to Saint Nicholas on the southwestern coast of the Athonite peninsula, between the monasteries of Simonopetra and Dionysiou. The community was afterward renamed Grigoriou after its founder, and it holds the seventeenth place in the hierarchical order of the twenty Athonite monasteries. By tradition Gregory chose the site for its nearness to the cell associated with Saint Gregory of Sinai.

Sources differ on when the monastery was founded. Some place its origin in the early fourteenth century, while documentary references to the community appear in the records of the 1340s. This range, together with the variant traditions about the founder's life, has left the foundation date uncertain, and accounts of the monastery generally present it with this caution rather than fixing a single year.

Identity and the hesychast circle

Gregory the Younger is associated with the hesychast renewal led by Saint Gregory of Sinai, whose disciples carried his teaching from Paroria, on the Bulgarian frontier, into Serbia and onto Mount Athos. The tradition identifies Gregory as a disciple within this circle, and some accounts name Saint Romylos of Ravanica and the Elder Hilarion, themselves disciples of Gregory of Sinai, among his teachers.

Because several hesychast figures of the period bore the name Gregory, the founder of Grigoriou has at times been confused with Saint Gregory of Sinai himself, and some accounts attribute the monastery's foundation to the latter. The distinction between the two is not uniformly drawn in the sources, and his life accordingly remains partly obscure.

Relics and later veneration

According to tradition, Gregory's relics were removed from Athos by Serbian monks. Later accounts connect his remains with the monastery of Gornjak in Serbia, and report that a portion was returned to Grigoriou in the twentieth century. The reverence shown to him is bound up with the continuing Serbian character of the community he founded, which a fifteenth-century pilgrim already noted as Serbian in nationality.

Sources: OCA Synaxarion (oca.org), Lives of the Saints