Monastery of Osios Patapios of Thebes – Loutraki Greece

Osios Patapios of Thebes

 Feast Day 8 December

 

Saint Patapios, or Osios Patapios, was born in 380 AD, in the city of Thebes, Egypt, of wealthy, Christian parents.

Osios (ὅσιος) is a Greek word meaning holy, pious, devout, or righteous.

In Orthodox Christianity, it often denotes an ascetic saint.

Through his studies, which included science, mathematics, philosophy and rhetoric, Patapios came to realize how fleeting life is and inspired by Clement, Origen and Athanasius, Christian theologians of Alexandria, he chose the ascetic life.

Once he finished his studies he returned home to Thebes, only to discover his father had died.

The death of his father once again got him thinking about how short life is and he again left Thebes to become a hermit, living in the desert.

After a few years, performing good deeds and roaming the desert, Patapios decided this was not the life for him and in 428 AD, headed for Constantinople.

On his journey his ship made a stop in Corinth, in the Peloponnese, Greece, where he and a monk, Sechnuti, disembarked, decided they liked the place and stayed.

There they lived as monks, in a cave on the Gerania Mountains, Loutraki, for seven years.

 

 

In 435 AD, Patapios and Sechnuti, resumed their journey to Constantinople, where, in the Monastery of Blachernae, Patapios, lived the life of a simple monk and established the Monastery of the Egyptians, where he eventually died at the age of eighty three.

 Patapios was buried in the Monastery of the Egyptians, however, after its destruction in 536 AD, his body was transferred to the Monastery of St.John of the Stone Constantinople.

One thousand years later, after the Turks captured Constantinople, his relics, along with those of St.Ypomoni, the wife of Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos, were taken back to the Cave on the Gerania Mountains, Corinthia, where their bodies was hidden.

 

Saint Ypomoni (Patience)

Feast Day March 13th

 

 

 

Helena Dragaš was the daughter of the emperor of the Slavs, Constantine Dragasis, and the wife of Manuel II Palaiologos, Byzantine emperor from 1391 to 1425, with whom she had seven sons.

 

 

Shortly before his death, after suffering a stroke, Manuel II became a monk, taking the name Matthew.

 He died on July 21, 1425, and was buried at the Pantokrator Monastery in Constantinople.

After her husband’s death, Helena became a nun, taking the name Ypomoni (patience) and helped to establish a home for old people, with the name “The Hope of the Despaired”.

The home was located at the Monastery of St. John of the Stone, where the relics of Osios Patapios of Thebes were kept.

St. Ypomoni died on March 13, 1450, three years before the fall of Constantinople, and was buried in the Monastery of the Pantocratoras in Constantinople, where her husband and three of their children were also buried.

After the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, Angelis Notaras, a nephew of St. Ypomoni, moved the relics of both St. Ypomoni and Osios Patapios, to the cave located near Loutraki, on the Gerania Mountain, Greece.

The cave was a place where hermit monks had lived since the eleventh century.

In 1952, Father Nektarios Marmarinos, from Corinth, established the Monastery of Osios Patapios (Loutraki, Greece) where the relics of  Patapios and the holy skull of St. Ypomoni are still kept.

 

 

Discovery of the Relics of Osios Patapios

Loutraki – 1904

 

 

In 1904, a local priest from Loutraki, Father Constantine Sossanis, an extremely tall man, who regularly performed services in the tiny chapel, in the cave high on the Gerania Mountain, was tired of hobbling around, bent nearly double, in the low roofed cave and called in some workmen to solve his problem.

According to local legend, the night before work was about to begin in the cave, Father Constantine had a dream, in which a monk appeared before him and said:

“Take care when you break the wall because I am on the other side. I am Saint Patapios of Egypt.“

The very next day, workmen discovered the body of Patapios, which had been placed under tiles and leaves to protect the body from the damp, was found.

A scroll bearing the name Patapios, a large wooden cross and some Byzantine coins, were discovered along with the remains.

In the cave they also found also the skull of Helena Dragaš, known as Saint Ypomoni, the rest of her remains were never recovered.

 

 

 

The  Cave and Chapel of the Virgin Mary of Egypt

Monastery of Osios Patapios

 Loutraki

 

 

 

Today, the body of Osios Patapios, is housed in a sanctuary, carved out of the rock of the Gerania Mountains, located about fourteen kilometres from Loutraki, at an altitude of about seven hundred metres above the Gulf of Corinth.

Located in the small courtyard of the Monastery of Osios Patapios, next to the Chapel of the Virgin Mary of Egypt, is the cave containing the relics of Patapios.

 

 

 

 

Decorating the walls of the cave, which houses the relics of Osios Patapios, is a wonderful Byzantine wall painting, dating back to the thirteenth century, depicting Patapios, Saint Ypomoni and Saint Nikon Osios.

 

 

Outside the cave of Osios Patapios is a shrine where visitors take, as an amulet, a piece of cotton wool soaked with holy oil from the burning lamps and holy water from a source next to the cave.

 

 

 

Osios Patapios is the patron Saint of the illness named dropsy.

 Now I never knew that dropsy had a patron saint!

 

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