Synaxis of All Saints of Mount Athos

The Synaxis of All Saints of Mount Athos honors together the multitude of monks who have sanctified the Holy Mountain, the great monastic republic of the Aegean, from the first hermits of its slopes to the elders of our own day. For more than a thousand years Athos has been a garden of asceticism, a school of unceasing prayer, and a refuge of the Orthodox tradition, and from it has come an unbroken succession of saints.

Organized monastic life took root when Saint Athanasius the Athonite founded the Great Lavra in the tenth century; from Athos the light of hesychasm spread through the Church, defended in the fourteenth century by Saint Gregory Palamas. Under the Ottoman yoke the Mountain gave the Church a host of new martyrs, and it has never ceased to bear ascetics and wonderworkers — down to the modern elders Saint Silouan the Athonite, Saint Joseph the Hesychast, Saint Porphyrios, and Saint Paisios, whose teaching has renewed the prayer of the heart across the world.

Kept on the second Sunday after Pentecost, the feast gathers the whole assembly of the Athonite fathers, named and unnamed. It is an open synaxis, and as the Church glorifies more of the Mountain's saints, they are numbered among this company.