Elder Evmenios

The Hidden Saint of our Times

St Porphyrios had asked for a confessor one time and requested Elder Evmenios from the Leprokomeio (Hospital of Infectious Diseases) in Athens. So greatly was he impressed that he would send people to him saying “you should go and receive the blessing of Elder Evmenios, he is the hidden saint of our time. Saints like this come along only once every two hundred years.”

The young Konstantinos Saridakis was born in 1931. He was the eighth child of a poor family in Ethia of Crete. He was brought up with little schooling but with a good foundation in the faith. At thirteen, sitting near the fireplace in his house, he w a s enveloped and filled by a fiery light which gave him so much joy that he immediately jumped up shouting, “I will become a monk.” This joy remained with him all his life, becoming his most notable characteristic. Four years later he went to the Monastery of St Niketas nearby where he was tonsured with the name Sophronios in 1951.

In those days monks were not exempted from being shorn and serving in the army. It was there that he contracted leprosy which, by God’s providence, led him to the Leprokomeio in Athens. Here he was acquainted with St Nikephoros who he cared for and became his spiritual child.

Renamed Evmenios at his ordination in 1975, he was sent back to serve in the Leprokomeio’s chapel dedicated to the Holy Unmercenaries Sts Kosmas and Damianos. It was here that innumerable witnesses to his gifts of prophecy, miracles, healings, visions and foreknowledge surfaced. He also had the gift of tears, often emerging from the altar during a liturgy with his beard completely soaked after praying for all those suffering.

This hidden saint of our times reposed on 23 May 1999 and was laid to rest in his home village where he began his service to Christ. Here as a young boy after lighting the church’s oil lamps, a woman wearing black clothing approached him and told him that he would become a priest. This was the Theotokos, and he chose this to be his final resting place, overwhelmed that the Mother of God had honoured him there. May his memory be eternal in the choir of the saints.

Source: Lychnos October-November 2020