Patapios of Thebes

Description

Patapios of Thebes (fl. 4th century AD) is the patron saint of dropsy. Saint Patapios’ memory is celebrated on 8 December (main celebration) and also at the Tuesday 2 days after the Sunday of Easter (in memory of the day that his relic was discovered). His relic is kept at the female monastery of Saint Patapios at Loutraki, a spa town near Athens, Greece.

Patapios was born in the 4th century AD in Thebes, Roman Egypt, to wealthy Christian parents. Patapios, at a young age, lived the life of a hermit in the desert. Many visited him to take his advice and to listen to his preaching. Later in his life, Patapios left Thebes and the desert for Constantinople. There he met two other ascetics, Varas and Ravoulas, who both became saints. Saint Ravoulas was hermit at the gate of Romanos. Saint Varas built the monastery of St John the Baptist at Petrion.

Patapios lived in the area of Blachernae at the Xero Oros (dry mountain) and he established a monastery, the Monastery of the Egyptians, where he eventually died.

Patapios’ relic after the destruction of the Monastery of the Egyptians in 536 AD was transferred by Saint Varas to the Monastery of Saint John at Petrion, which during the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire was under the protection of the royal family of Constantinople, the Palaiologoi, and especially the Augusta Helena Dragaš, the mother of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, who became a nun and a saint under the monastic name of Saint Hypomone (“patience”).

After the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire in 1453, a relative of the Palailogos emperors and nephew of the Augusta Helena, Aggelis Notaras, in order to protect the relic of Saint Patapios from the Ottomans, transferred it to Mount Geraneia in southern Greece, near the town Thermai (Loutraki). There he hid it in a cave and a hermitage was established, but some centuries later it was abandoned. It has to be mentioned that the cave where the relic of Saint Patapios was transferred had actually functioned as a hermitage since the 11th century AD. It is located at a height of 650 meters (2132 feet).