Venerable Peter of Athos

Life

A Greek by birth and a soldier by profession. Once while fighting against the Arabs, he was captured, bound in chains, and cast into prison. Peter languished for a long time in the city of Amara on the River Euphrates, and he ceaselessly prayed to God to free him from prison and lead him to some desert where he might devote himself entirely to the ascetical struggle of prayer. Saint Simeon the God-Receiver appeared to him in prison together with Saint Nicholas, touched his chains with his staff, and the chains melted like wax, and Peter suddenly found himself in a field outside the city. He immediately set out for Rome, where at the tomb of the Apostle Peter he was tonsured as a monk by the pope himself. Then he set out again by ship for the East. In a dream the Most Holy Theotokos appeared to him with Saint Nicholas, and the Theotokos said to Saint Nicholas that she had designated Mount Athos for Peter's ascetical struggle. Peter had never before heard of Mount Athos. Having disembarked, therefore, on the Holy Mountain, Peter settled in a cave where he spent fifty-three years in severe ascetical struggles, in battle with hunger and thirst, with heat and cold, and above all with demonic powers, until he conquered all with the help of God. After he had endured the first temptations and passed well the first difficult tests before God, an angel of God began to bring him bread every forty days. Several times the tempter devil appeared to him in the form of an angel of light, but Peter drove him away with the sign of the Cross and the name of the Most Holy Theotokos. A year before his death a certain hunter, who was hunting deer on Athos, found him and heard his life story from the saint's own lips. He departed this life in the year 374. His relics were transferred to Macedonia.