Saint George of Drama

Saint George of Drama, known in the world as Athanasios Karslidis and in monastic life as Elder George, was a Greek Orthodox hieromonk whose life spanned the violent upheavals that struck the Pontic Greek and Caucasian Christian communities in the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1901 in Argyroupolis (Gümüşhane) in the Pontus region of the Ottoman Empire. Left an orphan while still a child after the death of his parents, he experienced poverty and displacement from an early age. Family members took him from Pontus into the Russian Caucasus, where Greek and Georgian Orthodox monastic communities still existed. There he embraced the monastic life, receiving the tonsure and later ordination as deacon and priest. He took the name George and lived as a hieromonk under conditions of increasing hostility toward religion.

Under the Soviet regime he was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured for his refusal to abandon the Christian faith and the monastic vocation. These sufferings led later generations to honor him as a Confessor. After his release he continued an ascetic life until he was able to leave for Greece. In 1929 he reached Greek soil among the many refugees from Pontus and the Caucasus. Following a short period of unsettled residence, he made his home in 1930 in the small village of Sipsa, later renamed Taxiarches, in the prefecture of Drama in Greek Macedonia. On a hillside near the village he built a modest church dedicated to the Ascension of Christ and gathered a small sisterhood, laying the foundations of the Monastery of the Ascension that still stands there.

From this remote hermitage Elder George exercised a wide spiritual ministry. He was renowned for extreme fasting, night-long prayer, and an evangelical poverty that impressed even worldly visitors. The faithful attributed to him gifts of clairvoyance, the reading of hearts, and miraculous healings. People from Drama, from the rest of Macedonia, and from farther afield came to him for confession, for blessing, and for counsel about family and spiritual problems. He often foretold future events in the lives of individuals and gave pointed warnings against spiritual negligence. Despite chronic ill health and the lingering effects of earlier torture, he received visitors until the last weeks of his life.

He died on 4 November 1959 at the monastery he had founded and was buried there. Veneration of his memory grew steadily in northern Greece. In 2008 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, under Patriarch Bartholomew I, formally numbered him among the saints of the Orthodox Church. His principal feast day is 4 November, the anniversary of his repose. Pilgrims continue to visit his tomb and relics at the Monastery of the Ascension in Taxiarches, Drama, where he is invoked as Saint George Karslidis the Confessor, or simply Saint George of Drama.