8 Orthodox Saints of the Twentieth Century

It is easy to think of the saints as figures from a distant past: martyrs of Rome, bishops of the great councils, hermits of the Egyptian desert. But the Church has never stopped bringing forth saints, and the last century gave it some of its best loved. Several of the eight below were glorified only in the 2010s, and there are people alive today who confessed to them, ate at their table, or keep a letter in their hand.

1. St. Nektarios of Aegina - the wonderworker of Pentapolis

Feast: November 9

Anastasios Kephalas, born in Thrace in 1846, became Metropolitan of Pentapolis in Egypt, only to be slandered and removed from his see. He bore it without complaint, ran the Rizarios seminary in Athens for years, and founded the Holy Trinity Convent on the island of Aegina, where he spent his last years. He reposed in an Athens hospital in November 1920; tradition tells that a paralyzed man in the next bed rose healed when the saint's undershirt was laid on him. He is one of the most invoked saints of our time, especially by the sick.

Read the life of St. Nektarios →, or one of his miracles.

2. St. Joseph the Hesychast - the father of a monastic revival

Feast: August 16

Born on the island of Paros in 1897, Joseph came to Mount Athos in 1921 and spent his life in caves and huts on its harshest slopes, given over to the Jesus Prayer. He was almost unknown while he lived. Yet his handful of disciples went on to renew six of the ruling monasteries of the Holy Mountain, and one of them, Elder Ephraim of Arizona, planted seventeen monasteries in North America. His letters, published as Monastic Wisdom, are still read by monks and lay people alike. He was glorified in 2020.

Read the life of St. Joseph the Hesychast →

3. St. Grigol Peradze - the scholar-priest of Auschwitz

Feast: December 6

Grigol Peradze was a Georgian priest and one of the finest church historians of his generation, whose studies took him to Berlin, Bonn, Oxford and Paris, and finally to a chair in Warsaw. He founded the Georgian Orthodox parish in Paris. Arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw in 1942, he was sent to Auschwitz and died there that December. Georgian tradition holds that when the guards threatened to punish a whole barracks for a theft, he confessed to it himself to spare the others. The Church of Georgia glorified him in 1995.

Read the life of St. Grigol Peradze →

4. St. Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia - the elder who loved without measure

Feast: December 2

Porphyrios left his village on Evia for Mount Athos at the age of twelve and was ordained a priest young. He then spent thirty-three years as chaplain of the Polyclinic, a hospital in the middle of Athens, hearing confessions for hours each day and visiting the sick on its wards. His teaching that the Christian life is love before it is anything else fills the book of his sayings, Wounded by Love. He went back to his cell at Kafsokalyvia to die in 1991 and was glorified in 2013.

Read the life of St. Porphyrios →

5. St. Sophrony of Essex - the disciple of St. Silouan

Feast: July 11

Born in Moscow in 1896, Sergei Sakharov was a promising painter in Paris when he left for Mount Athos in 1925. There he became the disciple of St. Silouan the Athonite, whose life and words he later gave to the world. In 1959 he founded the Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, where monks and nuns still keep the Jesus Prayer together in church. His own books, above all We Shall See Him as He Is, are among the most searching Orthodox writing of the century. He was glorified in 2019, a saint for Britain, where the first saints long predate the Schism.

Read the life of St. Sophrony →

6. St. Paisios the Athonite - the elder of the Panagouda

Feast: July 12

Arsenios Eznepidis was born in Cappadocia in 1924, weeks before his family was uprooted to Greece in the exchange of populations. He was a carpenter and an army radio operator before he became a monk, and he lived on Mount Athos, at Sinai and in Epirus. From 1979 his small cell, the Panagouda near Karyes, drew crowds every day for counsel, a sweet and a few plain words. He reposed in 1994 at the convent of St. John the Theologian in Souroti, near Thessaloniki, where he is buried, and was glorified in 2015.

Read the life of St. Paisios →

7. St. Gabriel Urgebadze - the holy fool of Tbilisi

Feast: November 2

On May Day 1965, before the crowds at a Soviet parade in Tbilisi, a monk named Gabriel set fire to a huge portrait of Lenin and began to preach Christ. He was beaten, arrested and declared insane, and for the rest of his life he lived as a fool for Christ, hiding fierce prayer behind strange behavior. His last years were spent at the Samtavro convent in Mtskheta, which tradition places where St. Nina once lived. He reposed in 1995 and the Church of Georgia glorified him in 2012; his tomb at Samtavro is one of the most visited places of pilgrimage in Georgia.

Read the life of St. Gabriel →

8. St. Ephraim of Katounakia - the elder of obedience

Feast: February 27

Ephraim came to Mount Athos in 1933 and lived the rest of his life at Katounakia, a scattering of hermitages on the cliffs at the southern tip of the peninsula. Under the guidance of St. Joseph the Hesychast he learned the Jesus Prayer and, above all, obedience, which he called the key to everything he had been given. Those who knew him remembered a man who prayed through the night and was always at peace. He reposed in 1998 and was glorified in 2020, together with St. Joseph.

Read the life of St. Ephraim of Katounakia →

Missing from this list but of the same century is St. John Maximovitch of Shanghai and San Francisco, who appears among the saints who brought the faith to America.

More lists of the saints

• 7 Orthodox Saints Who Brought the Faith to America - from the monks of Kodiak to a wonderworker of San Francisco

• 7 Holy Women of the Orthodox Church - martyrs, a princess, an evangelist and the enlightener of Georgia

• 8 Orthodox Saints Whose Books You Can Still Read - the Church Fathers behind On the Incarnation, the Ladder and the Philokalia

• 7 Orthodox Saints of the West Before the Great Schism - Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy in the undivided Church

Or browse every saint on our calendar, and read why the Church honors them in the role of saints in Orthodox Christianity.