Our Holy Father Hesychius the Faster.

Commemorated March 5 in the Orthodox Christian Menaion

From the Prologue

He was born near Bursa in the eighth century, but withdrew to a mountain called the hill of Maion, a place with an evil reputation for diabolical apparitions. He built himself a hut there, and a church dedicated to St Andrew, and also made himself a garden which he cultivated in order to live by his own toil. Miracles were worked through his prayers. He foretold that there would be a women's monastery in that place after his death. A month before he died, he foretold the day and hour of his death, and at midnight on the day foretold, people saw his hut illumined with an unusual light, and, when they came to it, they found him dead. He was buried in the church of St Andrew, but later Theophylact, the bishop of Amasea, took him to the town of Amasea. He departed this life peacefully and went to the Kingdom of his God in 790. (In the Greek Synaxarion, he is commemorated on March 6th.)

From The Prologue From Ochrid by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich
©1985 Lazarica Press, Birmingham UK