Biography
Arsenius of Paros
About Arsenius of Paros
Arsenius of Paros was a Greek Orthodox monk, teacher and confessor, born in Ioannina on January 31, 1800. His family name was Sergiadis, and he was baptized Athanasius. Orphaned as a child, he went to school at Kydonia in Asia Minor, where Gregory Sarafis taught him. At fifteen he became a disciple of the monk Daniel of Zagora, beginning a relationship that shaped his religious life.
Daniel took him to Mount Athos, where he became a monk with the name Arsenius. They remained there for about six years. The Orthodox Encyclopedia connects their departure with opposition to the Kollyvades, a movement concerned with Orthodox liturgical and devotional practice. After leaving Athos, Arsenius eventually settled on Folegandros, where he served as a deacon and taught.
The church account dates his teaching on Folegandros to 1829–1840. Daniel died in 1837, leaving Arsenius without the elder who had guided him since adolescence. Arsenius later set out with Daniel’s remains, intending to return to Athos. A stop on Paros changed his plans: Elias, the superior of Saint George’s monastery, persuaded him to stay.
His years as a teacher also left a literary trace. The local historian Nikos Aliprantis describes an anthology compiled in 1832, running to 830 manuscript pages and preserved in the library of Loggovarda monastery. The manuscript is evidence of a scholarly interest that sits alongside the better-known accounts of his ascetic life. Aliprantis dates his ordination as a priest to 1847, at Syros, by Metropolitan Daniel of the Cyclades.
The same study makes an important distinction in the succession at Saint George’s. Arsenius did not immediately follow Elias as superior: Nikephoros Zervoudakis held the office between them. Aliprantis places Arsenius’s appointment in 1875, while allowing that it may have begun in 1871.
Arsenius also guided the women of the convent of Christos of the Woods. A church tradition about his ministry describes a young woman from Syros who came there seeking help and was harshly rejected by some of the nuns. Arsenius intervened and rebuked their treatment of her. The story presents compassion toward a person in distress as a responsibility of the religious community; its reported conversations should not be treated as a contemporary transcript.
He died on January 31, 1877. The convent near Parikia became the place associated with his grave and relics.
Today the Municipality of Paros identifies Arsenius as the island’s patron saint. Its guide to the monastery records that the church dedicated to him was inaugurated in 2002 and holds his relics. The two annual celebrations fall on January 31 and August 18.
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