St. George Karslidis (1901-1959)

Athanasios Karslidis was born in 1901 at Argyroupolis in Pontus and orphaned young. At seven he went on pilgrimage to the monastery of Panagia Soumela and stayed as a novice; he was tonsured in 1919 as George and ordained deacon. Driven out with the Greeks of Pontus, he lived in Georgia under the Soviets, where he was imprisoned, paraded in mockery and condemned to be shot, and lived. Ordained priest, he became a confessor to many, and in 1929 he came to Sipsa, now Taxiarches, near Drama in Macedonia, where he spent the thirty years left to him; the Bulgarian occupiers condemned him to death in 1941, and again he was spared. He died on 4 November 1959, and in 2008 Patriarch Bartholomew proclaimed him a saint at the monastery he had founded there. Feast: November 4.