St. Gregory of Sinai

A monk of Sinai in the fourteenth century who learned the prayer of the heart from an elder on Crete and came to the Holy Mountain to find almost no one practising it. He taught it there, and then, when raiders made Athos unsafe, moved to Paroria in the mountains between Byzantium and Bulgaria, where he founded a monastery that trained Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek monks together. Through his disciples, St Theodosius of Tarnovo above all, hesychasm passed into the Slavic churches a generation before it reached Russia. His writings on prayer are in the Philokalia. He died in 1346. Feast: August 8.