Venerable Anthimus the Blind of Cephalonia

Anthimus the Blind (born Athanasios Kourouklis) was an eighteenth-century monastic ascetic of the island of Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea. Blinded in childhood, he became a wandering monk who traveled through mainland Greece and especially the islands of the Aegean, founding several monasteries despite his disability. He is commemorated on September 4, and is particularly remembered as the founder of the convent of the Most Holy Theotokos Portaitissa on the island of Astypalaia.

According to the tradition, he was born in 1727 at Lixouri on Cephalonia and was blinded at the age of seven during a smallpox epidemic in the region of Palliki. After forty liturgies were served for his healing, he is said to have recovered partial sight in one eye. He was educated by an abbot named Anthimus at the monastery of St. Paraskevi at Lepeda, and about the age of twenty he entered the monastic life there, receiving the name Anthimus. He afterward went to Mount Athos, where he received the Great Schema at the Monastery of Iveron in 1747; in later life he became almost wholly blind again, retaining only a dim perception of light.

As a blind pilgrim monk he undertook an extended itinerant ministry across the Greek lands, and the sources credit him with founding a series of monasteries over the course of his journeys. He reposed on September 4, 1782, at the monastery of Lepeda at the age of fifty-four. His relics were translated in 1800, and he was formally canonized by Patriarchal and Synodal Decree on July 30, 1974.