Savvas the New of Kalymnos was a Greek monastic, priest, and iconographer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, remembered chiefly as the spiritual father of the Convent of All Saints on the island of Kalymnos and as the painter of the first icon of St Nektarios of Aegina. Born in 1862 at Herakleitsa in Eastern Thrace, the only child of Constantinos and Smaragda, he was baptized Vasilios. By tradition he was drawn to the monastic life from boyhood and left for Mount Athos at the age of twelve, entering St Anne's Skete, where he learned iconography and Byzantine chant alongside his monastic duties.
In 1887 he travelled to the Holy Land, entering the monastery of St George Hozeva in the Judean desert, where he lived as a hermit. He was tonsured a monk and given the name Savvas, was ordained deacon in 1902, and was ordained priest in 1903 by Archbishop Nikodemos. After his years in the East he returned to Greece, settling for a time on the island of Aegina at the invitation of St Nektarios, Metropolitan of Pentapolis, where he served as priest at the Convent of the Holy Trinity and taught the nuns iconography and Byzantine music.
Following the repose of St Nektarios, Savvas conducted his funeral and, by the account preserved in the tradition, withdrew into his cell for forty days, emerging with the first icon of the reposed hierarch, which he gave to the abbess for veneration. In 1925 he left Aegina for Kalymnos, where he spent the last two decades of his life as priest and spiritual father of the Convent of All Saints. He reposed there on 7 April 1947. When his relics were exhumed in 1957 they were reported to be incorrupt, apart from a small section of the skull, and he came to be venerated as the patron saint of Kalymnos. He was canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1992.
