Saint Hilarion the Younger, abbot of the Monastery of Dalmatia
Feast date: 06/06
Saint Hilarion was born in 775 AD. and came from Cappadocia. His parents, Petros who was a supplier of bread to the palaces and Theodosia, were pious and virtuous people and nurtured their young son with the threads of the Orthodox faith. When he came of age, desiring the path of virtue and exercise, he went to the monastery of Xeronesia, in Constantinople, where he devoted himself soul and body to exercise, strict fasting, silence and the study of the Holy Scriptures. Later he went to the Monastery of Dalmatia, where he became a great man.
He remained there for a decade as a gardener and quickly became an example of exercise, humility and magnanimity for all the brothers, who all voted for the abbot of the Monastery. When the storm of iconoclasm broke out, the emperor Leo the Armenian, with the impious patriarch Theodotus the Melissan, tried, unsuccessfully, to bend the haughty attitude of Osios. He straightened his spiritual stature and rose to the occasion.
Then his silent persecution began. For eight whole years, he suffered indifference and with admirable fortitude limitations in remote monasteries, imprisonments, beatings and exiles. However, he endured all the sufferings “as a good soldier of Jesus Christ”, thanking and glorifying the donor Lord, who deserved him to remain unshakable in the battlements. After the triumph of Orthodoxy, he returned to his Monastery, lived three more years and fell asleep peacefully at the age of 70, in 845 AD.
