Elder Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra

Alexandros Vapheidis was born on October 5, 1934, in Nikaia, a working-class district on the western edge of Piraeus, into a family of Asia Minor Greek refugees who had fled the 1922 catastrophe. The family was poor and pious; his father a small craftsman, his mother a homemaker who shaped his earliest piety. He attended the local primary and gymnasium, and entered the Faculty of Theology of the University of Athens in 1952. He was a brilliant student of the Greek patristic tradition under Professors Konstantinos Mouratidis and Panagiotis Trembelas, and at the same time a young man drawn powerfully into the spiritual life by the writings of the early Greek Fathers and the contemporary witnesses of the Russian emigration (Sophrony of Essex, Justin Popović) whose books were beginning to reach Greek-language readers.

After his army service (1957-1959) he taught Greek and theology briefly at the gymnasium of Trikala in central Greece, where a circle of young men gathered around him for catechetical instruction and patristic reading. In 1960 he was tonsured a monk by Metropolitan Dionysios of Trikala under the name Aimilianos, ordained deacon and priest, and assigned as preacher of the diocese. For ten years he served as a parish priest and spiritual father in Trikala — preaching, teaching, hearing confessions, and gradually drawing his original circle into a small ascetic brotherhood at the abandoned ancient monastery of the Great Meteoron at Stomion in the Pindus Mountains, which he restored and revived. He was elected abbot of Stomion in 1961.

In 1973 the Holy Community of Mount Athos elected him abbot of the Holy Monastery of Simonopetra — a thousand-year-old Athonite house in the southern part of the peninsula, perched on a cliff above the Aegean Sea, and at that point reduced to a few aged monks and on the verge of extinction. He brought his Stomion brotherhood with him, and over the next twenty-seven years the monastery was completely restored: the buildings repaired, the manuscript and printed library rebuilt, the choir tradition recovered, the typikon strengthened, and the brotherhood grown to more than seventy monks. Under his leadership Simonopetra became one of the most spiritually-radiant Athonite houses of the late twentieth century. He also founded and directed (1974) the affiliated women's Holy Monastery of the Annunciation at Ormylia in Chalkidiki, the metochion-monastery for the women who had been part of his Trikala circle — Ormylia in time grew to over one hundred and twenty nuns, the largest women's monastic community in modern Greece.

His teaching — given in hundreds of homilies, retreats, conferences, and individual counsels over four decades — covered the inward shape of monastic life and the practical inner life of every Christian. Major themes: the Jesus Prayer and the prayer of the heart, the role of the spiritual father, the centrality of repentance and the renunciation of the self-will, the eschatological dimension of all monastic life, the marriage of the soul to Christ, and the Divine Liturgy as the window of heaven. His vast unpublished corpus has been gradually edited and published in Greek by the Holy Monastery of Ormylia and in English by Indiktos Publications, St. Nilus Skete in Alaska, and other houses — The Way of the Spirit, The Angelic Life, The Divine Liturgy: A Commentary in the Light of the Fathers, On Prayer.

His health declined progressively from the late 1980s under a degenerative neurological illness; he resigned the abbacy of Simonopetra in 2000 and spent the last nineteen years of his life in a state of progressive paralysis and silence at Ormylia, surrounded by his spiritual children. He reposed on May 9, 2019, at the age of eighty-four. His funeral was attended by the Ecumenical Patriarch and brought together tens of thousands of his spiritual children from across the Orthodox world. He has not been formally glorified, but the breadth of his influence on the contemporary Greek-language and English-language Orthodox monastic and lay tradition is at this point comparable to that of his older contemporaries Sophrony of Essex and Paisios of Mount Athos.