Life and Asceticism
According to his hagiography, Bessarion was baptized in his teenage years, after which he set out on a pilgrimage to visit various holy sites. He traveled to Jerusalem and to the wilderness of the Jordan, where he visited Saint Gerasimus and learned about monastic life at several desert monasteries. Upon returning home, he received monastic tonsure and became a disciple of Saint Isidore of Pelusium.
Bessarion's discipline was severe and austere. He chose to despise the comforts of the body, sleeping always in the open air without shelter, dressed only in a few rags, and enduring both heat and cold. He took a vow of silence and ate only once a week. The sources relate that he never lay down to sleep, choosing always to remain standing or sitting, and that he spent much of his life wandering the desert in prayerful solitude.
His endurance in prayer was famous: by tradition he once remained for forty days and forty nights without food or sleep, standing motionless and immersed in prayer. He died at a great age, departing peacefully to the Lord.
Humility
The sources especially commend Bessarion's humility. The synaxarion relates that once, when a priest in a skete ordered someone who had fallen into sin to leave the church, Bessarion rose and went out with him, saying, 'I am a sinner, too.'
Miracles and Traditions
Historically Documented: According to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Bessarion received from God the gift of wonderworking. The accounts preserved in that collection attribute several miracles to him, recorded as part of the desert-father tradition.
Traditional Accounts: Among the wonders related of him, it is said that he sweetened bitter water for a thirsty disciple, brought rain through prayer, made rivers flow in desolate lands to quench his disciples' thirst, crossed rivers as if walking on dry land, and cast out demons with a word.
Legacy
Bessarion is remembered as one of the great Desert Fathers, and his sayings and example are preserved in the Apophthegmata Patrum. In some hagiographical traditions his name is substituted for that of Saint Paphnutius of Thebes in the legend of the conversion of Saint Thaïs, a sign of his place within the broader desert-monastic tradition.
