Early Life and Monastic Beginnings
Eumenios was born Constantine Saridakis on January 1, 1931, at Ethia in Crete, the eighth and last child of a poor family of devout Christians. The Nazi occupation of Greece during his childhood meant that he received no formal schooling. At about the age of seventeen he entered a monastery near his village and was tonsured a monk under the name Sophronios.
In 1954, while he was serving in the Greek military, he contracted leprosy. He was transferred to the Saint Barbara Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Athens, which would become the setting for the rest of his life.
Ministry at the Leprosy Hospital
Though he recovered fully from the disease, the monk chose to remain at the Athens hospital to minister to the other patients, whose suffering he had come to know in his own body. There he became the spiritual son of Saint Nikephoros the Leper, who had arrived in 1957 and, though blinded by his own illness, served as a spiritual father to many until his death in 1964.
In 1975, at the age of forty-four, he was ordained a priest and renamed Eumenios, and he became the father confessor of the leprosy hospital. He devoted decades to comforting and hearing the confessions of his fellow sufferers, and by 1992 he had been raised to the rank of archimandrite. His contemporaries esteemed him for a hidden holiness: Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyva is remembered as calling him a hidden saint of the age.
Repose and Glorification
Eumenios reposed on May 23, 1999. In accordance with his wishes he was buried in his native village of Ethia in Crete.
On April 14, 2022, the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople formally canonized him under the title 'Venerable and God-bearing Father Eumenios the New,' establishing his feast on May 23, the day of his repose.
