Saint Paisius of Sihăstria (Paisie Olaru) was a Romanian monastic elder and confessor of the twentieth century, remembered as the spiritual father of a great number of monastics and laypeople. He spent the central decades of his monastic life at the Sihăstria Monastery in Moldavia, where he became known for receiving his spiritual children for Confession at any hour. He reposed in 1990 and was glorified by the Romanian Orthodox Church, with his feast kept on December 2.
Born in 1897 in the village of Stroiești and baptized Peter, he was, by the accounts gathered after his repose, the youngest child of a pious family of the Bucovina region; his father is named as a forester. He entered the monastic life at the Cozancea Skete in the years after the First World War, was tonsured a monk in his twenties under the name Paisius, and after long years as a simple monk received the great schema in 1933. He was ordained deacon and later priest, and for a short time served as abbot of Cozancea before that responsibility was set aside.
In 1948 he transferred to Sihăstria, the monastery with which his name is now joined, where he labored as confessor alongside his contemporary and spiritual friend Saint Cleopas Ilie, abbot of the same community. Seeking greater solitude he withdrew for a time to the dependent Sihla Skete, returning to Sihăstria in his later years as his health declined. According to the sources, his plain and direct counsel strengthened many Romanians, including a number of the country's noted spiritual fathers, through the difficult years of Communist rule. He reposed at Sihăstria in 1990 and was buried in the monastery cemetery.
Saint Paisius was numbered among a group of twentieth-century Romanian spiritual fathers and confessors glorified by the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church, whose decision was taken in 2024 and proclaimed in 2025, the year marking the centennial of the elevation of the Romanian Church to a Patriarchate. He and Saint Cleopas of Sihăstria, canonized together, share the feast day of December 2.
