"Dionysios Christidis"

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Dionysios Christidis (1830-1902) was a Cypriot priest and saint.

Live
Dionysios Christidis was born in 1830 in Nicosia. According to oral traditions of distant descendants of his sister, his parents came from Tinos and because of the war situation that prevailed on the islands during the Greek Revolution, they fled to Cyprus. However, he stated that he came from Cyprus. He was originally a priest at the Ecumenical Patriarchate. He then fled to the skete of the Causokalyves, in the hut St. Charalambos on Mount Athos. There he learned Byzantine music and hagiography. He served as Archdeacon of Metropolitan Kitius Meletius Modinus. In the late 1850s with the early 1860s he went back to Mount Athos to indulge in Byzantine painting and music. During his stay there he became a great monk. He visited, unknown when, for a pilgrimage to the Holy Places, while in 1875 we found him in Cyprus where he lives ascetically in a cell in the position of Fellechia of the village of Kornos and the monastery of Agios Georgios Alamanos in the village of Pentakomos. He asked the Metropolitan of Kitios Kypranos Economidis to be granted the Monastery of Syarovounio with rent to reopen it as a commune, according to the model of the monasteries of Athos. He died on 28 February 1902.

Works by Christides
In the early 1860s he paints, for reasons of livelihood, paintings depicting members of a wealthy family of Limassol; Themistocles Simeonidis and his wife Maria with their son Stephen. In 1869 and while living in Kalybi Genesis of the Virgin Mary he embraced Saint Charalambos.
During the pre-campal journey to the Holy Places he wrote (oil painting) the rest of St. Saturday.

References

Sources
Kostis Kokkonoftas, "Dionysios Christidis (1830-1902) and his painting", Iconostion, ch. 4 (June 2013), p. 82-90
Kostis Kokkonoftas, "Dionysios Christidis and the re-establishment of Stavrosvounio Monastery in 1889", Cyprus Studies, Vol. 70 (2006), Nicosia Cyprus 2008, p.43-117

Cypriot monks
Cypriot hagiographers