Venerable Hilarion the New, Abbot of the Dalmatian Monastery

Hilarion, son of a Cappadocian who served at the imperial table, became a monk at twenty and joined the Dalmatian monastery near Constantinople, where he was a disciple of Gregory the Decapolite. He worked ten years in the monastery garden and took Hilarion the Great as his model, hence his name, «the New». Against his will he was made priest and, at the urging of Patriarch Nicephorus, abbot.

Under the Iconoclast emperors Leo V and Theophilus he was beaten, imprisoned in several monasteries and exiled to the island of Aphusia. Between persecutions a devout woman sheltered him on her estate; there, his Life says, he saw the soul of Theodore the Studite carried to heaven. When the empress Theodora restored the icons in 843, he returned to his monastery and died three years later, in 845.