MICHAEL MALENOS, Saint. — An ascetic of outstanding virtue, born at Carsianon in Cappadocia in 894. Even today he is little known even in the East. The name Malenos is not a family name, but that of the laura which he built on the Kimina in Bithynia, which M. directed as hegumen and where he died on 12 July 961.
Very young he retired to the Kimina (912), then to the desert, and after founding a monastery at Gerolimni (921), after four years he returned definitively to the Kimina; there he was ordained priest (930). He was a kinsman of the Byzantine imperial family, and was the spiritual father of St Athanasius, founder of Athos. Feast day 22 July in the East (in the Menaion of Venice 1860, 12 July).
BIBL.: Acta SS. Iulii, III, Antwerp 1723, p. 303; I. Martinov, Annus ecclesiasticus graeco-slavicus, Brussels 1863, p. 176 (or Acta SS. Octobris, XI, Paris-Rome 1869, p. 176); L. Petit, St Michel Maleinos, in Revue de l'orient chrétien, 7 (1902), pp. 543-603; H. Delehaye, Nota, in Anal. Boll., 24 (1905), pp. 491-92.