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Elder Epifanios Mylopotaminos, the Chef of Mount Athos, fell asleep at dawn today at the age of 64 after a long battle with cancer.
The monk Epifanio was born in Paggaio, Kavala in 1956. After graduating from high school in 1973, he went to Mount Athos, to the Agios Pavlos Monastery. He made several sermons.
He sat in the kitchen for eight years, which is generally not usual: the sermons change every year, so the monks gain comprehensive experience of working in a convent. He liked to cook and, as he had said in a previous interview with Kathimerini’s “Gastronomos” magazine: “Apparently, those who ate also liked it. Since then, if I had another job, they would call me to cook at parties and festivals. At festivals you have to cook for many people, sometimes more than 1,000 people. To get ahead, it is not enough to have culinary knowledge. You have to be more of a commander, handle 20 people, one to make a mistake, it has ruined your food “.
In 1992 he assumed the Holy See of Agios Efstathios, known as Mylopotamos. “It was a wreck then,” he said in the same interview. “In 1993 we planted the first vineyard, in 1996 we built the winery. Why did I take care of the vineyard? At Mount Athos you have to have a manual, a ministry, to do a job and earn a living. Others make incense, others make rosaries, others make pictures and sell them. They used to make wine on Mount Athos, but they had it in bulk in five liters, twenty liters. I decided to go to the winery and bottle wine. And little by little I started. With a lot of effort, a lot of struggle, day and night ”.
The dynamics of the winery reached 70,000-80,000 bottles a year.
In 2008 he published the book “Cooking of Mount Athos” (published by Modern Horizons) which has been translated into 8 languages. He was a member of the Northern Greece Chefs Club and frequently traveled abroad, to food and beverage conferences, exhibitions and competitions. In 2016, at the Worldchefs Congress & Expo, held for the first time in Greece, he introduced Mount Athos cuisine to 1,600 chefs from around the world.
As of 2018 he wrote articles for Kathimerini’s “Gastronomos” magazine. In the summer of 2020, Kathimerini published a recipe book entitled “The Monk Epifanio’s Mount Athos Summer Kitchen.”
