Dionysios the Rhetorician and his disciple Metrophanes were monastic ascetics of Mount Athos, commemorated together on July 9. They are remembered as the first settlers of the site that would become the Little Skete of Saint Anne, a dependency of the Great Skete of Saint Anne situated on a rocky slope between Saint Anne's and Katounakia. By tradition both were born toward the end of the fifteenth century.
The two came from a dependency of the Stoudion Monastery in Constantinople, where Metrophanes lived as the disciple of Dionysios. Seeking spiritual solitude, they journeyed to the Holy Mountain at the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, settling first in a cell near Karyes and devoting themselves to prayer, fasting, and vigilance. As Dionysios's reputation for wisdom drew monks to seek his guidance, the two withdrew to a more remote spot, finding a cave between Saint Anne's and Katounakia which they made their abode and where, according to the tradition of the skete, they were the first to settle.
Dionysios had held the office of Rhetorician of the Great Church of Constantinople, and on Athos he continued to work as a learned calligrapher and writer. The synaxarion relates that he rendered writings of the Holy Fathers into a simpler form of Greek so that ordinary people might understand them; manuscripts attributed to him are reported to survive at the Great Lavra, at the Skete of Saint Anne, and in other monasteries. Metrophanes, with the blessing of the Athonite fathers and of his elder, left the Holy Mountain for a time to preach in the neighboring villages of Halkidiki, serving as a spiritual father before returning to Athos.
Dionysios is recorded as having reposed in 1606, with Metrophanes following shortly afterward; the sources vary on the exact day and year of his repose. The two are venerated together at the Little Skete of Saint Anne, where in 1956 a chapel was established at the cave that had been their original dwelling.
