An excerpt from a conversation with the abbot of the Vatoped monastery, Archimandrite Ephraim:

"Elder Joseph has been a monk since the age of sixteen. When he was 16, he watched a film and saw how people are being killed there. Then he thought: how easy it is to kill a person and leave this life. And so, without a mentor, a desire came to him take care of his soul more than his body. He went to a monastery in Cyprus, and there they tonsured him into a ryassophor, named Sophronius. But, unfortunately, there was a period when the Cypriot Church changed the calendar to a new style. The monastery was divided, so that there were even two services: according to the new style and the old, the brethren were divided, and the old calendarists did not greet the new calendarists. : "Come to me. You have a future in the spiritual life, you have my blessing to go to the Holy Mountain." And so he came to the Holy Mountain. By the way, when he went to the Holy Mountain in 1949, he came to Athens. And when he was with several monks at the pier, they were told that a ship would soon be leaving for Thessaloniki. And where they had to go through control, the main inspector was a communist, he cursed the monks, bad mouthed them in every possible way, expressed something else from his ideology and did not let them board the ship. They kept asking him, but he did not let them board and scolded them even more. He let other people and laymen calmly board, even without a passport. The brothers who were with the elder began to be indignant and wanted to complain to the head of the wharf, but the elder told them: "No, we will not go anywhere, we tried twice and nothing came of it, every obstacle is for our good." They insisted, but the elder did not yield to them. If they had complained, they would of course have been put on board, because they were right. So the ship sailed away, but on the way it sank and no one survived. The elder often reminded us of this and said: "When you try to open a door, if it does not open, do not break it open, otherwise you will regret it." And he also said that often, even behind the passions of people, the Providence of God is hidden for us in an incomprehensible way.