The monastery was founded in 1520 by a young ascetic named David, who built it with gifts gathered from monks and Christian benefactors as far afield as Greece, the Romanian principalities, and Russia. He was a man drawn to hardship. South of the monastery, about twenty minutes on foot near a ravine, pilgrims still visit the cave where tradition holds that David trained himself in solitude, living on little more than dry bread through the week. About a kilometer to the north is a spring the faithful call the holy water - the place where, the story goes, David struck the rock with his staff and curative water gushed out. The catacomb chapel of the Holy Unmercenaries survives beneath the monastery, still wearing wall paintings from the eighteenth century.

For three centuries the monastery lived under Ottoman rule, and like many Greek monasteries it became more than a place of prayer. The accounts describe it as a shelter for the poor of the surrounding countryside and a quiet refuge where the region's Christian community could gather. That sheltering role made it dangerous to those in power. In 1824, during the upheavals of the Greek War of Independence, Ottoman forces killed the monks and burned the buildings - a brutal end to the original community. The wound was real and the monastery nearly vanished. Only after Greek independence was a new community founded on the ashes, beginning the long work of rebuilding stone by stone.

Disaster returned in a different form. In 1870 an earthquake destroyed the katholikon - the central church dedicated to the Transfiguration of Christ and to the founder David himself. The abbot Anthimos Aggelis rebuilt it in 1877. A harder blow came in 1933, when the monastery's largest estate was expropriated, stripping away the lands that had long sustained it. Yet the community endured, and in 1951 the archimandrite Nikodemos Thomas led a thorough restoration, adding a cluster of new chapels and a guesthouse that can shelter more than a hundred worshippers. The monastery's reliquary holds relics of David alongside many other saints, and its small museum preserves David's Russian stole and censer, his staff, old icons, and three woodcut crosses - one dating to the age of the Palaiologos emperors of Byzantium.

The monastery's most recent chapter may be its most remarkable. From 1975 to 1991 its abbot was Elder Iakovos Tsalikis, a monk renowned in his lifetime for humility and spiritual counsel, who drew visitors from across Greece to this remote hillside. He was glorified as a saint by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 27 November 2017, his feast set for 22 November. The celebration of his glorification was held at the monastery on 3 June 2018, led in person by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew alongside thirty Orthodox bishops from Greece, Cyprus, and Constantinople. For a community that had been massacred, shaken to rubble, and stripped of its lands, it was an extraordinary turn - the place that once buried its dead now venerating one of its own among the saints.

What strikes a visitor today is continuity. The monastery still functions as a living community, still keeps the cave and the spring, still welcomes pilgrims along the same forest road. Of the original sixteenth-century building only part of the east aisle survives, but that fragment connects directly to David and his first companions. To stand in the chapel of Saint Charalampos - once David's own cell, where he is said to have kept Saturday vigil - is to stand inside five centuries of unbroken devotion, weathered by fire and earthquake and time, and still very much alive.