Neophyte and Meletios were hermits who lived in solitude on the Sălbaticul (Wild) Mountain above the Olt River valley in what is now Vâlcea County, Romania, near the great Cozia Monastery. By tradition both were connected with Cozia and withdrew into the surrounding mountains to pursue a stricter ascetic life, and it was their disciples who afterward established the hermitage of Stânişoara at the foot of their refuge. They are commemorated together on September 3.
According to the tradition preserved in the Romanian Church, Neophyte was born in the sixteenth century to pious parents and received the monastic habit at Cozia. After years of obedience in community life he sought a more perfect solitude and, with his abbot's blessing, dug a cell on the western side of the Wild Mountain, where he lived in continuous fasting and prayer for about thirty years, descending only on Sundays and feast days to confess and commune at the nearby Turnu hermitage. Meletios is placed at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; by tradition he entered Cozia as a child and later withdrew to a cave on the southern face of the same mountain, where he labored for more than forty years.
The Romanian Orthodox Church glorified the two hermits on February 25, 2016, together with the Venerable Daniel and Misael of the neighboring Turnu Monastery, fixing their joint feast on September 3. Their lives, transmitted largely through the local monastic memory of the Cozia–Turnu–Stânişoara region, present them as exemplars of the hesychast withdrawal that flourished in the Carpathian mountains of Wallachia.
