From a young age, I heard about Father Gymnasios, the monk who healed every disease. They called him 'savior,' 'Hippocrates'; with the herbs he gathered, he healed the people who called upon him. After World War I, all the newspapers featured him, calling him a great healer, a great martyr, while others referred to him as a miracle worker or a fakir. The poet Pavlos Nirvanas referred to him as a 'phenomenon of a man.' He always said that he wanted his recipes to be published so that people could learn them.

He was born in Thasos in 1858, known as Georgios Tzanetis, the famous renowned monk Gymnasios Lavriotis from Mount Athos. At the age of fifteen, his parents moved to the village of Potamia, where his mother practically worked as a midwife and kept written recipes of herbs. It is said that Gymnasios's grandfather copied these recipes from an old Athonite manuscript.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]