Father Gabriel spent the last years at Samtavro, the convent of St. Nina Equal to the Apostles in Mtskheta, near Tbilisi. One day the nuns came to the temple and saw the elder on his knees in front of the miraculous Iver icon. He was crying loudly, and then… he started banging his head on the floor. He did this, as it seemed to the nuns, very deliberately, they even suspected the saint of ordinary acting.
“These blows made such a sound that it was really funny at first glance,” one of the nuns recalled. – But very soon we became alarmed, because it was the forehead of a living person, and not a soulless object. He beat the ground with his head a little more, cried, said something, and then stopped. The next day, we noticed several fresh wounds with dried blood on his forehead. So much for the performance!”
