In 369 AD, a famine was killing people in the streets of Caesarea while grain merchants calculated their profits behind locked doors. Basil --- bishop, theologian, and one of the most practically visionary figures in early Christian history --- walked into the marketplace and told the wealthy exactly what they were doing. Then he went home and picked up a shovel. What he built outside the city walls became the Basiliad --- hospital, hospice, shelter, kitchen, and trades training all in one --- the first institution of its kind in the Western world and the distant ancestor of every hospital that still opens its doors regardless of ability to pay. This is the story of a man who understood that belief without infrastructure is just poetry, and who spent his remaining nine years proving it in stone and mortar.

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