Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia

Origins and early life

Evangelos Bairaktaris was born on 7 February 1906 in the village of Agios Ioannis, in the province of Karystia on the island of Euboea, the fourth child of a poor and devout farming family. His father, Leonidas, a chanter in the village church who had once met Saint Nectarius of Aegina, was so pressed by poverty that he left for America to labour on the digging of the Panama Canal. The boy Evangelos tended sheep on the mountainside and had barely a single year of schooling before he was sent out to work: first, at the age of seven, in a shop at Chalkis, and afterwards for two years in a relative's grocery at Piraeus, teaching himself to read from a tattered copy of the Life of Saint John the Hut-Burner (January 15), whom he came to love and long to imitate.

Ascetic struggle on the Holy Mountain

Drawn by that reading, at the age of twelve Evangelos left in secret for Mount Athos. God's grace led him to the hermitage of Saint George at Kavsokalyvia, where he placed himself under two elders, the hieromonk Ioannikios — his own brother according to the flesh — and the spiritual father Panteleimon, men of an austere and demanding discipline to whom he gave himself in absolute love and obedience. He was tonsured a monk at fourteen with the name Niketas and, two years later, received the Great Schema. Very early in this life of obedience God granted him the gift of spiritual sight — a clairvoyance and discernment of hearts, of distant events and of hidden illnesses, that would astonish those who came to him for the rest of his days, and which he himself always ascribed wholly to the grace of God and never to any attainment of his own.

Priesthood and the years in Athens

At nineteen a serious illness — the tuberculosis that would trouble him lifelong — forced him to leave the Holy Mountain. He returned to Euboea and to the Monastery of Saint Charalambos at Leuka, and in 1926, at the age of twenty, he was ordained priest at Saint Charalambos of Kymi by Porphyrios III, Archbishop of Sinai, who gave him the name by which he is now known. Barely two years later he was appointed a spiritual father and confessor, and soon raised to the rank of archimandrite, serving for a time as a parish priest and for some years at the deserted monastery of Saint Nicholas at Ano Bathia. On the eve of Greece's entry into the Second World War, in 1940, he was sent to Athens as priest and confessor at the Athens Polyclinic, a hospital near the city centre. There he remained for thirty-three years — which, he said, passed as though they were a single day — pouring himself out in the care of the sick and the guidance of the countless people who sought him, his gift of insight now exercised in the noise and pain of a great city.

Milesi and repose

In 1955 he settled at Kallisia on the slopes of Mount Penteli, leasing a ruined monastery of Saint Nicholas and its lands, which he cultivated with his own hands while continuing his spiritual work. In 1979, though by now often blind and gravely ill, he moved to Milesi with the dream of raising a monastery there dedicated to the Transfiguration; he lived at first in a trailer under harsh conditions and later in a bare concrete cell, labouring tirelessly to see the work completed, and rejoiced when the cornerstone of the great church was laid in February 1990. As his end drew near he wished only to return to the place where he had begun. In June 1991, sensing his death and unwilling to be buried with honours, he went back quietly to the hut of Saint George at Kavsokalyvia, where he had been tonsured seventy years before. There, at 4:31 on the morning of 2 December 1991, he gave up his soul to God. His last words were those of the Lord's high-priestly prayer, which he loved to repeat: "that they all may be one" (John 17:21).

Veneration and teaching

Porphyrios was known in his lifetime across Greece and beyond as a clairvoyant elder and healer, sought out by thousands; yet what has spread his fame since his death is above all his teaching, gathered from his conversations and letters and published (most widely in the collection Wounded by Love). Its heart is a counsel of joy: that a person is not made holy by grim warfare against his passions so much as by falling in love with Christ and with the beauty of creation, so that the soul, filled with light and love, has no room left for evil. He spoke of prayer as the sweetest of occupations, of the presence of Christ in nature, poetry and music, and of a spiritual fatherhood exercised in gentleness rather than severity. The Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate entered his name in the calendar of the saints on 27 November 2013, appointing his feast on the day of his repose, and his veneration has since spread rapidly through the Greek Churches, the Orthodox Church in America, and far beyond.