Icon Saint Porphyrios

Icon of Saint Porphyrios with handmade silkscreen print on a polished gold background in various dimensions.

All images of the Orthodox calendar are made in any size.

Celebration 2 December

Saint Porphyrios, born on February 7, 1906 A.D., in Evia, in the village of Agios Ioannis, in the province of Karystia. His parents, Leonidas Bayraktaris and Eleni, née Antoniou Lambrou, were pious and philanthropic people.

Little Evangelos was the fourth child of the family. He was tending sheep in the mountains and had only attended the first grade of primary school when he too was forced to go to Chalkida to work due to the great poverty. He was only seven years old. He worked for two or three years in a shop. Then he went to Piraeus, where he worked for two years in a relative’s grocery store.

At the age of twelve, he secretly left for Mount Athos, with the desire to imitate Saint John the Calvite, whom he had particularly loved when he had previously read his life. The grace of God led him to the hut of St. George of Kausokalivi and to the submission of two elders, Panteleimon, who was also a spiritual director, and Ioannikiou, brothers in the flesh. He devoted himself to the two Elders, who were admittedly very strict, with great love and a spirit of absolute obedience.

He became a monk at the age of fourteen and took the name Nikitas. After two years he became a great man. Shortly afterwards God gave him the gift of insight.

At the age of nineteen, the Elder became very seriously ill, which forced him to leave Mount Athos for good. He then returned to Euboea, where he settled in the Monastery of Saint Charalambos of Lefkos.

A year later, in the year 1926 AD, at the age of twenty, he was ordained a priest in St. Charalambos of Kymi by Porphyrios III, Archbishop of Sinai, who gave him the name Porphyrios. At the age of twenty-two he became a clergyman-confessor and shortly afterwards an archimandrite. For a time he worked as a parish priest in Tsakaios, a village in Euboea.

In Evia, in the Holy Monastery of Agios Charalambos, he lived twelve years, ministering to people as a spiritualist and exegete, and three years in Ano Vathia, in the abandoned Monastery of Agios Nikolaos.

In 1940 A.D., on the eve of the Second World War, Elder Porphyrios settled in Athens, where he assumed the duties of chaplain and spiritual director at the Polyclinic of Athens. As he said himself, he lived there for thirty-three years as if in a day, carrying out his spiritual work tirelessly and relieving the suffering and sickness of the people.

Since 1955 AD he had settled in Kallisia, where he had leased from the Holy Monastery of Penteli the monastery of St. Nicholas with the surrounding agricultural area, which he cultivated with great care. Here, at the same time, he practiced his rich spiritual work.

In the summer of 1979 AD, he settled in Milesi with the dream of building a monastery. There he lived at first in a caravan under very adverse conditions and then in an unpretentious little cell made of concrete blocks, where he endured the many trials of his health.

In 1984 AD it was moved to a building of the monastery under construction, for the completion of which the Elder, although he was very ill and blind, worked tirelessly and tirelessly. With the foundation of the Katholikon of the Metamorphosis Monastery, on February 26, 1990 AD, he deserved to see his dream come true.

In the last years of his earthly life he began to prepare for his demise. He wished to retire to Mount Athos, to his beloved Kausokalivia, where secretly and quietly, as he lived, he would give his soul to her nymph. Many times they heard him say: “I seek even now that I have gone out to go and die up there.”

Indeed, in June 1991 AD, sensing his end, and not wanting to be buried with honours, he departed for the hut of Saint George in Kausokalivia on Mount Athos, where he had been a monk for about 70 years and at 4:31 on the morning of December 2, 1991 AD, he gave his spirit to the Lord, whom he had loved so much in his life.

The last words that came out of his mouth were from the Lord’s high priestly prayer, the ones he loved so much and repeated so often: “Ina osin en”.

The Holy and Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, at its meeting of November 27, 2013, under the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, proceeded to the canonization of Elder Porphyrios.

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