St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia

He was born Evangelos Bairaktaris in 1906 in a village of Evia, in Greece, to a poor and pious family, and had almost no schooling, for he was sent young to work. Drawn by the life of St. John the Hut-dweller, he ran away as a boy to the Holy Mountain of Athos and settled at the hermitage of Kavsokalyvia, giving himself to obedience and prayer under two simple and strict elders.

While still young, the tradition recounts, he received from God the gift of grace and of insight, so that he perceived things distant and hidden and saw the state of souls. Illness forced him to leave the Holy Mountain, and he was ordained priest and served for a time in Evia, and then for over thirty years as a confessor at the chapel of a polyclinic in Athens, where the sick and the troubled of the city came to him.

He used his gift not to astonish but to heal. He would name a person's illness or sin before it was spoken, not to shame but to open the way to repentance, and he sent many to the doctors as well as to confession, for he honored both. Above all he taught the love of Christ and the love of the beauty of the world, leading souls to God through joy rather than fear, and warning against a religion of anxiety and self-will.

In his later years, worn out and nearly blind, he longed to return to the place of his repentance, and went back to his hermitage at Kavsokalyvia on Athos. There he prepared for death with great humility, asking forgiveness of all and dwelling on the words of the prayer that the will of God be done.

He reposed at Kavsokalyvia on the second of December, 1991. His recorded counsels, gathered after his death, have been read across the world. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in 2013, and the Church keeps his memory on the second of December.