Saint Porphyrios the Kafsokalyvite
Elder of Mount Athos and of Athens
- Feast day
- December 2
- Lived
- 1906–1991
- Patronage
- Discernment, the anxious, the sick
Saint Porphyrios, who spent thirty years as chaplain of a polyclinic in central Athens, could read a person's whole life at a glance and insisted that Christianity is not a struggle against darkness but a turning toward the light.
Life
Born Evangelos Bairaktaris to a poor family on Evia, he ran away to Mount Athos at twelve. There, at Kafsokalyvia, he received the gift of clairvoyance while still a teenager, a gift he tried for the rest of his life to conceal. Illness forced him off the Holy Mountain, and he was ordained and eventually appointed to the chapel of Saint Gerasimos at the Athens polyclinic.
For decades a stream of people came to him with illnesses and marriages and business ruin; he would name their diagnoses before doctors could, and pray with them. In old age, blind and gravely ill, he founded the monastery of the Transfiguration at Milesi and returned to Athos to die in his old hut.
Teaching
'Do not fight the darkness,' he said. 'Open the shutters and let the light in.' Wounded by Love, the collected record of his counsels, is one of the most widely read Orthodox books of the past thirty years. He was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2013.