Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia

Saint Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, born Evangelos Bairaktaris on 7 February 1906 in the village of Agios Ioannis in the Karystia district of the island of Evia, Greece, belonged to a poor rural family. His father Leonidas worked for a time on the construction of the Panama Canal, while his mother Eleni raised the children amid hardship. As a boy Evangelos herded sheep and received little formal schooling, but he learned to read from a popular life of Saint John the Hut-dweller, whose example awakened in him a desire for monastic life. Toward the end of the 1910s, while still an adolescent, he left home, reached the Holy Mountain of Athos, and settled at the Skete of Kafsokalyvia under two elder monks, Panteleimon and Ioannikios.

There he was tonsured a monk with the name Nikitas and took up a life of austerity, obedience, and unceasing prayer. In the mid-1920s Archbishop Porphyrios III of Mount Sinai ordained him deacon and then priest and gave him the name Porphyrios. Still a young hieromonk, he was stricken with a serious pulmonary illness that compelled him to leave Athos and return to Evia. After a period of recovery and monastic residence on his native island, he moved to Athens. From 1940 he served for more than three decades as chaplain of the chapel of Saint Gerasimos at the Athens Polyclinic, hearing confessions, visiting the sick, and becoming known in the city as a spiritual father of unusual discernment.

During those years many of the faithful attributed to him gifts of clairvoyance, healing, and insight into the human heart. He continued a hidden ascetic discipline even while living in the capital. After leaving the polyclinic in the early 1970s he sought a quieter setting, including a period at Saint Nicholas in Kallisia on Mount Penteli. With ecclesiastical blessing he then undertook the foundation of a monastery dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Saviour at Milesi in Attica, near Oropos, a work that occupied him in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984, already aged and in declining health, he returned to the Skete of Kafsokalyvia on Mount Athos and spent his last years in his cell.

Elder Porphyrios died at Kafsokalyvia on 2 December 1991 and was buried there according to his wish for simplicity and without public honours. His spiritual counsel, later gathered in collections such as the volume published in English as Wounded by Love, circulated widely among Orthodox Christians. On 27 November 2013 the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, under Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, formally glorified him as a saint. His feast is kept on 2 December. He is remembered as a wonderworking Athonite elder and spiritual guide of the twentieth century; he never held episcopal or patriarchal office and remained a simple hieromonk throughout his life.