Saint Porphyrios the Causokalyvite the clairvoyant and miracle worker

Saint Porphyrios the Causokalyvite the clairvoyant and miracle worker
It is celebrated every year on December 2

The holy Elder Porphyrios, born Evangelos Bairaktaris, was born on February 7, 1906 AD, in Evia, in the village of Agios Ioannis, in the province of Karystia. His parents, Leonidas Bairaktaris and Eleni, nee Antonio Lambrou, were pious and God-loving people. His father, in fact, was a cantor in the village and had personally met Saint Nektarios. His family was large and the parents, poor farmers, had difficulty supporting it. That is why the father was forced to leave for America, where he worked in the construction of the Panama Canal.

Little Evangelos was the fourth child of the family. He looked after sheep in the mountains and had attended only the first grade of primary school, when he too was forced due to great poverty to go to Chalkida to work. 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 left secretly for Mount Athos, with the desire to imitate Saint John the Kalivite, whom he had particularly loved, when he had previously read his life. The grace of God led him to the hut of Saint George of Kaufsokalyvia and to the submission of two Elders, Panteleimon, who was both spiritual, and Ioannikios, brothers in the flesh. He devoted himself to the two Elders, who by common confession were particularly strict, with great love and with a spirit of absolute obedience.

He became a monk at the age of fourteen and took the name Nikitas. After two years he became big. A little later God gave him the gift of clairvoyance.

At the age of nineteen, the Elder became very seriously ill, which forced him to permanently leave Mount Athos. He then returned to Evia, where he retired to the Monastery of Agios Charalambous Lefko. A year later, in the year 1926 AD, at the age of twenty, he was ordained a priest at Agios Charalambos Kymis by Porphyrios III, Archbishop of Sinai, who gave him the name Porphyrios. At twenty-two he became a spiritual confessor and a little later an archimandrite. For a while he worked as a vicar in Tsakaios, a village in Evia.

In Evia, in the Holy Monastery of Agios Charalambous, he lived for twelve years, ministering to the people as a spiritual and exologist, and three years in Ano Vathia, in the abandoned Monastery of Agios Nikolaos.

In 1940 AD, on the eve of the Second World War, Elder Porphyrios settled in Athens, where he assumed the duties of vicar and chaplain at the Athens Polyclinic. As he himself said, he lived there thirty-three years as one day, tirelessly doing spiritual work and relieving people’s pain and illness.

Since 1955 AD he had settled in Kallisia, where he had leased from the Holy Monastery of Pentelis the monastery of Agios Nikolaos located there with the agricultural area that surrounded it, which he cultivated with great diligence. 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 mobile home under particularly adverse conditions and then in an unnecessary cell made of concrete blocks, where he endured the many trials of his health. In 1984 AD it was transferred to a building of the monastery under construction, for the completion of which the Elder, despite being very sick and blind, worked tirelessly and tirelessly. With the foundation of the Catholic Church of the Transfiguration Monastery, on February 26, 1990 AD, he was entitled to see his dream come true.

In the last years of his earthly life he began to prepare for his sleep. He wished to retire to Mount Athos, to his beloved Kaufsokalyvia, where secretly and quietly, as he lived, he would give his soul to her Bride. Many times he was heard to say, “I aspire even now that I am old to go and die up there.”

Indeed, in June 1991 AD, sensing his end, and not wanting to be buried with honors, he left for the hut of St. George in Kavsokalyvia of Mount Athos, where he had been a monk about 70 years ago and on the 4: 31 in the morning of December 2, 1991 AD. he surrendered his spirit to the Lord, whom he loved so much in his life.

The last words heard from his mouth were from the high priestly prayer of the Lord, the ones he loved so much and repeated very often: “ἵνα ὦσιν ἓν”.

The Holy and Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, during the meeting of November 27, 2013 AD, under the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, proceeded with the canonization of Elder Porphyrios.