Evia and the Boy Who Fled to Athos (1906–c. 1920)

The origins of St. Porphyrios: his birth on February 7, 1906, into a poor farming family at Agios Ioannis in Karystia on the island of Evia; the two short years of school cut off by poverty; the boyhood of hard labor as a shepherd, in the coal mines, and behind a grocer’s counter; the Life of St. John the Hut-Dweller of Kavsokalyvia, spelled out painfully on a hillside, that set his whole heart on Mount Athos; and the secret flight — after failed attempts — by which a child of perhaps twelve to fourteen made his way to the Skete of Kavsokalyvia, the remote and severe edge of the Holy Mountain.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

A Poor House at Agios Ioannis

Evangelos Bairaktaris was born on February 7, 1906, in the village of Agios Ioannis (St. John) in the province of Karystia, on the southern part of the island of Evia (Euboea), to Leonidas and Eleni Bairaktaris, poor and pious farming people (Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “Childhood”; Elder Porphyrios (Bairaktaris): A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). He was the fourth of five children (the early biographies are consistent that he was one of five, and most place him fourth) (Porphyrios (Bairaktaris) the Kapsokalivite, OrthodoxWiki). The family was so poor, and the times in the Greek countryside so hard, that schooling was a luxury it could barely afford.

He himself remembered the family’s piety simply. His was a household of the old village faith — the icon corner, the fasts, the long walk to the village church — and the boy absorbed it before he could articulate it. But poverty pressed in early. As St. Porphyrios told it in the reminiscences gathered in Wounded by Love, he managed only about two years of school before he had to go out to work, and he learned his letters slowly and with difficulty (Wounded by Love, “Childhood”; Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia, which gives “two years of school” and work from about age eight). The near-illiteracy of his beginnings is not a marginal detail: it frames everything that came after. The Elder whose counsel would one day draw professors, doctors, and writers had himself almost no formal education at all, and never ceased to say so.

The Shepherd, the Mines, the Grocer’s Shop

From around the age of eight, Evangelos worked. He minded the family’s animals as a shepherd on the hills of Evia; at different points the early accounts have him laboring in the coal mines and serving as an assistant in a grocer’s shop, taking on a man’s burdens while still a child (Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). This was the ordinary lot of a poor boy in the Greek provinces in the years before and during the First World War — hard physical work, little rest, and no horizon beyond the next season’s labor.

It was on the hillsides, tending the flocks, that the decisive thing happened. He had with him — by one account, having bought or borrowed it — a copy of the Life of St. John the Hut-Dweller (St. John Kalyvites), the fifth-century young saint of Constantinople who left wealth and family to live hidden and poor for the love of Christ, and after whom, by tradition, the Athonite Skete of Kavsokalyvia (“the burnt huts”) takes part of its dedication. The boy could barely read, and he spelled the Life out syllable by syllable, over and over, on the hillside, until it had soaked into him (Wounded by Love, “Childhood”; Saint Porphyrios, Wonderworker of Kafsokaliva, Orthodox Church in America). The reading kindled in him a single, total desire: to imitate that saint — to go and live, hidden and poor, for Christ alone. From that point, every thought bent toward Mount Athos.

The Flight to the Holy Mountain

A poor shepherd-boy of Evia could not simply announce that he was leaving for Mount Athos. His parents needed his labor; the Mountain was far; and he was a child. The early accounts agree that he made more than one attempt before he succeeded — running off and being turned back, or losing his nerve, before at last he got away (Wounded by Love, “I go to the Holy Mountain”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). When he finally succeeded, he went secretly, without his parents’ knowledge or blessing, in the manner of the runaway child-ascetic that the Life he loved had taught him to be.

The sources differ on exactly how old he was. The early Greek biographies and the accounts drawn from Wounded by Love most often give his age at the flight to Athos as around twelve; other accounts and the chronology that has him tonsured at fourteen imply he reached the Mountain closer to fourteen or fifteen. [Disputed: the early accounts and Wounded by Love place the secret flight to Athos at about age twelve (so OrthoChristian’s Short Biography and the popular Lives); the chronology giving tonsure as the monk Nikitas at age fourteen, with the ferry-meeting of his elder en route, implies arrival at about fourteen–fifteen (so Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia).] What the sources agree on is that he was a child — not a youth who had finished his schooling and weighed a vocation, but a boy who had read one book and run away to become a saint.

By one well-attested detail, the crucial human link was made on the journey itself: on the ferry from Thessaloniki toward the Holy Mountain, the boy fell in with a hieromonk, Panteleimon, who would become his spiritual father and who brought him to Kavsokalyvia — to the Hut (Kalyva) of St. George, where Panteleimon’s fellow-elder Ioannikios also lived (Wounded by Love, “My elders”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). So the boy did not arrive at a great monastery in the comfortable center of the Mountain. He arrived at the Skete of Kavsokalyvia — the remote, poor, vertiginous southeastern tip of Athos, a scatter of hermit-huts clinging to the rocks above the sea, the hardest and most ascetic corner of the Holy Mountain, named for the burnt huts of its first hesychasts. It was exactly the life the Life of St. John the Hut-Dweller had promised him.

Evia in 1906: The World He Was Born Into

It is worth setting the boy’s beginnings in their place and time, because the poverty that shaped him was not incidental but formative. The Evia (Euboea) of 1906 — the long second island of Greece, stretching down the Aegean coast northeast of Athens — was, in its interior and its southern reaches around Karystia, a hard agricultural and pastoral country: small villages, stony hillsides, subsistence farming, flocks of sheep and goats, and the grinding labor of people who lived close to the land and to want. Greece itself in 1906 was a small, poor kingdom recovering from the disastrous war with the Ottomans of 1897 and not yet enlarged by the Balkan Wars; the deep countryside knew little of cities, schools, or comfort. A child of a poor farming family in such a place could expect a life of labor and faith, in roughly equal measure, and not much else (general background; on his birth and family circumstances, Wounded by Love, “Childhood”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com).

Into this world the old village Orthodoxy was woven inseparably. The rhythm of the year was the rhythm of the Church — the fasts and feasts, the long services, the saints’ days, the veneration of icons, the pilgrimage to a country chapel. A pious child absorbed the faith not as a set of propositions but as the very texture of existence. This is the soil from which St. Porphyrios’s later teaching grew, and it explains something of its character: his Christianity is not the religion of the study or the seminary (which he never attended) but of the village and the hillside — concrete, sensory, full of flowers and birds and the love of God in created things (see Nature, Poetry, and Science). The shepherd-boy who would one day teach professors that they must “become poets” had himself learned the faith the way a poet learns — by living in it, under the open sky, before he could read.

The Place That Formed Him

Kavsokalyvia matters to everything that follows. It is not a place of relaxed cenobitic routine but of severe eremitic asceticism — small huts, manual labor on impossible ground, long vigils, and an old tradition of charismatic prayer reaching back to the fourteenth-century hesychasts and to St. Maximos of Kavsokalyvia, the “burner of his own huts,” whose memory hangs over the skete. The child who had run away from Evia to be poor and hidden for Christ had found, almost improbably, the one place that would let him be exactly that.

He embraced it with the whole force of a convert’s love. The same total desire that had spelled out a saint’s Life on a hillside now threw itself into obedience, labor, and prayer under his two elders — and there, by his own later account and theirs, almost at the very beginning of his monastic life, the central mystery of his whole existence was given to him (see The Elders and the Gift). But that beginning was also fragile. The body of a half-grown, half-fed boy could not indefinitely sustain the asceticism of Kavsokalyvia, and within a few years the illness that would shape the rest of his life would tear him away from the Mountain he loved (see Forced Back from Athos).

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. (First published in Greek by the Holy Convent of Chrysopigi, 2003.) Opening chapters on his childhood, his reading of the Life of St. John the Hut-Dweller, the flight to Athos, and the meeting with Panteleimon.
Elder Porphyrios (Bairaktaris): A Short Biography. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/66300.html). Birth at Agios Ioannis, Evia (Feb. 7, 1906); the shepherd-boy and the reading of the Life; the ferry-meeting with Panteleimon; Kavsokalyvia.
Porphyrios (Bairaktaris) the Kapsokalivite. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). Parents Leonidas and Eleni Bairaktaris; one of five children; the early labor and near-illiteracy.
Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia. Wikipedia. Two years of school; work from about age eight (shepherd, coal mines, grocer’s assistant); the chronology placing the tonsure (name Nikitas) at age fourteen.
Saint Porphyrios, Wonderworker of Kafsokaliva. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, December 2. The reading of the Life of St. John the Hut-Dweller and the resolve to go to Athos.