The Monastery at Milesi

The great labor of St. Porphyrios’s last decades: the founding of the Holy Convent of the Transfiguration of the Saviour at Milesi, near Malakasa in Attica, the community of spiritual daughters he raised up to continue his work and to outlast him. The file traces the long search for land across Attica, Evia, and Viotia; the canonical approval and the presidential recognition of the convent in 1981; the building begun from 1980 amid the grave illnesses, hemorrhaging, and poverty of his old age; the laying of the foundation stone in 1990, when, too weak to descend into the foundations, he blessed them with his cross and prayed “O Cross of Christ, make firm this house”; and the meaning of the whole undertaking as love made institutional — the elder of love building up a church.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

Why a Monastery

Across his long ministry, St. Porphyrios had gathered around him a circle of devoted spiritual daughters — women who had given their lives to God under his guidance and who assisted him in his work. As he aged, his desire crystallized: to establish a convent where this community could live the monastic life together, a permanent place of prayer and common life that would continue after his death (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com; Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “The Holy Convent”). This was not a vanity project or a bid for an institutional monument. For St. Porphyrios — whose whole teaching was that to love Christ is to love and build up His Church (see The Church and the Sacraments) — founding a community of the Church was simply what his love did in its old age. He had spent his life healing souls one by one in the confessional; now he would leave behind a living community to carry on the prayer and the work.

An early attempt to establish a community had not succeeded — the accounts note an unsuccessful effort around 1955 — but he did not abandon the hope (Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia).

The Long Search and the Recognition (1981)

The founding was slow and hard. St. Porphyrios first obtained the necessary canonical approval — from the Archbishop of Athens and the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece — and the community received presidential recognition as the “Holy Convent of the Transfiguration of the Saviour” in 1981 (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com; Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia). Then came the search for a place. He looked across Attica, Evia, and Viotia before settling on a property at Hagia Sotira (Holy Saviour), Milesi, near Malakasa, north of Athens toward the Oropos coast (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). It was there that the Holy Transfiguration Monastery would rise, and where the community he founded continues to this day as a center of his veneration.

Building Amid Illness and Poverty

The building of Milesi is, among other things, a record of St. Porphyrios’s astonishing endurance in suffering. From 1980 he oversaw the construction while himself enduring one grave affliction after another — the long sequence of illnesses that afflicted his last years: kidney disease and surgery, a heart attack (August 1978), hemorrhaging that required many blood transfusions, and the progressive loss of his sight (see Return to Kavsokalyvia). The accounts record that during these years he lived on the building site in the poorest conditions — first in a mobile home, then in a shabby house — directing the work through episodes of hemorrhaging and pain (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). The man who had supported himself all his life by his own labor now poured the last of his failing strength into raising up a house of God.

This is the same St. Porphyrios who taught that illness, embraced with love and offered to Christ, becomes a means of grace (see Reading Souls in the City). He did not merely teach it; the building of Milesi was the living proof, a monastery raised by a dying, half-blind, hemorrhaging old man who would not let his sufferings stop the work of love.

The Foundation Stone (1990): “O Cross of Christ, Make Firm This House”

The laying of the foundation stone of the convent’s church took place on February 25–26, 1990 (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). By then St. Porphyrios was blind and too weak to descend the eleven meters into the deep foundations to bless them in the usual way. So, in an act the accounts preserve with care, he had his cross lowered into the foundations in his place, and he prayed over it: “O Cross of Christ, make firm this house. O Cross of Christ, save us by Your strength” (St. Porphyrios, quoted in Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). The image is a fitting emblem of his whole life: the blind, suffering elder, unable even to climb down to the work, blessing it with the Cross and the prayer — the strength made perfect in weakness, the house of God founded not on his own power but on the Cross of Christ.

He did not live to see the church completed; he would depart for Athos and for death within little more than a year. But the community was founded, the work was set in motion, and the Holy Convent of the Transfiguration at Milesi stands today as the chief earthly monument of his love — not a monument to himself, but a living church he gave away.

The Transfiguration: A Dedication That Fits

It is worth noting the dedication of the monastery, for it is not arbitrary but deeply fitting to the saint who chose it. St. Porphyrios placed his community under the Transfiguration of the Saviour (the Metamorphosis) — the feast (August 6) commemorating the event on Mount Tabor when Christ was transfigured before three of His disciples, His face shining like the sun and His garments white as light, and the uncreated light of His divinity shone through His humanity (Matthew 17:1–8; the event is central to the Orthodox theology of theosis and of the divine light, definitively expounded by St. Gregory Palamas).

The choice illuminates St. Porphyrios’s whole spirituality. The Transfiguration is the feast of light — of the divine light breaking through, of the human person flooded and made radiant by the uncreated grace of God. And St. Porphyrios’s whole teaching is a teaching of light: do not fight the darkness but turn to Christ and let in the light; the soul wounded by love is a soul filled with the light of Christ; creation is shot through with the little lights of God’s love. A man whose charism and whose teaching were so bound up with light and grace could hardly have chosen a more apt patronal feast than the one on which the Light Himself shone out on the mountain. The hesychast tradition that formed him at Kavsokalyvia is, moreover, precisely the tradition of the uncreated light of Tabor — the light the Palamite Fathers defended as the real, experienced grace of God. In dedicating his monastery to the Transfiguration, St. Porphyrios placed it under the sign of the very thing his life had been about: the shining of the divine light through a human life given wholly to Christ.

Love Made Institutional

The founding of Milesi is best understood as the institutional form of St. Porphyrios’s teaching of love. Everything in his doctrine — Christ is everything; be wounded by His love; love every soul; love His Church — found, at the end of his life, this concrete expression: a community of souls united in the love of Christ, a house of prayer and sacrament and common life, built to endure. The elder who had spent decades healing individuals in a hospital chapel left behind, as his final gift, not a book of his own (he wrote none) but a church — a community that would go on praying and loving after he was gone. It was the natural completion of a life whose whole content was love: to build, with the last of his strength, a place where that love could be lived in common, generation after generation. From Milesi, in the end, he turned toward the Holy Mountain and toward death (see Return to Kavsokalyvia).

See Also

• Return to Kavsokalyvia — the return to Athos and the repose that followed the founding of Milesi
• The Church and the Sacraments — the ecclesial conviction that the founding embodied
• Reading Souls in the City — his teaching on illness offered to Christ, lived in the building of Milesi
• Wounded by Love — the teaching of love of which Milesi is the institutional form
• The Books and the Influence — the convent of Chrysopigi and the gathering of his words

References

• Elder Porphyrios (Bairaktaris): A Short Biography. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/66300.html). The early unsuccessful attempt (c. 1955); presidential recognition of the Holy Convent of the Transfiguration in 1981; the search across Attica, Evia, and Viotia; the property at Hagia Sotira, Milesi, near Malakasa; building from 1980 amid illness, hemorrhaging, and poverty; the foundation stone of February 25–26, 1990, and the prayer over the cross lowered into the foundations.
• Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia. Wikipedia. The 1955 attempt; the 1981 recognition; the Milesi foundation.
• Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. His desire to establish the convent and the community of spiritual daughters.