Refugee and Wanderer

Between the loss of her family in Pontus and the half-century she would spend as an ascetic beside the monastery hearth, St. Sophia of Kleisoura passed through the great uprooting of the Anatolian Greeks — the flight from Asia Minor, the refugee world of Greek Macedonia, and the road that brought her at last to the Panagia of Kleisoura. This section follows that middle passage of her life: the historical catastrophe that tore her from her homeland, and the recounted call that fixed the destination of her wandering.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Pontic Greek; 20th-c. woman ascetic)

St. Sophia (Sophia Saoulidou, married name Hotokouridou, 1883–1974) belonged to the Ottoman-Greek world of Pontus, the Black Sea littoral of Asia Minor, and she was one of the roughly one and a quarter million Orthodox Christians whom the collapse of that world drove into the Kingdom of Greece in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Her personal losses — a husband taken into the Ottoman labour battalions and never returned, a child dead in infancy — were folded into a collective catastrophe: the destruction of the Greek communities of Pontus and Asia Minor between roughly 1914 and 1923, and the compulsory population exchange that followed (see Marriage, Loss, and the Catastrophe).

The documentary record of these years in her own life is thin, and the dates given in the devotional sources vary; where accounts disagree the files below give the range rather than a false precision, following the repository methodology. What is not in doubt is the shape of the thing: a widowed, childless refugee-woman, arriving destitute among hundreds of thousands of others in the new lands of Greek Macedonia, who found her way to a monastery of the Mother of God and never left it.

Contents

• Uprooted to Greece — her flight from Asia Minor and arrival in Greece (fuller accounts: 1919, on a ship named “Saint Nicholas”); the refugee exodus of the Pontic and Asia Minor Greeks; the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange under the Lausanne Convention and the resettlement of some 1.2 million Orthodox refugees in Greek Macedonia.
• The Road to Kleisoura — how she came to the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos (“Panagia Kleisoura”) near Kastoria; her own recounted testimony of the Mother of God directing her there; her settling at the monastery at age 44 as a laywoman ascetic, never tonsured a nun; and the history of the monastery itself.