The Road to Kleisoura

The wandering of St. Sophia of Kleisoura ended at a monastery of the Mother of God. According to the testimony she herself told and her spiritual children transmitted, it was the Panagia who directed her there — “Come to my house; I am in Kleisoura” — and to the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos, some thirty-five kilometres from Kastoria in West Macedonia, she came and settled at the age of forty-four. This file follows that road: the recounted apparition that named her destination, her arrival as a laywoman ascetic who was never tonsured a nun, and the older history of the monastery that became the whole of her world for close to half a century.

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

“Come to My House; I Am in Kleisoura”

The devotional Life recounts that the destination of Sophia’s wandering was given her not by circumstance but by a vision. She told — and her spiritual children transmitted — that the Mother of God appeared to her and directed her to Kleisoura, in words handed down as “Come to my house; I am in Kleisoura” (Ἔλα στο σπίτι μου· εἶμαι στην Κλεισούρα) (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura,” Mystagogy / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now, 2010/2011; the words are transmitted in the biography resting on the testimony of her spiritual daughter Kyriaki Kioskeridou and the monastery).

Per the repository methodology (§3.5), this is reported here as St. Sophia’s own recounted testimony — what she is remembered to have said of herself, preserved by those who knew her — and not as a documented event. The accounts variously attach the apparition to the sea-voyage from Asia Minor or to the period of her refugee wandering in Greece; what they agree on is the content: that she understood herself to have been summoned by the Panagia to a particular house that was the Panagia’s own, a monastery of the Mother of God at a place called Kleisoura (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011). The whole of her subsequent life — lived beside the hearth of that monastery, in a poverty and prayer directed wholly to the Theotokos — is, in the reading of her spiritual children, the working-out of that call (see The Theotokos; and on the life that followed, The Ascetic of the Hearth).

The Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos

Kleisoura lies in West Macedonia, in the mountainous country of the Kastoria region; the monastery to which Sophia came — the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos, known popularly as the Panagia Kleisoura — stands some thirty-five kilometres from the town of Kastoria (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011, for the monastery’s dedication and its distance from Kastoria). Its dedication to the Nativity of the Mother of God, whose feast falls on 8 September, gave the “house” of Sophia’s vision a fitting name: it was, quite literally, a house of the Panagia.

The monastery is old. Tradition holds that it was founded about the year 1314 by the hieromonk Neophytos of Kleisoura, and that after a long decline it was re-established in 1813 by the hieromonk Isaiah of Kleisoura (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011, and the monastery’s own tradition as reported in the devotional and aggregator notices; these dates are transmitted in the hagiographic and local-historical sources rather than established from independent archival study, and are given here as the monastery’s received history). By the time Sophia arrived in the later 1920s it was a functioning monastic community in the refugee-thickened Orthodox landscape of interwar Macedonia — an ancient foundation of the Mother of God set among the newly resettled Anatolian Greeks, of whom Sophia was one (on that refugee world, see Uprooted to Greece).

Settling at Kleisoura

The accounts give her age at settling rather than a bare calendar date: she came to the monastery and made it her home at the age of forty-four (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011). Reckoned from her birth in 1883, that places her arrival about 1927 or 1928 (1883 + 44 ≈ 1927), some years after the flight from Asia Minor and the completion of the population exchange — a period of refugee wandering, then, lay between her arrival in Greece and her arrival at Kleisoura.

[Disputed: the length of her stay at the monastery, and how it is counted. Reckoning from her settling at age forty-four (c.1927/1928) to her repose in 1974 gives roughly forty-seven years at Kleisoura (1974 − 1927 ≈ 47). But the figures given in the sources vary with what is being counted and how it is rounded: some notices speak of about "forty years by the hearth," rounding down the years of her settled monastic asceticism; others say "fifty-five years," counting from her 1919 arrival in Greece rather than from her settling at the monastery. The differences are matters of starting-point and rounding, not of contradiction about the underlying life; the range "some forty to forty-seven years at the monastery, roughly half a century in Greece" is given here, with the components attributed to their reckonings.]

At Kleisoura she remained until her death on 6 May 1974 — close to half a century in one place, most of a long life spent in the single house to which she believed the Panagia had called her (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011). The stability of it is itself striking against the displacement that preceded it: the refugee who had lost homeland, husband, and child, and who had wandered from the Black Sea to Macedonia, did not wander again once she reached Kleisoura.

A Laywoman Ascetic, Never Tonsured

One point the sources are careful to make, and it governs how her whole life at the monastery is to be understood: St. Sophia was never tonsured a nun. She lived at the monastery, and lived there ascetically — in extreme poverty, making her place beside the kitchen fireplace (τζάκι), sleeping only a couple of hours a night by the hearth with a stone for a pillow, fasting strictly, and spending her nights in prayer — but she did so as a laywoman, not as a professed member of a monastic community under vows and the schema (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011, on her status and her manner of life; on the asceticism itself see The Ascetic of the Hearth).

This places her within a recognizable Orthodox type: the lay ascetic, and more particularly the woman living a hidden, quasi-monastic life of extreme self-denial outside the formal structures of a tonsured community — a pattern the tradition knows in the fool-for-Christ and in figures such as Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg and Blessed Matrona of Moscow, laywomen whose sanctity was worked out in poverty, prayer, and concealment rather than in monastic office (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011, which draws the parallel to Blessed Xenia in describing how the villagers took Sophia for a madwoman, “Crazy-Sophia”; see St. Xenia of Petersburg and St. Matrona of Moscow). That she was never a nun is not incidental. It is the reason her asceticism took the form it did — at the hearth, among the pots and the ashes of the monastery kitchen, in the guise of a poor mad refugee-woman — rather than the ordered form of the cloister, and it is part of why her sanctity was for so long hidden from the very villagers among whom she lived (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011; on the ascetic and monastic life she took up outside its formal structures, see Monasticism).

The Character of the Record

As with the whole of her early life, the road to Kleisoura reaches us through the hagiographic accounts and not through archives: the apparition and its words, the age at settling, and the monastery’s foundation dates are all transmitted in the devotional Life standing on the testimony of Kyriaki Kioskeridou and the monastery community, translated into English by John Sanidopoulos and echoed in OrthodoxWiki and OrthoChristian.com (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011). The apparition is reported as her own recounted testimony, the monastery’s founding dates as its received tradition, and the length of her stay as a computation over dates that the sources themselves give only approximately. What is firm is the outline: a refugee-woman who settled, in the later 1920s and as a laywoman, at a monastery of the Mother of God near Kastoria, and who remained there in ascetic poverty until her death in 1974.

References

Sanidopoulos, John. “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura.” Mystagogy / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now, 2010/2011. (English translation of the devotional Life resting on the testimony of her spiritual daughter Kyriaki Kioskeridou and the monastery: the recounted apparition of the Theotokos and the words “Come to my house; I am in Kleisoura”; the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos near Kastoria and its traditional foundation c.1314 by Neophytos and re-establishment in 1813 by Isaiah of Kleisoura; her settling at age forty-four; her status as an untonsured laywoman ascetic and her manner of life. Treated as hagiographic attestation, not archival documentation.)
“Sophia of Kleisoura.” OrthodoxWiki; and OrthoChristian.com. (Aggregator/devotional notices standing on the same Greek-language material; consulted for the range of dates and the varying reckonings of the length of her stay.)