Repose and Relics

St. Sophia of Kleisoura fell asleep in the Lord on 6 May 1974, at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos where she had lived as a hearth-dwelling ascetic for roughly half a century. This section covers the accounts of her death — including the deathbed foretelling transmitted by her spiritual children — and the pilgrim cult that formed at her grave and around her relics at the monastery, the veneration that in time carried her cause to a formal glorification.

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

The last act of St. Sophia’s life and the first stirrings of her public veneration belong together. She died quietly, an aged laywoman by a monastery kitchen fireplace, known to her neighbours as much for her poverty and her odd “Crazy-Sophia” manner as for her holiness; yet within a short time of her burial the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kleisoura had become a place of pilgrimage, and the reports of answered prayer and healing that gathered around her memory formed the popular basis on which the Ecumenical Patriarchate would eventually act. Because her life reaches us almost entirely through devotional accounts resting on living witnesses — above all her spiritual daughter Kyriaki Kioskeridou and the monastery community — the files in this section report the deathbed prophecy and the miracle-cult as attested testimony, pinned to their sources, and not as documented fact (per the repository methodology, §3.5). The formal glorification of 2011 is noted here only as the outcome of this cult; it is treated in full in section 08.

Contents

• Repose (6 May 1974) — her death at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos, aged about ninety-one; the foretelling three days before as her spiritual children transmit it; the manner of her repose and her burial at the monastery; and the immediate local reputation for sanctity.
• The Cult at Kleisoura — the growth of pilgrimage to the monastery after 1974; the healings and answered prayers reported by pilgrims and the monastery; the exhumation of her relics and their veneration; the annual pilgrimage on her feast (6 May); and how this veneration led toward her 2011 glorification.

See Also

• Those Who Knew Her — the living witnesses on whose testimony the accounts of her repose and cult rest
• Clairvoyance and Counsel — the gift of discernment that drew the pilgrims who would become her venerators