Repose (6 May 1974)

St. Sophia Saoulidou fell asleep in the Lord on 6 May 1974 at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos (“Panagia Kleisoura”) near Kastoria, where she had lived as an unschooled laywoman ascetic for roughly half a century. The devotional accounts transmitted by her spiritual children report that three days before her death she foretold it, saying the Mother of God had told her “in three days you will come with me,” and that she died at the hearth that had been her home and her ascetic cell. She was buried at the monastery, and a local reputation for holiness formed almost at once.

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

The End of a Long Ascesis

By 1974 St. Sophia had lived at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kleisoura, some thirty-five kilometres from Kastoria in Greek Macedonia, for close to half a century — she is said to have settled there at the age of forty-four, about 1927, and to have made her cell for the rest of her life beside the kitchen fireplace, the τζάκι, of the monastery (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura,” Mystagogy / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now; OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). She was born in Pontus in 1883, and so at her death she was about ninety-one years old, though the thinness of the early documentary record means her age is given as an approximation reckoned from that birth-year rather than as a certified figure (the sources agree on 1883 for the birth and 1974 for the repose; the accounts speak of her dying “aged about ninety-one”). She had never been tonsured a nun. She died as she had lived: a poor Pontic refugee-woman, a laywoman ascetic, known to some of the villagers as “Crazy-Sophia” (τρελο-Σοφία) for the fool-for-Christ manner that concealed her prayer, and known to her spiritual children as an eldress of rare discernment (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”; OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”).

The manner of her last years was of a piece with the whole: extreme poverty, strict fasting, and a sleep of only about two hours a night taken by the hearth with a stone for a pillow, the rest of the night given to prayer, often on her knees (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”). It is against this background — an old woman worn by decades of such a life — that the accounts set her death in the spring of 1974.

The Foretelling

The best-known feature of the accounts of her repose is that she is said to have foretold it three days in advance. As the devotional Life transmits the episode, resting on the testimony of the women she guided, St. Sophia told a woman under her spiritual care that the Panagia had appeared and said to her, “in three days you will come with me,” and that she thereupon prepared herself for death (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”; the saying is transmitted among her spiritual children and the monastery community). This is reported here as attested testimony and not as a documented fact: it belongs to the same class of clairvoyant utterance as the other prophecies ascribed to her — the war in which “Greek blood will be shed, but far from here,” understood after the event of the Cyprus crisis of the summer of 1974 — and reaches us through the hagiographic accounts standing on her spiritual children’s memory, not through any independent record (per the repository methodology, §3.5; Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”). The foretelling is characteristic of the shape her venerators gave to her life: a death expected, announced by the Mother of God to whom her whole devotion had been given, and met without fear.

That devotion is the frame within which the accounts place the prophecy. From her first coming to Greece she had referred her life wholly to the Theotokos — she is said to have come to Kleisoura at the Mother of God’s own direction, the words transmitted as “Come to my house — I am in Kleisoura” — and her recorded sayings return again and again to the Panagia: “One is the Lord and one is the Lady; the rest of us are all brothers and sisters” (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”; OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). The report that the Panagia summoned her home three days before her death is thus, in the logic of the accounts, the fitting close of a life lived at the Mother of God’s hearth. The honest course, which this collection follows, is to name it as the testimony of her spiritual children and to let it stand as such.

Her Repose and Burial

St. Sophia reposed on 6 May 1974, at the monastery, in the poverty in which she had always lived (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”; OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). The accounts, faithful to the manner of her whole ascesis, transmit her death as taking place at the hearth that had been her home for so many years — the same fireplace beside which she had kept her nightly vigil — an old woman falling asleep in the Lord in the place of her prayer (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”). Here too the reticence proper to the sources is in order: the fuller devotional narratives dwell on the peace and readiness of her passing, and these are the pious memory of those who loved her rather than a clinical record; the load-bearing facts, on which the sources agree, are the date, the place, and her great age.

She was buried at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos, the community and the pilgrims who had known her being the witnesses of her burial (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”; OrthoChristian.com, on the monastery and her relics). The grave at the monastery would become, in the years that followed, the first focus of her veneration — the place to which pilgrims came and from which, on the exhumation of her body, her relics were taken up for veneration in the church (treated in The Cult at Kleisoura).

The Immediate Reputation for Holiness

What is striking in the accounts is how little interval they report between her death and the beginning of her veneration. In her lifetime her holiness had been recognised by those with eyes to see past the “Crazy-Sophia” surface — a priest, Fr. Leonidas Paraskevopoulos (later a bishop), is remembered to have said of her, “You have a great treasure up there,” pointing to the monastery — and at her death that quiet recognition became a wider local conviction (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”). The spiritual children who had received her counsel, above all Kyriaki Kioskeridou, carried the memory of her sayings and her discernment into the years after 1974 and became the transmitters of her Life; the monastery kept her grave; and the pilgrims began to come (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura”; on Kyriaki Kioskeridou as the principal witness, OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). Metropolitan Seraphim of Kastoria would in time take up and promote her cause. The local reputation for holiness that formed almost at once around her grave is the seed of the cult described in the next file, and, through it, of the glorification the Ecumenical Patriarchate would proclaim in 2011 (treated in Glorification (2011)).

References

Sanidopoulos, John. “Saint Sophia the Ascetic of Panagia Kleisoura.” Mystagogy Resource Center / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now. (Translated devotional Life resting on the testimony of her spiritual children, esp. Kyriaki Kioskeridou, and the monastery: her ascetic manner of life; the deathbed foretelling “in three days you will come with me”; her repose on 6 May 1974 at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos, aged about ninety-one; her burial and the immediate reputation for holiness.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Sophia of Kleisoura.” (Summary Life: birth 1883 in Pontus; the ascetic of the hearth; Kyriaki Kioskeridou as principal witness; repose 6 May 1974; feast 6 May.)
OrthoChristian.com. Report on the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kleisoura and the relics of St. Sophia. (Her burial and the veneration of her relics at the monastery.)
General background: the Pontic Greek refugee experience following the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922) and the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange (Lausanne Convention, 30 January 1923); Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger (2006), on the exchange and the refugee communities of Greek Macedonia into which St. Sophia’s life fell.