Glorification (2011)

On 4 October 2011 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, presided over by Patriarch Bartholomew, entered Sophia of Kleisoura among the saints of the Church, fixing her feast on 6 May, the day of her repose in 1974. On 27 November 2011 the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kleisoura celebrated her solemnly, with the procession of her relics and her newly written icon before thousands of pilgrims. This file documents the synodal act, the composition of her Service and icon, and the way in which such a glorification functions as the Church’s ratification of a veneration already alive among the faithful.

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

The Synodal Act of 4 October 2011

Sophia Saoulidou (married name Hotokouridou) reposed at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kleisoura, near Kastoria in West Macedonia, on 6 May 1974, having lived for roughly half a century as a laywoman ascetic beside the monastery hearth (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura,” Mystagogy; OrthoChristian.com, “Eldress Sophia of Kleisoura Canonized,” orthochristian.com/50197). In the decades after her death the reverence that had gathered around her in life continued and deepened at her tomb, sustained by her spiritual children — above all Kyriaki Kioskeridou — by the monastery community, and by the growing circulation of accounts of her discernment and her hidden asceticism (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy). The cause of her formal recognition was promoted especially by Metropolitan Seraphim of Kastoria, in whose metropolis the monastery lies (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy; OrthoChristian.com/50197).

On 4 October 2011 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, meeting at the Phanar under the presidency of Patriarch Bartholomew, resolved to enter Sophia among the saints of the Orthodox Church (OrthoChristian.com, “Eldress Sophia of Kleisoura Canonized,” orthochristian.com/50197; Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy). Her feast was fixed for 6 May, the anniversary of her repose, according to the ancient custom by which a saint’s principal commemoration falls on the day of her death — her dies natalis, her birth into eternal life (OrthoChristian.com/50197; on the day of repose, Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy). In the Synod’s act and in the hymnography and iconography that followed she was given the title by which she is now known: Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura — also rendered “the Ascetic of the Panagia,” binding her name to the Mother of God at whose monastery she had lived and to whom her whole devotion had been directed (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy; OrthoChristian.com/50197).

The timing bears noting. Sophia had reposed in 1974; the synodal act came thirty-seven years later, in 2011. This interval is itself characteristic of Orthodox practice, which does not hurry to glorify but waits on the maturing of a saint’s veneration and the accumulated witness of the faithful over a generation. In the intervening decades the memory of the eldress was kept alive and spread beyond Kleisoura — carried by pilgrims who had known her, by her spiritual daughter Kyriaki Kioskeridou (who lived until 2022 and on whose testimony much of the biography rests), and by the increasing circulation of her Life and sayings in Greek and, latterly, in English translation (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy). By 2011 the reverence for her was sufficiently established, and the record of her holiness sufficiently gathered, for the Church to give it formal recognition.

How Ecumenical-Patriarchate Glorification Works

Orthodox glorification — the East’s equivalent of what the Latin West calls canonization — is not the making of a saint but the Church’s authoritative recognition that a person is already among the saints and may be publicly venerated. The saint is glorified first by God; the ecclesiastical act ratifies and regularizes a holiness the Church discerns to be already manifest, typically attested by a holy life, by the reverence of the faithful, and by signs and answered prayers (a standard account of Orthodox glorification; see also the parallel treatment of modern glorifications in OrthoChristian.com/50197 and Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy).

Within the Orthodox communion the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople holds a primacy of honor, and its Holy Synod exercises authority to glorify saints — a competence that extends to the “New Lands” of northern Greece, including the Metropolis of Kastoria, which for canonical purposes stand under the Ecumenical Throne even while administered by the Church of Greece. It was therefore the Synod at the Phanar, under Patriarch Bartholomew, and not the Synod of the Church of Greece alone, that acted in Sophia’s case (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy; OrthoChristian.com/50197). The decisive point for understanding the 2011 act is that it did not create the veneration of St. Sophia. That veneration had been alive at Kleisoura since her repose; the synodal decree gave it the Church’s formal seal, permitting her public liturgical commemoration, the writing of services in her honor, the painting of her icon, and the naming of churches and children for her (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy; on Orthodox glorification generally). The glorification is thus best read not as a verdict newly reached but as a ratification of an existing cult — the Church catching up, in her ordered public life, with what her people had already discerned.

The Service, the Hymns, and the Icon

Glorification carries with it the practical furnishing of a new saint’s cult. A Service (Akolouthia) was composed for St. Sophia — the office of hymns, troparia, and readings by which she is now commemorated liturgically on 6 May — together with an apolytikion and other proper hymns celebrating her poverty, her hidden asceticism by the hearth, her gift of discernment, and her devotion to the Panagia (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy; OrthoChristian.com/50197). In the same period her icon was painted, fixing her image for veneration: she is depicted as the aged, poorly clad eldress of the photographs on which her memory in part rests, with the monastery of the Theotokos and the marks of her ascetic life. The composition of a service and the writing of an icon are the ordinary consequences of glorification, the means by which a saint enters the Church’s worship and visual tradition (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy).

The Celebration at Kleisoura, 27 November 2011

The public celebration of the glorification took place at the monastery itself. On 27 November 2011 the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kleisoura held a solemn festal celebration marking St. Sophia’s entry among the saints, with a hierarchical Divine Liturgy and the procession of her holy relics together with her new icon (OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50197; Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy). The reports record thousands of pilgrims in attendance — spiritual children, faithful from Kastoria and the surrounding region, and Pontic Greeks who honored her as one of their own (OrthoChristian.com/50197; Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy). Her relics remain enshrined and venerated at the monastery, at the place where she had lived and died, so that the site of her half-century of hidden asceticism became the center of her public cult (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy; OrthoChristian.com/50197).

The 27 November celebration gave visible, corporate form to what the 4 October decree had authorized: a woman whom some villagers had mocked as “Crazy-Sophia” during her life was now carried in procession as a saint of the Church, her relics honored and her icon borne aloft before a multitude — the completion, in the Church’s public reverence, of a holiness that had been lived in poverty and concealment (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy; OrthoChristian.com/50197). For the Pontic Greeks in particular — the community of her birth, destroyed and scattered in the persecutions and the population exchange of the early 1920s — the day carried a further weight: one of their own refugees, who had carried the loss of homeland, husband, and child into a lifetime of prayer, was numbered among the saints of the Church (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy; OrthoChristian.com/50197). The Metropolis of Kastoria, under Metropolitan Seraphim, thereby gained a modern saint at one of its own monasteries, and the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos became a place of pilgrimage not only to the Panagia but to the ascetic who had lived and died in the Panagia’s house.

Per the repository methodology (§3.5), the accounts of her sanctity that underlie the glorification are reported here as the attestation of her spiritual children, the monastery, and the devotional sources, not as independently documented fact. The datable public acts — the synodal decree of 4 October 2011, the fixing of the feast on 6 May, and the festal celebration and procession of 27 November 2011 — are attested by the reporting of OrthoChristian and Sanidopoulos; the underlying claims of holiness and discernment rest, as throughout her story, on the testimony of living witnesses and the devotional Life rather than on archival documentation (OrthoChristian.com/50197; Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy).

References

OrthoChristian.com. “Eldress Sophia of Kleisoura Canonized.” orthochristian.com/50197. (The synodal act of the Ecumenical Patriarchate under Patriarch Bartholomew, 4 October 2011; the feast on 6 May; the celebration and procession of relics and icon at the monastery, 27 November 2011; the thousands of pilgrims.)
Sanidopoulos, John. “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura” and related translations and resource notes. Mystagogy / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now. (The life and repose; the veneration at her tomb; the promotion of her cause by Metropolitan Seraphim of Kastoria; her title “the Ascetic of Kleisoura” / “the Ascetic of the Panagia”; the Service and icon; the 2011 glorification and celebration.)
On Orthodox glorification generally: the Eastern understanding of glorification/canonization as the Church’s recognition and ratification of an already-existing sanctity and veneration, and the competence of the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, including over the metropolises of the “New Lands” of northern Greece such as Kastoria.