Chrysanthi of Andros

Chrysanthi of Andros was a simple ascetic, never formally tonsured, who lived fifty years as an exile and outcast in the Monastery of the Life-⁠giving Spring on Andros and fell asleep on St Spyridon's day in 1992. She is honoured by the faithful as a righteous woman, without synodal canonization.

She was almost unknown outside Andros, and there only to a few. She had no family and had gone, perhaps as a young girl, to a monastery at Siseroes, where she lived and worked beside the nuns, in black, as a novice, without being officially tonsured. She was a bright, pious girl. In 1943, when the local bishop began to change traditional practices of the Church, she disputed them with him fearlessly, defending all she had received from the holy men and women she had known. The bishop was angered and sent her to the Monastery of the Life-⁠giving Spring on Andros, on a hill between Batsi and Gavrion. She was twenty-⁠three, and her exile lasted fifty years.

The few nuns of the monastery came to dislike her intensely, because she was an exile and because she was different. The first abbess loved her like a daughter, but after her repose Chrysanthi was treated as an outcast. She did not sleep with the others, but in an unheated storeroom in a ruined part of the monastery; her room was full of rubble. She was not allowed into the church and even in winter stood outside during the services, though she sometimes slipped into the narthex and crossed herself with vigour when the saints were named. She was not allowed to eat with the sisters and took what was left after them. When she lit a fire in the old kitchen, they drove her away.

Abbot Dorotheos of the Monastery of St Nicholas, her confessor for some years, said she had an acute mind and knew more about the monastery's business than the sisters. Sometimes she foretold what would follow from a course of action, and was always right. She never complained, had accepted her cross serenely and never asked to leave. She was cheerful, the first at the gate to welcome guests, with whom she chatted until the sisters came. The young monk Vlasseou remembers her as having an otherworldly quality. It is told that on Theophany, when the sisters took sea water, three of them could not drink it because it was salt, but hers was sweet, and she drank several cups, saying "It's sweet, it's sweet." She was once granted a vision of the Mother of God.

Three days before her death, while she was praying, the Mother of God said to her: "There is no abbess here. I am the abbess. Have patience a little longer and I will come and take you, and then you can rest." Chrysanthi was extraordinarily happy and told the sisters, who thought she had invented it to annoy the abbess and treated her more roughly. On the third day, unable to make her way back across the courtyard against a bitter wind, she slipped into an empty room and died quietly, on St Spyridon's day in 1992. The sisters would not allow prayers for her in church. Father Dorotheos told them: "She was the best of you all." She was buried the next day, wrapped in a blanket, with no coffin. On the ninth day, when Fr Dorotheos and the monk Vlasseou served the memorial at her grave, though the wind blew fiercely, around her grave it was still and warm, and the candles stayed alight. On the fortieth day an old nun cried out from the window: "I see her, I see Chrysanthi, walking on the hill."