Macrina of Portaria

Gerontissa Macrina of Portaria (1921-1995) was a nun, abbess and founder of the Monastery of Panagia Hodegetria at Portaria, on Mount Pelion. She is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; in 2024 the Metropolis of Morphou in Cyprus called her venerable.

She was born in 1921 near Smyrna, with the name Maria Vassopoulou. Her devout family fled after the fall of Smyrna and settled in Greece when she was only six months old, in the refugee camp at Nea Ionia. According to accounts of her life, at seven she experienced a "divine transformation" and turned toward the faith, though she had to leave school to work. Her parents died while she was still young, and she had to work, partly as a housekeeper for a wealthy family, to raise her younger brother George. At Volos she met Ephraim, then a young monk and a disciple of Saint Joseph the Hesychast.

In the years of occupation in 1940-1941, in the famine that killed some three hundred thousand Greeks, she decided to send her brother to an uncle in Thessaloniki so that he would have food. She survived the war with great difficulty, but shared what little she had with those in need. She came to know Victoria Moraitis, the mother of Ephraim and the future Gerontissa Theophano, and a small community of women gradually formed around them. Ephraim told of an episode from that time: at Pascha, after much toil, she gathered money to buy a candle but gave it to a poor and hungry girl; she then stood in church without a candle, weeping, and when the others received the holy light she saw the Uncreated Light and fainted, and the people carried her home thinking she had collapsed from hunger.

In 1952 Ephraim withdrew from the community after slanders. Saint Joseph the Hesychast agreed to guide it and, after a vision, asked that Maria be made gerontissa, with the words: obey Maria. In 1963 Maria Vassopoulou and Victoria Moraitis were tonsured by Ephraim with the names Macrina and Theophano, and the community founded the Monastery of Panagia Hodegetria at Portaria. Macrina became abbess. Visions of saints and wonders are told of her; she became known for her spiritual counsel, and among those who came for guidance was Iakovos of Evia, canonized in 2017. Sophrony of Essex, canonized in 2019, called her a "titan of the spirit".

She led the monastery until her death on 4 June 1995.