Mary of Egis

Blessed Mary of Egis (Aegae), mentioned by Blessed John Moschus in the "Spiritual Meadow", was a fallen woman who repented and came to work miracles. The Azbyka page reproduces the story after Saint Philaret of Chernigov.

Two elders were going from Aegae to Tarsus, the city of Cilicia. Coming by God's arrangement into an inn, they stopped to rest, in the heat. They found there three young men who had set out from Aegae together with a prostitute. The elders sat farther off. One of them took the holy Gospel from his bag and began to read. The prostitute, seeing the elder read, left the young men, came near and sat beside him. The elder said to her: "Wretched woman, how shameless you are. You were not ashamed to come to us and sit." She answered: "No, father, do not reject me. I am full of sins, but the Master God did not reject the prostitute who approached Him." The elder said to her: "That woman was a prostitute no more afterward." "I hope in the Son of the living God," she said, "that from this hour I too shall not return to my sins." She left the young men and everything she had and followed the elders. They sent her to a monastery near Aegae called Nahiba. John Moschus says that he saw her later, an old woman, judging very wisely, and heard the story from her own lips. According to other reports she was called Mary and rose so high in spiritual life that she worked miracles.

Because Blessed John saw her as an old woman in 606, her death probably came in 607. Her name is not in today's Menologion of the Russian Church. She is commemorated on 28 September, in the new style.