Porphyrios

Venerable Porphyrios was, together with Saint Agapios, the founder of the steep Hermitage at the edge of Mesa Vouno, between the bays of Perissa and Kamari on Santorini (Thira). Both were venerable Kollyvades.

In 1822 there arrived on Santorini, in rags, the Athonite monk Agapios Metaxas, a native of Constantinople, who became the evangelist of the island by his pure preaching. At first he practised asceticism in a cave at Monolithos. At the Monastery of the Prophet Elias there lived at that time the virtuous hieromonk Porphyrios Mindrinos of Gonia in Thira, who wished to live in solitude. The abbot, Gerasimos Mavrommatis, refused to let him go, because of the shortage of monks. When the fame of Venerable Agapios reached the monastery, Porphyrios met him and followed him. The two later took refuge in the Kollyvadic Monastery of the Prophet Elias on Hydra, where Porphyrios was initiated into the spirit of the Kollyvades, and then, with the abbot's blessing, returned to the Hermitage at Monolithos.

The faithful filled the place. Later they moved to Gonia, where they served in the church of the Transfiguration, and began to build the inaccessible Hermitage above the bay of Kioni, at the edge of Mesa Vouno. At Gonia they set up another hermitage as a monastic place of struggle for women. In 1844 Venerable Agapios fell asleep, and he rests in the Hermitage; the people commissioned the iconographer Merkourios Sigalas to paint two icons of him, one placed at his tomb and the other in the church of Saint Nicholas at Kamari. Three years later the elder Cyprian Dakoutros, a representative of the monastery of the Prophet Elias on Hydra, moved his relics to the monastery of his repentance on Hydra.

After Agapios's repose Porphyrios was appointed to serve the historic church of the Holy Cross at Perissa. In 1845 Archbishop Daniel of the Cyclades, an opponent of the Kollyvades movement, came to Thira. Learning of the Kollyvades' spiritual struggle and especially that they did not accept the new western religious ideas of the Bavarian-⁠controlled authority, he asked Porphyrios, the confessor, to renounce his struggle, but he stood unmoved. Daniel made a report to the Holy Synod of the Kingdom of Greece, weakened and controlled by secular power. Porphyrios was tried in absentia, without being able to defend himself, and sentenced to exile at the Evangelistria Monastery on Skiathos, where he fell asleep on 26 March 1852. The two venerable Kollyvades, Agapios and Porphyrios, are commemorated together on 18 August, in the calendar of the Church of Greece (new style).