The life of St Irene of Chrysovalantou
By the time she arrived, Michael had already been wed to someone else, a reversal Irene did not take as misfortune but as God's own hand clearing a different path for her. She went instead to the monastery of Chrysovalantou, freeing the servants who had traveled with her, giving her wealth to the poor, and trading her fine clothing for a nun's plain habit, serving the community there with a humility unusual in a woman of her former rank. In time she became its abbess.
The Church remembers her also through a striking tradition: that an old man once crossed the sea on foot to a passing ship and gave its sailors apples said to come from the Apostle John himself in Paradise, meant for the Patriarch and for Irene, a gift by which whatever her soul desired would be granted her. She is said to have lived forty days afterward on nothing but a sliver of that fruit each day, and to have been warned in advance, by a vision of an angel, of the very day appointed for her death.
She is remembered as a bride freed from an earthly marriage for a hidden one, and honored still in icons that show her holding the apples of that gift.
