The life of St Sophia the Righteous
These losses turned her toward a life of prayer and hard asceticism, first practiced alone on a mountainside in Pontus. Local tradition remembers her warning her village of a coming persecution after, it is said, Saint George appeared to her, allowing the people to flee in time. Displaced from Asia Minor after 1919, she eventually settled in 1927 at the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos in Kleisoura, near Kastoria in Greek Macedonia, drawn there, tradition holds, by the Theotokos herself. She lived out the rest of her life at Kleisoura as a laywoman rather than a tonsured nun, in poverty and voluntary obscurity, at times bearing the community's misunderstanding without complaint. She reposed there on May 6, 1974, and was formally numbered among the saints by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2011, her life remembered as one of hidden endurance rather than public witness.
