Crete: Saint Argyro Stefanaki, the multi-athlete.

 

Crete: Saint Argyro Stefanaki, the multi-athlete

Argyro, a hidden ascetic in the world and her life on Spinalonga. Her relic was fragrant!

The martyr Argyro slept peacefully on July 12, 2014 and at the transfer of her relics on July 26, 2017, she revealed her glory and made her relic fragrant!

… She will meet Saint Nikephoros the leper and Saint Eumenios Saridakis and will experience the infinite love of God.

She will receive and give love and offering, she will sanctify that miserable place with her existence…

Argyro was born in Crete in a village outside Heraklion around 1920. She was a beautiful, well-groomed woman! They fell in love with a young man, but before they could get married, war was declared. The young man fled and fought in Albania against the Italians. After the capitulation, he went down to Crete to fight there against the Germans. At one point, he finds himself a prisoner of the Germans being led to execution.

Argyro is informed of everything and runs to the place of execution. Ten Greeks are lined up against the wall and opposite them ten Germans with their weapons drawn await the order to shoot.

Argyro, haughty, proud, beautiful as a goddess, passes in front of them and one by one lowers the barrels of the weapons.

Everyone is stunned. The military officer in charge of the execution calls her before him.

“What are you doing there? What do you want? “My fiancé is here. Either you free him or hit me too!”.

The man bows. He has never seen such courage, such devotion. “Take him and go!” he tells her.

But Argyro does not stop there. The other young men are Greeks, they are her villagers. With excessive courage she counters! “No! Either all of them or put me up against the wall too!” and with these words she advances towards the condemned.

The commander is speechless. Their soldiers are the same.

She sends a message to the Führer himself, who expresses his admiration and his desire to meet this heroic Greek woman. And life is granted to everyone…

Argyro and her lover get married. They have a child. After the birth, the terrible leprosy manifests itself in Argyro.

She must leave her husband, her newborn angel, her home, her entire life setup and isolate herself on Spinalonga, the island of the damned. The common fate of these outcasts awaits her…

The father is left with a baby in his arms. He looks for a keeper to resurrect him and finds help from a woman in Chania, on the other side of Crete. A few months pass.

Argyro burns from the deprivation of her bowels and makes a crazy decision. At night she dives into the sea and swims the distance to the opposite land.

She has made a bundle of her clothes and tied them over her head. She walks for seven days and nights, alone, hiding so that she won't be noticed and stoned, almost starving and thirsty, and at one point she arrives in Chania and finds her foster mother's house - she had gotten her information from the messages her husband sent her.

She finds it deserted. She sits aside in the yard and waits. At one point, some people come, a woman, two or three old women. She speaks to them from a distance, introduces herself to them.

"Just tell me if my child is okay. Just let me see him from a distance!" she tells them.

"Your child died last night! We just buried him, we're coming from the graves." She collects her debris, her pain, and sets off on her way back.

A few years pass. She is still in Spinalonga. She receives a message from her husband that he wants to get married.

He is young and there is no hope of salvation and return for Argyro. “With all my heart and my love!”, she replies. And on the wedding day, she does the same reckless act again.

She swims out and attends the wedding, again from afar. And when the mystery is over, she approaches the bride and shouts to her

“You have a good husband. Love him!…” and leaves her her gift, a sum of money that she collected crumb by crumb from the allowance she was given.

And for every child that this woman gave birth to, she went out in the same way to his baptism and left a gift, whatever her poverty could offer…

In 1957, the Spinalonga Leprosy Hospital closed. The cure for leprosy has arrived here too. Those who had the disease in its early stages were cured and returned to their homes and families.

The old patients, who had suffered visible irreparable damage and who had mostly been forgotten by their families, although they were now considered safe with the treatment they had also undergone, were transferred to a special wing of the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Agia Varvara, Attica.

Here Argyro would become a humble minister to the older patients. She would meet Saint Nikephoros the leper and Saint Eumenios Saridakis and experience the infinite love of God. She would receive and give love and offering, she would sanctify that miserable place with her existence.

Together with two or three other women with the same disease, they washed, cleaned, cared for and decorated the bodies of the leprous sisters when their time came.

Also noteworthy is the vow they had made long ago: “May, my God, a cure for leprosy be found, not for us, for the young people who are losing their dignity and their lives and we will not eat oil in eternity!!!”.

And after the cure was found, they had to keep their promise. And they kept it. And they did not put oil in their mouths.

And at Easter, to perform ablution, they would dip their finger, the one severed from the disease, in the oil of the lamp and touch it to their lips to honor the day of Resurrection without breaking their vow. This was Argyro.

Who knows how many other diamonds her martyred life hid! But God revealed her and her relic was fragrant!

PS. By the Grace of God, I have been to Loimodon a few times, to Agia Varvara, where I experienced the holiness up close, I spoke and received the blessing of the 2 ladies (Ms. K. and M.) who still live there and who knew the holy soul in question, Argyro..

From the book: Ascetics in the World, vol. 3,

Source: Mount Sinai