Icon of Agia Paraskevi Passenger 10Χ14 Gold Plated Wooden (paper)

Icon of Agia Paraskevi Passenger 10Χ14 Gold Plated Wooden (paper)

God in every generation raises and places "on the lamp" His worthy educators, to illuminate salvation in people, and during their earthly life, but even more loudly and successfully after it.

So to us, the Orthodox of the Balkans, more than ten centuries ago, sent our holy mother Friday - Petka, heavenly man and earthly angel.

This wonderful benefactor is glorified by all the countries and peoples, in the Balkans and throughout the universe, who have chosen to live on earth under the heaven of Christ.

Little is generally known about this holy mother; the details of her birth, her childhood, and her early youth remain unclear to us.

The most important fact of her life is that, still young, her whole being, body and soul, youth and beauty, she offered as a gift to God, receiving from Him much more than "a hundred times".

This, however, he did not do in public, in front of the eyes of the whole world, to receive praise from the people, but secretly, living for years unknown, in the deserts of the Balkans.

There, for the sake of exercise, she was isolated from her birthplace, the port of Epivates, on the shores of the Marmara Sea, a day hiking from Istanbul.

Given that her older brother Efthymios, bishop of the city of Madytos, slept between 989 and 996 AD, it is concluded that Saint Paraskevi also lived in the second half of the 10th and beginning of the 11th century.

He practiced in the wilderness, first in Thrace, in its inaccessible forests and inaccessible caves and then in the stony and arid deserts of Palestine.

She stayed there until God called her to return to her homeland; and she first hurried to Constantinople to pray for her patron, Our Lady of Vlacherna, and then returned to the Passengers, where no one recognized her anymore.

He continued to practice in the plains and mountains. When she emigrated to the Lord, some good people buried her as a stranger, not in the village cemetery, but where death found her, near the sea.

But the secret of her holiness, with which she passed into eternity, God revealed to people, shortly after her death.

The earth and the place where she was buried began to smell, with a divine fragrance, with the eternal and indescribable fragrance of God.

An Mount Athos elder said that when he walked in the forests of the Mount Athos "deserts", he felt an unspeakable fragrance.

They asked him if it was the scent of flowers, trees and everything that grows there. No, he says, "this is not a plant.

I know what plants and flowers are, but that's another scent.

Here lived people of God, walked secretly before God, and slept secretly, so that no one knows, and were buried here in this soil.

And the soil can not bear and keep this torrent in its bowels leaving the fragrances of their holiness.

So the soil knows how to smell with the holiness of human bones.

This is how the fragrant relics of Holy Friday, the Holy of God, on the shores of the Sea of ​​Marmara, when they lifted them from the mud, smelled.

They cleaned them, transported them with splendor to the reliquary, to the church of Agios Apostolos in the city of Kallikrateia, which was famous for the treatments of the blind, the disabled and the demon-possessed.

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