Kilisis Pis Feotoku (Summer Easter)
Description:
Many people fast until August 15. In all churches and monasteries of St. The Mother of God has great celebrations. The most famous of these sites are the Panagia tis Tina in the Cyclades and the Monastery of Panagia Sumela in Vermio. Thousands of people visit these places, even Greeks from remote Australia, America, Canada, to worship Our Lady.
The monastery of Panagia Sumela is located in the high mountain village of Matsuka, 42 kilometers from Trebizond.
The ancient Orthodox monastery was created by the Athenian monks Barnabas and Sophronicus in the period from 375 to 395 A.D. Panagia Sumela (translated from the Pontic "Panagia on Mount Mela" is a symbol of Orthodoxy and the preservation of faith by the Pontian Greeks who have inhabited the southern coast of the Black Sea for centuries). After the Asia Minor catastrophe (1912-1922), when thousands of Greeks left the territory of Turkey, fleeing death, one of the Pontian Greeks, a famous politician, Leonidach Yasonidis, was able to negotiate with the Turkish authorities and transport the miraculous icon of Panagia to Greece.
According to legend, this icon was painted by the Apostle Luke himself in Athens, and it was she who indicated in a dream to the Greek monks where to build a monastery. In Greece, the icon was kept for more than thirty years in the treasury of the Athens Historical Museum, but in 1992 it was transferred to a new monastery with the name "Panagia Sumela", built with funds raised by Greek Pontic refugees from Pontos in 1953 in the mountains near the city of Veria - the village of Vermio. Today, thousands of pilgrims from all over the country and from abroad come here to worship her and ask her for mercy.