Nativity of the Theotokos Monastery

Nativity of the Theotokos Monastery in Saxonburg was founded in 1989 by Elder Ephraim of Arizona and became the first Greek Orthodox women’s monastery in the Americas. Its first abbess, Gerontissa Taxiarchia, was born Aphrodite Doukas on April 30, 1938, in the mountain village of Drakia in Greece. Her childhood was marked by considerable suffering. Her father was killed when she was five, leaving her mother to raise four children in poverty, and at twelve Aphrodite contracted rheumatic fever. The illness permanently damaged her heart and would trouble her for the remainder of her life.

Her heart disease eventually brought her to the United States for valve-replacement surgery. Before returning to Greece, she made a promise to the Theotokos that, if she recovered, she would serve her for six months in a monastery. In 1971, at the age of thirty-three, she entered Panagia Odigitria Monastery at Portaria under Gerontissa Makrina. The promised six months passed, but Aphrodite never left. Only a year after entering she was tonsured to the Great Schema with the name Taxiarchia—an unusually rapid progression which the monastery remembers as evidence of the spiritual maturity her elders already saw in her.

At Portaria she became a spiritual daughter of Gerontissa Makrina and Elder Ephraim, himself a disciple of St. Joseph the Hesychast. She learned the hesychastic life which would later characterize Elder Ephraim’s American monasteries: obedience, vigils, asceticism, and continual practice of the Jesus Prayer. Taxiarchia remained at Portaria until 1989, when Elder Ephraim asked her to leave her spiritual mother and sisterhood and travel to Pennsylvania to establish a monastery. Gerontissa Makrina found the separation deeply painful. Taxiarchia arrived in a country whose language and customs were foreign to her and exchanged the established Byzantine monastery at Portaria for a small, neglected farmhouse in rural Saxonburg.

The beginning was extremely small. Taxiarchia had only one sister with her, but visitors gradually began coming to the farmhouse, at first from curiosity and later specifically to speak with her. The monastery remembers her as unusually gentle and discerning, and priests, families, children, and people in difficulty increasingly came seeking her counsel. Her small sisterhood also began attracting American-born women who had no established Greek women’s monastery in America from which to learn the monastic life. Taxiarchia therefore had to teach almost everything from the beginning: Byzantine chanting, the order of services, obedience, the monastic rule, and even the ordinary habits and manner of life of a nun.

On July 20, 1991, she was formally enthroned as the monastery’s first abbess. Speaking at her enthronement, she said, “It appears that God wants to show his strength in giving this responsibility to one as weak as I.” By the early 1990s the original farmhouse community had grown into a sisterhood of ten, and a larger monastery building and chapel were constructed. Taxiarchia accomplished this while continuing to suffer from serious heart disease and, eventually, breast cancer. The monastery also preserves accounts from those who knew her who believed that she possessed unusual spiritual discernment and that healings occurred through her prayers.

Gerontissa Taxiarchia reposed on August 3, 1994, at only fifty-six years old, five years after arriving in America. She was buried three days later on the Feast of the Transfiguration. An account preserved by the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese says that during her funeral droplets of fragrant oil appeared on her head as she lay in the coffin. Gerontissa Makrina, who was present, understood the event as confirmation that the sacrifice of sending her spiritual daughters to America had been blessed by God; afterward, she agreed to send additional nuns to the monasteries being established there.

Taxiarchia’s life was thus closely bound to the beginning of Elder Ephraim’s monastic work in America. The sickly girl from Drakia who had originally promised the Theotokos only six months of monastic service ultimately spent the rest of her life as a nun and crossed the Atlantic to establish what became the first Greek Orthodox women’s monastery in the Americas. The monastery at Saxonburg continues to commemorate its first abbess every August 3.

Monastery Website

Address: 121 St. Elias Lane, Saxonburg, PA 16056

Phone: (724) 352-3999