Overwhelming Vespers at the Metropolitan Church of Ag. Georgiou in Nafplio (video)

She covered her fares by offering sexual services to ship passengers and continued her normal lifestyle for a while in Jerusalem. However, when he went to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for the feast, he was prevented from entering by an invisible force. Perceiving that the cause of this was her impure life, she had a sudden inclination to penitence, and, seeing an image of the Virgin outside the temple, prayed for forgiveness and promised to renounce worldly things and become an ascetic.

Then he tried again to enter the temple and this time he entered unhindered. After worshiping the real Holy Cross, she returned to the outside image of the Virgin to please her, whereupon she heard a voice say to her: “If you cross the Jordan, you will find glorious rest.” Immediately Mary of Egypt went to the monastery of St. John the Forerunner on the banks of the Jordan River, where she confessed and received communion, and the next morning she actually crossed the Jordan and retired to the desert to live out the rest of her life as an ascetic in penance. She took only three loaves of bread with her and after eating them she lived only on what she could find in the desert.

About a year before she fell asleep, Osia Maria told the story of her life, otherwise unknown to us, to Saint Zosimas (who was probably a monk of the above Monastery of Saint John), who happened to meet her in the desert.

Osia was now completely bony from the exercise and it was almost impossible to tell that she was a human being. Since she was naked, she asked Zosimas to throw his cloak over her to cover herself, and then she told him her story.

At the end she asked him to meet her on the banks of the Jordan on Maundy Thursday of the following year and bring her Holy Communion. The following year Zosimas did grant her request and then she crossed the river to reach him by miraculously walking on the surface of the water. She communicated and told him to meet her again in the desert next Great Lent.

The following year Zosimas traveled to the site where he had first encountered her, about twenty days’ journey from the monastery, and there he discovered Ossia’s lifeless body. According to an inscription written in the sand next to her head, she had passed away that very night she had spent and had somehow been miraculously transported to the place where she found her, while her body had been preserved unchanged for almost a year.

SAINT GEORGIOS – METROPOLITAN CHURCH OF NAFPLIO

The church was built during the first Venetian rule, in the 16th century. In 1540 it was converted by the Turks into a mosque, like most churches. Then it became a cathedral again and in the second Turkish rule a mosque again, until the liberation of the city in 1822, where it took the form it has today.

In January 1833 the temple welcomed the first king of Greece, the young Otto. His throne is still preserved inside the church.

The type of church is a basilica with a dome and its frescoes were created at the beginning of the 18th century. Characteristic is the representation of the Last Supper, copied by Leonardo da Vinci.