Life-Giving Spring of the Most Holy Theotokos

On April 21, Friday of Bright Week, we celebrate the renovation of the Church of Our Most Holy Mother and Our Lady, called the Life-Giving Spring, and we also remember the extraordinary miracles performed in it by the Mother of God.

This temple was first built by King Leo the Great, who is also called Maclellus. A kind and compassionate man, he, when he was still among the common people of the country, before he ascended the throne, one day while in this place and found a blind man stumbling there, led him by the hand. And as they were approaching the place, the blind man, thirsty as he was, asked Leo for water to refresh him. He went into the thicket of the forest to look for a spring, and the place was at that time overgrown with various trees and densely covered with flowering greenery.

But since he did not find any water there, he returned in sorrow, when suddenly, on his return, he heard a voice from above saying, "King Leo, do not despair, for water is near. And when he again labored without success, he again heard the same voice: "King Leo, go in, into this thicket, and scoop up a handful of this water with the mud, and quench the thirst of the blind man; and when you anoint his eyes with [the mud], then you will know who I am, who has lived in this place for a long time. He does as the voice tells him, and the blind man immediately regains his sight. When, at the proclamation of the Mother of God, Leo was enthroned, the first temple was erected by a generous hand over the spring, where it can still be seen today.

But when, after some time, Justinian, the greatest Roman emperor, suffering from an illness, was healed there, out of zeal for the Mother of the Word, he built a new church, which after the devastating earthquake was rebuilt by Basil the Great and his son, Leo the Wise. During their reign the spring performed many miracles: thus, it healed purulent boils, retention of urine, crippling dropsy and various kinds of cancer, also bleeding princesses and other women, all kinds of fevers and all kinds of other incurable diseases and ulcers. It also resolved infertility: for example, as a gift of this spring to tsarina Zoe was born to tsar Constantine Porphyrogenitus.

The fountain even raised the dead. There was a man from Thessaloniki, and having set out to it, he died on the way, but dying with his last breath, he bequeathed to the ship crew to bring him to the temple of the spring and bury him there by pouring upon him three pots of water from the spring. So they obeyed, but as soon as they begin to pour water over him, the dead man rises.

After much time, when this great temple was (in the earthquake) about to fall, the Mother of God appeared and held it up until all the people who came out of it got out. Drinking this water drove away various demons and freed prisoners in prison. For King Leo the Wise it healed a sickness, for his wife Theophanes it stopped the worst of fever, for his brother, Patriarch Stephen, it got rid of dropsy, and for John, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, it healed his damaged organ of hearing.

In Chaldea, with a single invocation, Our Lady heals the monk Peperin and his disciple, and helps the monks Matthew and Meletius, who were summoned to the king by a denunciation. And about the patricians and the proto-passopharies and countless others, who could even tell? Stephen also receives healing in his thigh through incense. And what language could tell what this water did and still does, of all those miracles - the most abundant rain drops, stars and leaves, the miracles that even in our days we see for ourselves?

Thus, she miraculously healed the extraordinary urge to eat, cancer, deadly tubercles and other,  leprosy, deafness; she healed female tumors and very often mental passions, flushes to the eyes, eyesholes, crystals; John the Viking had dropsy, another Viking had cured malignant old ulcers, Hieromonk Mark had cured a burning rash on his skin (either smallpox or measles), a fifteen-year-old shortness of breath, and also an illness of monk Makary, and many more, which cannot be counted in words. All this Our Lady did and does, and never ceases to do.

Through the intercession of Our Lady, O Christ God, have mercy on us. Amen.