Mariam Soulakiotis

• 1. Introduction

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  Abbess Mariam Soulakiotis led a convent in the pine-covered hills near Keratea, Greece, and on the night of the 4th of December 1950 more than eighty-five police officers closed in on it. They brought a deputy prosecutor, a judge and a coroner, which suggests the authorities expected far more than smuggling. The raid lasted until morning. Officers had to pull thirty-six children out of the hands of nuns who would not let go. The children were taken to orphanages where, by one account, their prospects were hardly better. In the basements, police found several elderly women, half-naked, sick and tied up. The food served in the convent troubled the investigators too. Yet the first charges laid against the abbess concerned olive oil and tires.

  She had once worked in a factory. Her followers called her Mariam of Keratea, while newspapers called her "Mother Rasputin". She presided over a tuberculosis retreat that advertised itself as free. How did a woman with so little documented history come to command an entire monastery? What happened to the people who handed over their property? And why do a court, a group of historians and a living convent still disagree about who she was?

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• 2. From Factory to Veil

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  Keratea, a town roughly 50.6 kilometres from Athens, is where a girl named Marina was born around 1883. Almost nothing is recorded about her childhood. The one firm detail is that she worked in a factory before she took religious vows.

  Around 1900 she became a nun in the mainstream Greek Orthodox Church. She soon grew close to her religious superior, Bishop Matthew Karpathakis of Vresthena. In May 1923, a pan-orthodox council in Constantinople approved the New Calendar for the mainstream church, and that decision changed her allegiance. She became an eager Old Calendarist, loyal to Matthew, who by then called himself Archbishop. Both the mainstream church and the other Old Calendarists, known as the Florinites, regarded him as a schismatic.

  As a nun she took the name Mariam. She was addressed as Mother, and later as Abbess, Mariam of Keratea. Her childhood home at No. 71 Megalou Alexandrou Street would one day be converted into a building of the monastery she ran.

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• 3. The Convent in the Pines

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  In April 1925 Soulakiotis bought seven additional acres of land, and later that year she bought two more plots. The Greek author Nina Kouletaki points out a puzzle. Even the long, sympathetic histories written by Matthew's followers give no legal explanation for how the nuns found the money.

  The Panagia Pefkovounogiatrissa Monastery was founded in 1927, with Matthew as co-founder. He was already 66. It stands between the town of Keratea and the village of Kaki Thalassa, in the municipality of Lavreotiki in East Attica. Officially it honoured the Presentation of the Virgin Mary. Matthew, however, said plainly that its real purpose was to fund the young Old Calendarist movement.

  The Greek name is long. It can be rendered as the Monastery of the Entrance of the Most Holy Theotokos, the Healer, on the Pine Mountain. In 1954 an Australian newspaper, The Sun, shortened it to "The Convent of the Virgin in the Pines".

  The name also pointed to a medical promise. The mountain air was said to benefit people with tuberculosis who could not pay for conventional care. In 1938 the convent began advertising itself as a treatment center that charged nothing.

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• 4. Matthew's Shadow

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  Matthew was 78 in 1939, the year Soulakiotis took on the full responsibility of running the monastery. She would not hold the title of abbess until 1950. He left the daily work to her, partly because he was often absent. At times he was in prison. At other times he was away as a hieromonk, pursuing the spiritual rewards of harsh asceticism. His practices included forty-day fasts, stays in deprived isolation cells, and heavy metal chains tied to his body that he carried everywhere.

  His health reportedly began to slip during World War II, which left him less able to oversee her and more reliant on her. When he became seriously ill in 1950, her influence over him grew sharply.

  Even Orthodox historians sometimes portray her unkindly. Vladimir Moss recounts a scene at Matthew's deathbed. Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina, a fellow Old Calendarist bishop who was in schism with Matthew, came to visit. Matthew tried to sit up out of deference and began to speak "inaudibly". Soulakiotis allegedly burst in with a group of nuns and demanded that the visitors leave at once. Matthew died only days later, so nobody knows whether he wished to mend the rift.

  She succeeded him as head of the monastery. In descriptions and photographs from this period she wears a stricter version of the black headdress worn by the highest-ranking nuns of the Church of Greece, which covered her forehead and eyebrows entirely. It was an image of severe piety that investigators would soon question.

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• 5. The Alleged Method

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  Prosecutors described a pattern. Wealthy women were encouraged to join the convent and were then tortured until they donated their fortunes. Soulakiotis allegedly embezzled the money and, in some cases, killed the donor. From 1940, once she controlled the other nuns, she reportedly sent the monastery's monks around Greece to find wealthy "spinsters, widows, and families" to "convert".

  When she was arrested, Reuters reported that she had gathered three hundred homes and farms across the country, plus "gold and jewels worth thousands of pounds". One accuser, Eugenia Margheti, said she was held in an isolation cell and tortured until she signed over property worth 118 million drachmas.

  The police first took notice because of an anonymous complaint. It came from the daughter of a wealthy woman who had left everything to the monastery. The daughter insisted her mother would never have done so freely and accused the administration of "blackmail and threats".

  A second thread was a missing girl. Simela Spyrides, an 18-year-old born in Greece and living in Toledo, Ohio, vanished in 1949. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation traced her to the monastery. Her father, Christo Spyrides, appealed to the Greek embassy and to authorities in Ohio. He said a nun he named "Mariam Zaphriopoulos" had lured his daughter, after visiting the United States to collect property worth US$10,000 left to the monastery. The Associated Press later reported that he had been able to contact his daughter, but it did not say whether she had been inside the convent.

  Survivors alive in the 1950s accused the abbess of torturing, starving, unlawfully imprisoning and beating them. Prosecutors added a charge about the sanatorium. They alleged that 150 people died unnecessarily after seeking tuberculosis treatment there. According to the prosecution, doctors were admitted only to sign death certificates and never to run supervised treatment.

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• 6. Courtroom

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  The first charges were deliberately modest: illegally exporting olive oil to Cyprus and illegally importing tires. Prosecutors felt these were the charges they could prove, partly because the voluntary nature of monastic life raised hard legal questions. As witness statements and evidence accumulated, the indictment was revised again and again.

  In January 1951 the political ground shifted. Archbishop Spyridon Vlachos of Athens failed to reconcile with Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina, and every Old Calendarist sect in Greece, the Matthewites included, was outlawed. The next month the Public Prosecutor indicted Soulakiotis and thirteen other nuns and monks. The charges were homicide, fraud, forgery of wills, blackmail and torture, and she faced the most severe indictment.

  At her trials she wore an icon showing the dead Matthew. Some Old Calendarists honour him with the posthumous name "Saint Matthew the New Confessor".

  Her attorney, Panos Panayotakos, argued that people joining a monastery routinely give up all their property under a vow of poverty. The property sat in her own name, he said, simply because no legal entity stood behind the monastery. He also produced a letter from Field Marshal Harold Alexander. In the lawyer's account, it thanked the monastery's clergy for risking their lives to help British soldiers escape during the Axis occupation of Greece.

  Courts nevertheless found her guilty of seven particular murders. The Baka family had joined the monastery with five members, two adults and three children, and surrendered their property at first. When Mrs. Baka saw the conditions and asked to leave with her children, she was shut for six months in a cell once exposed to tuberculosis, with little food. She emerged in a coma and died soon afterwards. Her husband met the same fate. Mr. and Mrs. Panagiotopoulou were forced to sign over their home and starved to death inside. Ms. Michalakou, who had tuberculosis, came for the promised treatment. She saw no doctor, was locked in a cell and died after signing over her property. Sister Theodote was accused of misconduct and ordered beaten as penance; the nuns who carried out the order caused fatal internal bleeding. Sister Maria received a similar beating and died in hospital.

  Soulakiotis denied every charge to the end and dismissed them as "satanic fictions". She reportedly took each sentence "without emotion", crossing herself and murmuring a "prayer of vengeance" to "Saint Matthew". Three trials produced three sentences: 26 months in 1951-52, then in 1953 ten years to run concurrently and four more years to run consecutively. The total was fourteen years, and the last trial ended only months before her death.

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• 7. A Devoted Flock

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  At the height of her power, more than 400 followers lived inside the monastery, and commentators have called her a "cult leader". State records showed that five hundred people had willed all their property to the monastery and later died there. Prosecutors argued that this was an unusually high number for a legitimate monastery of that size.

  In 1951, after her arrest, her followers marched in protest and demanded that their "leaders" be returned to them. Police believed the Old Calendarists planned to kidnap Archbishop Spyridon and hold him until Soulakiotis was freed. They placed his home under protection.

  She died in Averoff Prison on the 23rd of November 1954. Reports disagree about her age, though Reuters and Newsbeast both give it as 71. She was buried on the convent grounds, near Matthew's body.

  The sect outlived her. As late as 1959 police were investigating "young girls vanishing into thin air", which they linked to the "rebel Keratea convent". In 1961 they admitted they did not know who now led it. They said the presumed new abbess had "perfected the art of making herself and her pseudo-sacred sisters vanish".

  As of 2022 the monastery is still open. Its nuns believe she was innocent and venerate her as a saint. Old Calendarism is no longer outlawed in Greece, where, as part of the European Union, citizens enjoy freedom of religion.

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• 8. Counting the Dead

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  The commonly cited figure of 27 murders comes from medical testimony at her trials. The same testimony counted 150 negligent deaths from tuberculosis. At one point authorities claimed that she had killed more than 500 people. Tuberculosis treatment was still new in her day and was a widespread problem across Greece, so it is unclear how far she was responsible for the negligent homicides of which she was convicted in 1952. In his 1992 survey Women Serial and Mass Murderers, Kerry Segrave wrote that the prosecution established, to his satisfaction, a toll of at least 177.

  Defenders offer other readings. The priest Constantine Kouris, a Matthewite writer, insists that she was innocent and unjustly tried. Nuns of her own era blamed jealousy, claiming that male bishops and monks resented a powerful woman and were themselves guilty of the crimes. They also said many who joined the monastery were already old. Nuns living there today were not witnesses to events, at least since 2008, yet they pray to "Holy" Mariam of Keratea as a martyr for Christ. Modern secular historians reject her innocence on the weight of witness statements and evidence, though they dispute the real number of victims.

  In her 2019 Greek treatise Murderesses, Nina Kouletaki argues that the calendar mattered little. A shrewd abbess like Soulakiotis would have succeeded under any branch of Orthodoxy. Kouletaki adds that tabloid journalists used the convent's lurid details as a convenient distraction from the political turmoil of the time.

  The case reached screens later. Two episodes of the Greek crime drama Anatomy of a Crime drew on it without naming her or the monastery: "Purgatory", directed by Takis Spetsiotis, and "The Third Commandment", directed by Panos Kokkinopoulos. In the FX series Grotesquerie, a Catholic nun names Soulakiotis as her favorite serial killer. A gothic horror film called Sound of Silence, about the events, was released in 2025.

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