Mariam Soulakiotis

Abbess Mariam Soulakiotis ( – 23 November 1954), née Marina Soulakiotou, also known either to her followers as Mariam of Keratea, or in contemporary media pejoratively as "Mother Rasputin", was a Greek Old Calendarist Eastern Orthodox abbess and serial killer who was found guilty of numerous counts of murder, fraud and other crimes, which public prosecutors of the Kingdom of Greece alleged she committed against both laypeople and other nuns in her abbey between 1939 and her arrest in December 1950.

During the time period of the crimes she was convicted of, Soulakiotis was neither a member of the mainstream Greek Orthodox Church nor in communion with the other, larger Old Calendarist group (the "Florinites") — she was a devoted follower of Archbishop Matthew Karpathakis of Vresthena, whom both groups consider a schismatic.

Greek civil authorities first arrested Soulakiotis on two charges unrelated to serial murder: export of olive oil to Cyprus and import of tires after a large raid on her abbey which took place on 4 December 1950. Receiving multiple sentences over her three trials totaling fourteen years, Soulakiotis died in on 23 November 1954. As she died before all of her criminal trials were done, she was only technically found guilty of seven premeditated murders—as well as more than one hundred negligent homicides due to offering 'free' tuberculosis treatment that only consisted of staying at her monastery's high altitude locale, not medical therapy. Excluding these negligent homicides, the typically agreed upon total of her victims is 27; including them, 177.

Soulakiotis' convent was the ("The Convent of the Virgin in the Pines") near Keratea, Greece. As of 2022, the Old Calendarist abbey Soulakiotis once managed remains open and still has nuns who believe she was innocent and who venerate her as a saint. Some modern Greek Old Calendarists on Matthew's side of the schism (but outside the convent) concur.

Modern secular historians, however, reject the possibility of her innocence, based on the overwhelming number of witness statements and amount of evidence, although disagreement exists as to the true number of her victims.

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Early life (–)

Little is known of Soulakiotis' life before she became an Orthodox nun, except that she was a factory worker, and that she was born with the given name Marina in Keratea, Greece, which is around from Athens. Her childhood home, later converted into one of the monastery's buildings, was at №71 Megalou Alexandrou St.

Religious life

As Greek Orthodox nun (–1923)

Soulakiotis started as a nun in the mainstream Greek Orthodox Church (GOC), but soon became a close confidante of her religious superior, the Bishop Matthew Karpathakis of Vresthena. After the adoption of the New Calendar by the GOC at the pan-orthodox Council of Constantinople in May 1923, Soulakiotis became an avid Old Calendarist and a follower of Bishop Matthew, now self-styled Archbishop Matthew of Vresthena, whom both the mainstream Greek Orthodox Church and even other Old Calendarists (self-styled ''true'' ''Orthodox Christians'') consider to be in schism.

As a nun, Mariam was called Mother (and later Abbess) Mariam of Keratea.

Foundation of the Pefkovounogiatrissa Monastery (1923–1939)

Mariam Soulakiotis, together with the hieromonk Archbishop Matthew Karpathakis of Vresthena, founded the Panagia Pefkovounogiatrissa Monastery in 1927. The monastery is located between the town of Keratea and the rural village of Kaki Thalassa, both located in the municipality of Lavreotiki, in the region of East Attica.

The monastery was officially founded to "honor the Presentation of the Virgin Mary", but Matthew also made clear that the goal of the monastery is to support the nascent Old Calendarist movement financially. At the monastery's founding, Matthew was already 66 years old. Plans for the monastery had been a few years in the making—in April 1925 Soulakiotis acquired an additional seven acres of land, and, later that year, she acquired two more plots of land. Greek author Nina Kouletaki writes that even having reviewed "long" sympathetic, Matthewite histories of the monastery, there is no legal explanation as to how the nuns acquired the money to make these expensive property purchases.

The monastery's Greek name is occasionally transliterated in English as ''Pefkovounogiátrissa(s)'', ''Peukovoynogiatrissa(s)'', with or without ''Panagia(s)''. The monastery's full Greek name, , can be translated as 'Monastery of the Entrance nto the Templeof the Most Holy Theotokos, the Healer, on the Pine Mountain'. An Australian newspaper, ''The Sun'', translated it in 1954 as "The Convent of the Virgin in the Pines".

Part of the reasoning for its name was that the convent was opened to offer tuberculosis treatment, owing to the purported health benefits of its high-altitude, mountainous locale to those who could not afford conventional treatment. In 1938, the convent began marketing itself as a free-of-charge tuberculosis treatment center.

Founding nuns

The founding nuns were:

Rise to power

While Soulakiotis' official tenure as abbess began in 1950, she had already been doing the work of an abbess since 1939, "assuming full responsibility for the monastery" when 'Archbishop' Matthew was aged 78. Matthew left all day-to-day operations to her, as he was for some of that time in prison and for the rest of it, as a hieromonk, seeking spiritual rewards for ascetic monastic practices, such as forty-day fasts, voluntary stays in deprived isolation cells, and tying heavy metal chains to his body to be carried around at all times.

Decline of Matthew's health (–1950)

Matthew's health is said to have begun declining during World War II—leaving him even less able to effectively supervise Soulakiotis, and making him more dependent on her. When Matthew's health started to seriously fail in 1950, Soulakiotis' already considerable influence over him grew in turn.

Soulakiotis is therefore sometimes portrayed negatively even in Eastern Orthodox Church histories—one author of such a history, Vladimir Moss, relates a story where she is said to have prevented Matthew from saying something on his deathbed to Metropolitan , a fellow Old Calendarist bishop, but one with whom he was in schism, after Matthew tried to sit up "out of deference" to Metropolitan Crysostomos and began to try to speak inaudibly.

Soulakiotis, it is claimed, burst into the room at that moment with a group of other nuns and demanded Metropolitan Crysostomos and his entourage leave at once. Matthew would die only a few days later, so it is unknown if he wanted to heal the schism with Chrysostomos—a deathbed conversion of sorts.

After the death of Matthew, Soulakiotis succeeded him as abbot of the monastery. During this period of her life she was described and photographed wearing an even more chaste version of the typical '' epimandylion'', a Greek-style black ''epanokalimavkion'' worn by Eastern Orthodox nuns of the highest rank (who cannot rise higher as they cannot become ordained priestesses), which entirely covered her forehead and eyebrows.

Crimes

Soulakiotis' alleged ''modus operandi'' was to encourage wealthy women to join the convent, and then torture them until they donated their fortunes to the monastery; once the money was donated, Soulakiotis would embezzle it and in some cases kill the donor. Beginning in 1940, after establishing control over the other nuns in the monastery's convent, she was said to have even sent the monastery's monks around Greece in search of wealthy "spinsters, widows, ndfamilies" to convert. ''Reuters'' reported that at the time of her arrest she had amassed three hundred homes and farms across Greece this way along with "gold and jewels worth thousands of pounds." ( £2,000 is .) One of her accusers, Eugenia Margheti, said she was held in an isolation cell and tortured until she surrendered property worth ₯118 million (US$80,000 in 1952—).

Soulakiotis first came to the attention of police when an anonymous complaint was made by the daughter of a wealthy woman who had willed all her property to the monastery—she insisted that her mother wouldn't have done this without being forced, and accused the monastery's administration of "blackmail and threats".

Soulakiotis further faced police scrutiny when they were searching for an 18-year-old woman from Toledo, Ohio but born in Greece, Simela Spyrides, who first went missing in 1949. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation had traced Spyrides to the monastery, and her father, Christo Spyrides, called on Greek authorities from Ohio to take action, claiming that his daughter was "lured" to the convent by a nun he identified as "Mariam Zaphriopoulos", who he said had been in the United States to collect property worth US$10,000 left to the monastery. However, the ''Associated Press'' reported that Spyrides was able to get into contact with his daughter after their initial reports, omitting whether or not she had been in the convent.

The prosecution further alleged that Soulakiotis' strict adherence to ascetic practices among those in the convent led to the unnecessary deaths of 150 people, who had sought treatment at the monastery for tuberculosis. They also alleged that the only time doctors were allowed on site was to sign death certificates, never to carry out medically supervised treatment of the deadly communicative lung infection.

Victims of Soulakiotis' administration of the monastery who were still alive in the 1950's also variously accused her of torturing them, starving them, falsely imprisoning them, and beating them.

Arrest

More than eighty-five police officers first raided the monastery's grounds on the night of 4 December 1950, accompanied by a deputy prosecutor, a judge, and a coroner, in an operation which lasted overnight. Upon gaining entry, they forcibly removed all thirty-six children on the premises, having to wrest them away from the hands of nuns, to orphanages "where their future was not much better". Police also freed "several half-naked malnourished and sick elderly women tied up in basements", and were disturbed at the poor quality food served to those in the convent.

Trials

Although extremely concerned, due to questions over the voluntary nature of monasticism, the initial charges prosecutors felt they could prove carried light sentences: illegal export of olive oil to Cyprus and illegal import of tires. As more evidence and witness statements came to light, the indictment of Soulakiotis was revised repeatedly.

When Archbishop Spyridon Vlachos of Athens failed to reconcile with Metropolitan Crysostomos of Florina, all Old Calendarist sects in Greece, including the Matthewites, were outlawed in January 1951. The following month, the Public Prosecutor further indicted Soulakiotis, along with thirteen other nuns and monks, on charges including homicide, fraud, forgery of wills, blackmail and torture, with Soulakiotis receiving the harshest indictment.

At her trials, Soulakiotis wore an Orthodox icon depicting the deceased Matthew, who among some Greek Old Calendarists is honored in death— glorified—by referring to him by the posthumous name (Father) "Saint Matthew the New Confessor".

Defense arguments

At trial, Soulakiotis' attorney, Panos Panayotakos, said in her defense that people surrender all their material property to monasteries when joining as a matter of course (a vow of poverty

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