The Living Archive
Dead Woman Names Hiding Place Before Returning to Rest
A grieving owner had no witness and no evidence. Bishop Spyridon’s prayer at the graveside is said to have produced the only testimony left.
A gathering that began at a grave ended in astonishment yesterday after Bishop Spyridon of Trimythous reportedly restored a deceased woman to life long enough to answer a question that had troubled an entire household.
According to those present, the matter began when a local woman entrusted valuable possessions to a friend for safekeeping. When she later asked for them to be returned, the friend denied ever receiving them.
“There was no one left to ask. So he asked her.”
With no witnesses and no evidence, the owner found herself unable to recover what had been entrusted.
Before the dispute could be resolved, the accused woman died unexpectedly.
Believing that any hope of recovering her property had been buried with her, the owner turned to Bishop Spyridon and pleaded for help.
Witnesses say the bishop accompanied her to the grave, where he knelt in prayer and asked God to reveal the truth.
What happened next left those standing nearby in silence.
The dead woman is said to have briefly returned to life. Asked where the property had been hidden, she named the exact place in which it had been concealed. Having given her answer, she returned to her rest.
Residents searched the place she had identified and found the property exactly where she had described.
The owner recovered everything that had been lost.
News of the event spread rapidly through Cyprus. Those close to Spyridon, however, insist his concern was never the recovery of the goods themselves, but the vindication of a woman whose honesty had been publicly doubted with no way of answering the charge.
For many who were present, the account has settled into a single sentence, repeated ever since in the town: what a human court could not establish, God did not leave hidden.
The accounts below circulated among the faithful and are told here as they were told. They are not established by contemporary record — see the Historian’s Desk for what stands behind each one.
The account has been retold with the persons reversed — the dead woman becoming the wronged owner rather than the one who concealed the goods, and in some versions a child taking her place altogether.
The earliest form of the tradition is clear on the point: the one briefly restored is the woman who had hidden the property. The reversal appears to be a later slip in transmission rather than a variant account.
Sources & Documentation
The Cloud of Witnesses reports nothing it cannot source. Each account is held to the standard of the Church’s own discernment.
- The Life of St Spyridon of Trimythous (traditional Greek hagiography)
- The Great Synaxaristes (Greek Orthodox tradition)
- Orthodox Church in America — Life of St Spyridon the Wonderworker
- Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America — St Spyridon the Wonderworker