Saint Appearance
of the Iveron Icon of the Theotokos on Mount Athos.

In Nicea (now the Turkish city of Isnik), a rich, virtuous widow lived with her young son. The widow was praying in front of the icon in her house chapel one night when the iconoclasts came to abuse the holy image. One of the soldiers struck the icon with a sword. The blow fell into the image on the right cheek of the Most Pure Mother of God and immediately blood poured out of the wound. The frightened executioners hurried away, responding to the widow's pleas by agreeing to wait until the morning and promising the unthinkable amount of ransom for the icon.

The Nicéan widow also handed her precious image of the Theotokos to the will of God. After the departure of the soldiers, she and her son went to the seashore and, with many prayers, parted with her icon by lowering it into the water. The young man, heeding his mother's pleas, fled that night to Mount Athos where he remained there and later accepted monasticism.

On Mount Athos, during the abbotship of St. Ephemios in the Georgian monastery of Iveron on Tuesday of Bright Week in the year 999, the monks were struck by a terrible and, at the same time awe inspiring phenomenon - on the surface of the sea they saw a pillar of fire emanating from an icon. Great excitement engulfed the monastery and with prayers many tried to take the icon by boat, but every time they drew near, it was moved further away.

This continued for several days, until they learned from Elder Gabriel the Georgian, who was struggling in a cave high above Iveron Monastery, that at night the Most Holy Theotokos appeared to him in a dream. Her will was revealed - the Mother of God wants to give Her image for protection and help to the monastery, and he must, without fear, walk through the waters and receive the icon. That night, to the chanting of monks standing on the shore, Elder Gabriel walked through the water and took the Holy Icon.

While the monks were celebrating a Service of thanksgiving, a cold, sweet spring miraculously gushed forth from the ground where the Icon was standing. Afterward, they took it into the church and placed in the sanctuary with great reverence. The next morning one of the monks went to light the lamps in church and discovered that the Icon was no longer where they had put it; now it was on the wall near the entry gate. The monks took it down and returned it to the sanctuary, but the next day the Icon was found once again at the Monastery gate.

After this, the icon was permanently installed in a small Chapel next to the Gates where it remains to this day. Because of this, the icon came to be called Portaitissa or "Gate-Keeper". In 1648, Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, while he was still Archimandrite of Novospassky Monastery, commissioned an exact copy of the Iviron icon to be made and sent to Russia. Almost immediately upon its arrival on October 13, the icon was "glorified" with numerous miracles attributed to it by the faithful.

Several of the copies themselves have been known to be wonderworking, one of the most famous of which is the myrrh-streaming icon from Montreal in Canada. For fifteen years (1982–1997), as myrrh continued to flow from the Icon, Brother José Muñoz Cortés devoted himself to its care, accompanying it on numerous trips to parishes all over the United States and Canada, to South America, Australia, and Europe. Since June of 2008, the Iveron Icon has been to over 1000 churches in North America of all (canonical) jurisdictions, and has been venerated by millions of people throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and the world.