Our Lady of Soufanieh

The Damascus apparitions to Myrna Nazzour beginning in 1982, with an icon exuding olive oil, stigmata, and a message of Christian unity.

Our Lady of Soufanieh refers to a series of reported phenomena in the Soufanieh district of Damascus, Syria, centered on Myrna Nazzour (also spelled Mirna), a young Greek Melkite Catholic woman. The main series of events ran for roughly eight years, from late 1982 to 1990, with further occurrences reported into the 2000s. They are remembered above all for a message calling divided Christians to unity, especially around a common celebration of Easter.

That message is mirrored in Myrna's own household: a Greek Melkite Catholic married to a Greek Orthodox husband, Nicolas, she lived the very division the apparitions asked the Churches to heal.

What happened

In late November 1982 a small, mass-produced paper icon of Our Lady of Kazan in the Nazzour home was reported to exude an oily substance. Soon Myrna herself was said to exude the same oil from her hands and face. Observers reported that the flow was examined and found to be ordinary olive oil, and that numerous visitors, including physicians, witnessed the events without detecting any fraud.

Over the following years Myrna reported repeated apparitions of the Virgin Mary, who appeared to her both within the home and in its garden, speaking to her in Arabic and entrusting her with short messages for the Church. She also reported apparitions of Christ. On several occasions she bore stigmata, with wounds described on her forehead, hands, feet, and side. These episodes clustered in Holy Week, and notably in years when the Catholic and Orthodox dates for Easter fell together, a coincidence read by devotees as underscoring the unity message.

A house opened to all

From the first reports the Nazzour family opened their home in Soufanieh to anyone who wished to pray before the little icon, and it quickly became a place of pilgrimage for Christians of every communion and for Muslims as well. Crowds gathered in the modest house and courtyard to venerate the image and to join in prayer for unity.

A detail often singled out by observers is that the family has consistently refused to accept money for what happens there. They take no donations and sell nothing connected to the events, insisting that the icon and its message are not for profit. For many visitors this disinterested hospitality has been as telling a sign as the oil itself.

The message

The central theme attributed to the apparitions is Christian unity: a repeated plea that the divided Christian communities reconcile and keep a single date for Easter. The words reported by Myrna press the faithful to love one another, to pray for peace, and to seek the unity of the Church, addressed to Catholic and Orthodox alike rather than to one communion alone.

How the Church regards it

Soufanieh has drawn wide attention and pilgrimage across the Middle East, and local clergy observed the events closely; the Melkite archbishop Jacques Georges Habib Hafouri is reported to have regarded them favorably in 1987. Even so, the Syrian churches issued no joint, formal adjudication, and the case has not received the kind of definitive approval given to apparitions such as Lourdes or Guadalupe. It is treated here as a reported, still-unadjudicated case. As with every private revelation, the Church neither requires belief nor presents such events as an addition to the deposit of faith.

Why it matters

The Soufanieh phenomena are remembered above all for their ecumenical message in a region marked by ancient Christian divisions and, in recent decades, by war and the flight of Christians from the Middle East. Whatever the final judgment on the signs reported there, the call to unity around the Risen Christ echoes the Church's own longing that all may be one.