New Skete of St. Anna opens in Kenya

New convent has opened in the Diocese of Nyeri and Mt. Kenya in the Patriarchate of Alexandria.

“Welcome to the Skete of St. Anna. It is now complete and ready for nuns to settle in,” writes Bishop Neophytos of Nyeri and Mt. Kenya on his Facebook page.

Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, who previously served in Africa, founded a convent in Nyeri in the 1980s but it did not survive after he moved to serve as primate of the Albanian Church, Bp. Neophytos writes.

Photo: Facebook “Many thanks go to Mother Johanna of the Skete of Archangel Michael KS, MO who is the founding nun of this humble monastery,” the hierarch writes.

A post on the diocesan Facebook page on September 7 notes that Mother Johanna is not living at the monastery, but spent two months in Kenya helping to get it started.

As Bishop Neophytos notes, there are two Kenyan nuns in Greece whom he hopes will return someday “and continue to revive the spirit of monasticism in the Diocese of Nyeri and Mt. Kenya.”

In an interview given not long before his repose last year, Bishop Athanasius of Kisumu and Western Kenya noted that there is one active men’s monastery and one active convent in the diocese, though neither had residences of its own at the time of the interview.

Source: Orthochristian.com