Cosmas the Aetolian

Origins and education

He was born about 1714 in the village of Mega Dendron, in the district of Apokouro in Aetolia, near Thermo — a poor upland region of western Greece — and was given at baptism the name Constas (Constantine). The eighteenth century in which he grew up was the low point of Greek letters under Ottoman rule: whole provinces had no school of any kind, priests who could read were scarce, and in the mountain villages of Epirus and Albania the faith survived as memory and custom rather than as instruction.

His own schooling was got piecemeal and late. He learned his letters locally and then under the archdeacon Ananias Dervisanos, and afterwards made his way to Mount Athos, where between 1749 and about 1759 he studied at the newly founded Athonite Academy attached to Vatopedi, under Nikolaos Tzartzoulios of Metsovo and the great Eugenios Voulgaris — the best philosophical education then available anywhere in the Greek East. He also spent time at Constantinople perfecting his rhetoric. At the monastery of Philotheou he was tonsured a monk with the name Cosmas, and was ordained hieromonk.

The decision to preach

What broke his monastic stability was not restlessness but a diagnosis. He had seen the countryside from which he came; he had seen what he had learned on Athos; and he concluded — the Teachings return to it again and again — that the Christians of the Balkans were being lost not to force but to ignorance, and that ignorance could be attacked. Islamisation in Epirus and Albania in his lifetime was proceeding fastest exactly where there were no schools and no preaching.

He would not go without a blessing. He obtained the canonical permission of the Ecumenical Patriarch Seraphim II about 1760, and renewed it later under Sophronios II; he also secured the goodwill of the local bishops through whose dioceses he passed, and, where he could, of the Ottoman authorities themselves. This is a point his biographers stress and his enemies later ignored: Cosmas preached with written ecclesiastical permission, and several Turkish beys — most notably Kurt Pasha of Berat, in whose territory he would eventually die — gave him safe-conducts.

The four apostolic journeys

From about 1760 until 1779 he was almost continuously on the road, in what his biographers count as four great circuits: first through Constantinople, Thrace and the Danubian lands; then Thessalonica, Verroia, Macedonia and the Chalkidike; then Thessaly, Epirus, Acarnania and his native Aetolia; and finally, from 1775, the Ionian islands — Cephalonia, Zakynthos, Ithaca, Corfu — and the interior of Albania, Chimara and the northern Epirot villages.

His method was fixed and simple. Arriving at a village he asked the people to plant a large wooden cross in an open field or square, and set beside it a low wooden stool from which he preached; he spoke in the plainest demotic Greek, without rhetoric, in short sentences built out of proverbs and stories, and at the end he led the whole crowd — sometimes several thousand, drawn in from the surrounding villages — in prayer for the living and the dead. The crosses were left standing when he moved on, and many of them, replaced in stone, still mark his stations across western Greece.

He asked for nothing for himself. What money was pressed on him he spent on books, baptismal fonts, prayer-ropes, small crosses and headscarves, which he distributed by the tens of thousands, and above all on schools. He would not leave a village until it had undertaken to keep a teacher and pay him from a common fund; the number of schools thus founded is put by his biographers at about two hundred common schools and ten Greek schools, the last of them at Preveza in the year of his death. His social preaching was equally practical and equally unwelcome to some: he attacked the exploitation of the poor, denounced the buying and selling of Christian children, urged that girls be taught as well as boys, and pressed the Jewish and Christian traders of the towns alike to stop trading on Sundays so that villagers could attend the Liturgy.

Martyrdom

In the summer of 1779 he was preaching in the region of Berat in southern Albania. The Russo-Turkish war and the Orlov revolt of 1770 had left the Porte suspicious of any Greek who could gather a crowd, and Cosmas gathered enormous ones. He was denounced — the sources say by men whose commerce his Sunday preaching had damaged, and the charge laid before the authorities was that he was an agent of Russia stirring the rayah to revolt.

He was seized at the village of Kolikontasi, on the river Apsos (the modern Seman), without trial. On 24 August 1779, aged about sixty-five, he was led out at dawn, given time to pray, and hanged from a tree with a rope; his body was stripped and thrown into the river. It was recovered three days later by a priest named Markos, who found it floating upright, and was buried at the monastery of the Entry of the Theotokos at Kolikontasi. Veneration began at once and crossed confessional lines: Ali Pasha of Ioannina, who attributed his own rise to the saint's prophecy, raised a church over the grave in 1813 and endowed the monastery.

Writings, prophecies and legacy

No autograph of Cosmas survives. What we have are the Didachai — five "Teachings", transmitted in notes taken down by hearers and copied at second and third hand, which preserve his voice with a vividness rare in Greek homiletic prose: catechesis on the creation, the fall, the Incarnation, confession, the Cross and the last things, delivered in the syntax of a man talking to farmers. Attached to them in the manuscript tradition is a large and much later body of Prophecies, sayings foretelling the liberation of Greece and the coming of technologies, which circulated orally for generations before being printed and which cannot be critically separated from what the saint actually said. The Teachings themselves are the sound historical basis for his thought; the Prophecies are treated by careful editors as a tradition about him rather than as his work.

His influence on the modern Greek and Albanian Church is out of all proportion to the brevity of his mission. He is claimed as a founder by both — his preaching in Albanian districts is remembered there as much as his Greek schools are remembered in Epirus — and the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania keeps him among its principal saints. Greek folk memory calls him simply Patrokosmas, "Father Cosmas."