The Method of the Missionary

The distinctive working method by which Kosmas conducted his open-air mission: the large wooden cross that he had each community erect, the portable preaching-stool or bench from which he spoke, and the practice — rich in symbolism and now in relics — of taking the stool with him when he left but leaving the cross standing as a permanent memorial. It also treats the baptismal fonts he arranged, the prayer-ropes and small crosses he distributed, and the surviving crosses (at Votrisi, Lia, Mousini) venerated as relics today.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

A Method Built for the Open Air

Kosmas’s audiences were far too large for any church (see The Preaching Tours), and so his whole method was built for the open air and for permanence. Arriving at a town or village, he would direct the people to erect a tall wooden cross at the place chosen for the preaching — a field, a square, a hillside — and before that cross he would set up a small portable stool or bench (a skamni), mount it so as to be seen and heard, and preach (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 19–24; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971). The cross gave the gathering its center and its meaning; the stool gave the preacher his pulpit. Both were simple, portable, reproducible — a method that could be set up anywhere, by anyone, with materials any village possessed.

The plainness of the apparatus was itself part of the design. The audiences Kosmas drew were far larger than any building could hold — the tradition preserves an eyewitness estimate of some fifteen thousand at a single gathering (see The Preaching Tours) — and no church, square, or hall in the rural Balkans could contain such numbers. The open field, the hillside, the threshing-floor were the only spaces equal to the crowds, and the cross-and-stool method was shaped to fit them (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–24). The skamni was light enough to be carried on the road by a man traveling on foot and mule across mountainous country (see The Preaching Tours on the logistics of the journeys), and the cross was made on the spot from timber the village itself supplied. Nothing in the method depended on wealth, fixed buildings, or the presence of the preacher once he had moved on — a deliberate economy that let the work be set up afresh in community after community over nearly two decades.

The Cross Left, the Stool Taken

The most resonant feature of the method was what Kosmas did when he departed. He took the portable stool with him, to use again at the next stop; but he left the great wooden cross standing where it had been raised, as a permanent memorial of his visit and a place to which the people could return to pray (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24). The gesture turned each preaching-place into a lasting shrine. Long after Kosmas had moved on — and long after his death — these crosses marked the landscape of the southern Balkans with the memory of his passage, and the people gathered at them, kept lamps burning before them, and venerated them.

Several of these crosses, or crosses standing in their place, survive and are venerated as relics. The standard accounts and local tradition name surviving Kosmas-crosses at Votrisi, at Lia, and at Mousini, among other sites (the surviving crosses are noted in the devotional and local literature on the saint; cf. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, on the practice, and the modern Greek hagiographical accounts of the relic-crosses). The cross at Lia, in particular, in the Mourgana region of Epirus near the Albanian border, is among the better-known of these memorials. As with all relic and miracle traditions, these are reported here as what the local tradition venerates and attests, in the manner prescribed by the repository methodology, rather than certified as historically continuous with the original timbers (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5).

It is worth being precise about what is and is not claimed for these crosses. The historical core — that Kosmas’s method was to leave a standing cross at each stop, and that crosses associated with his visits became fixed points of local devotion — rests on the documented practice and the testimony of the lives (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24). The further claim attaching to particular sites, that the specific timbers now venerated at Votrisi, Lia, or Mousini are those Kosmas himself raised, belongs to local and devotional tradition and is reported here as such (modern Greek hagiographical and local accounts of the relic-crosses, per METHODOLOGY §3.5). Over more than two centuries crosses are repaired, replaced, sheltered, and re-raised, and the repository does not assert an unbroken material continuity from the eighteenth-century timber to the object venerated today. What the tradition attests, and what is recorded here, is the continuity of place and devotion: that at these spots Kosmas preached, that a cross has stood in his memory ever since, and that the faithful gather and venerate there. So framed, the surviving crosses are an unusually concrete instance of the way a missionary’s passage can be inscribed permanently upon a landscape (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Cult and the Shrine).

The Symbolism of Stool and Cross

The contrast between the stool taken and the cross left was not lost on Kosmas’s hearers, and the tradition has read it as a deliberate sign. The preacher and his platform pass on; the Cross of Christ remains. The skamni is the apostle’s: provisional, mobile, in service of the moment, carried on to wherever the next crowd waits. The cross is Christ’s: planted, fixed, and permanent, outlasting the man who raised it. By the simple act of separating the two when he departed — the human instrument taken away, the divine sign left standing — Kosmas enacted a small theology of the mission itself, in which the preacher is nothing and the Cross he preaches is everything (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24; cf. The Cross and the Poor). Kosmas himself made the Cross the constant center of his preaching — he is remembered for teaching the people to make the sign of the Cross correctly, slowly, and with understanding, and for tracing in his sermons the whole economy of salvation back to the Cross (see The Cross and the Poor, and on the content generally The Content of the Preaching). The physical cross raised at every stop was the visible anchor of that teaching, and leaving it behind made the message permanent in a way no sermon alone could be.

Fonts, Prayer-Ropes, and Crosses

Kosmas’s method went beyond preaching to a set of practical works that institutionalized the visit. He arranged for baptismal fonts to be made and installed where they were lacking, so that the sacramental life of the community could be rightly carried on; he distributed prayer-ropes (komvoschoinia) to teach and encourage the Jesus Prayer among the laity; and he gave out small crosses and other simple devotional objects as tokens and aids (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). To fund these works and to relieve the poor, he encouraged the better-off to contribute, and he is remembered for directing wealthy hearers to pay for fonts, school buildings, and the like as acts of penance and charity.

Each of these works had a specific pastoral purpose. The baptismal fonts answered a concrete deficiency: a community lacking a proper font could not rightly carry on its sacramental life, and by having fonts made and installed Kosmas secured the regular celebration of baptism after he had gone (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24). The prayer-ropes (komvoschoinia), the knotted woolen cords used to count the repetitions of the Jesus Prayer, carried the contemplative discipline of the monasteries — and of Mount Athos, where Kosmas had been formed — out to the lay villager, putting into ordinary hands a tool by which the unlettered could pray without ceasing (Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24). The small crosses he distributed served as tokens of the visit and as constant reminders of the sign of the Cross he had taught the people to make. Each object extended the visit forward in time, leaving the community equipped to continue what the preaching had begun.

The funding of all this was itself part of the method. Kosmas owned nothing and sought nothing for himself, and so the works had to be paid for by the communities and, above all, by their wealthier members, whom he is remembered for directing to fund fonts, school buildings, and the relief of the poor as acts of penance and charity (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24). In this way the same preaching that called the rich to repentance also turned their wealth to the building of lasting institutions, binding social reform and material provision together: the well-off gave, the poor were taught, and the community as a whole was left with a school, a font, and a cross it had paid for itself.

These practical measures are of a piece with the schools (see Founding the Schools): Kosmas did not preach and pass on, leaving only an emotional impression, but built lasting structures into the communities he visited — a cross to pray before, a font to baptize in, a school to read in, a prayer-rope to pray with. The genius of the method was its combination of mass appeal with concrete, durable institution-building.

A Reproducible Apostolate

Taken together, the elements of the method — the cross, the stool, the fonts, the prayer-ropes, the schools, the call to confession and reconciliation — formed a reproducible apostolate that could be, and was, carried out hundreds of times across nearly two decades and a vast geography. Its simplicity was its strength: it required no buildings, no endowment, no permanent staff, only a preacher, a cross, a stool, and a crowd.

The reproducibility was not accidental but structural. Because each visit followed the same recognizable pattern — raise the cross, mount the stool, preach to repentance and confession, found or repair a school, install a font, distribute ropes and crosses, reconcile the enemies, fund the work from the well-off, and move on leaving the cross behind — the method could be deployed identically in a Venetian-ruled island, an Epirote mountain village, or a Thessalian plain town, adapting to none of them and serving all of them (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). It also fitted neatly within the existing order of the Church: because Kosmas worked with the blessing of the Patriarchate and the cooperation of the local bishops (see The Preaching Tours), the fonts he installed, the schools he founded, and the reconciliations he effected passed naturally into the ongoing care of the resident hierarchy once he had gone. The apostolate was mobile, but the institutions it left were rooted, and the rooting was secured by the Church already in place. This is why Kosmas could cover so much ground and leave so deep a mark; and it is why, when he was gone, the marks remained — in the surviving crosses, the schools that outlived him, and the memory of the communities he had passed through (see The Cult and the Shrine).

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The wooden cross and portable stool; the practice of leaving the cross and taking the stool; the baptismal fonts, prayer-ropes, and small crosses; the funding of works by the well-off.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The method of the open-air mission and the devotional objects.)
Menounos, Ioannis. Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία). Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979. (The sermons in which the cross-teaching is embedded.)
Modern Greek hagiographical and local accounts of the surviving Kosmas-crosses (Votrisi, Lia, Mousini), reported as venerated relic-tradition per METHODOLOGY §3.5.