The Preaching Tours

The two decades of itinerant preaching that fill the second half of Kosmas’s life: the apostolic journeys — three by Vaporis’s scholarly reckoning, four in popular tradition — that carried him across Aetolia-Acarnania, Epirus, Macedonia, Thessaly, the Ionian Islands, and finally into Albania, where he died. It treats the sweep of the routes, the immense crowds that gathered (one eyewitness estimate of some fifteen thousand), and the disputed count of the journeys, presented as a structured range.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

From the Mountain to the Provinces

After leaving Mount Athos around 1760 and securing the patriarchal blessing for his work (see The Call to Preach), Kosmas began the itinerant preaching that would occupy the rest of his life. He went first to Constantinople and its surrounding regions, then turned to the Greek heartlands of the Balkans, moving from village to village and town to town on foot or by mule, preaching wherever a crowd could be gathered and a bishop would receive him (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 11–18; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 24).

The geography of the mission widened over the years until it covered most of the Greek-speaking Ottoman lands. The sources trace his routes through his native Aetolia-Acarnania in west-central Greece; through Epirus in the northwest; into Macedonia and Thessaly; across the Ionian Islands (where, beyond Ottoman jurisdiction under Venetian rule, he preached on Kefalonia, Zakynthos, and elsewhere); and finally into the regions of southern Albania, where his life ended (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 14–24; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971). His base and frequent point of return was his own region of Aetolia-Acarnania, but the reach of the later journeys took in a great arc of the southern Balkans.

The Lay of the Land

The regions through which Kosmas moved were not a uniform plain but a difficult, fractured terrain, and the shape of the mission was determined in part by the shape of the country. Aetolia-Acarnania, his home ground, is a land of mountains falling to coastal lagoons and river valleys, and from it he could pass north and west into Epirus, a region of high ranges and isolated upland villages where Greek-speaking and Albanian-speaking populations lived intermingled, and where the Orthodox faith was under particular pressure from conversion to Islam (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 14–24; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). Eastward lay the broad plain of Thessaly and, beyond it and to the north, Macedonia, with its mixed populations and its great mountain monasteries; here too Kosmas preached, carrying the same message across very different human ground (Menounos, Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές, on the dating and sequence of the regional visits).

The Ionian Islands formed a special case within the geography. Lying off the western coast, they were not under Ottoman but under Venetian rule, and so the Orthodox there lived under a Latin-Catholic political authority rather than a Muslim one. Kosmas’s preaching on Kefalonia, Zakynthos, and the other islands therefore addressed a community whose circumstances differed sharply from those of the mainland flock, yet the core of his work — confession, reconciliation, schools, the cross and the stool — was carried out there unchanged (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 14–24). That he was received in territories of such different jurisdictions, Ottoman and Venetian alike, is itself a measure of how far the mission ranged and how widely it was welcomed.

How Many Journeys?

The biographical tradition organizes this travel into a set of distinct “apostolic journeys,” but it does not agree on how many there were. The careful scholarly reconstruction, set out by Vaporis on the basis of Kosmas’s letters and the datable events, counts three great apostolic tours over the period from around 1760 to 1779. The popular and devotional tradition, by contrast, more often speaks of four journeys (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 14–24; the four-journey scheme is common in the popular Greek lives and in devotional accounts).

[Disputed: the NUMBER of apostolic journeys. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 14–24, reconstructs three great tours on documentary grounds (the scholarly position); the popular and devotional tradition commonly counts four. The disagreement turns on how the continuous travel is divided into “journeys” and on the dating of Kosmas’s returns to base, not on any dispute that he traveled almost continuously for nearly two decades.]

The reason for the disagreement is instructive. Kosmas did not keep an itinerary, and the lives reconstruct his movements from scattered references in his letters, from the foundation dates of schools, from local memory in the places he visited, and from the surviving crosses he left behind (see The Method of the Missionary). Dividing two decades of nearly continuous travel into discrete “journeys” is partly an act of editorial organization, and different editors have drawn the lines differently. What is not in dispute is the scale and the relentlessness of the travel: for roughly nineteen years Kosmas was almost never at rest.

The Logistics of the Road

The bare fact of the travel conceals an enormous physical labor. Kosmas moved on foot and by mule, over mountain tracks and unbridged rivers, in a land without made roads, and he did so as a monk in his late forties, fifties, and sixties (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 14–24). The southern Balkans through which he passed were mountainous and often dangerous, troubled by banditry and by the insecurity of Ottoman provincial life, and a journey of a few dozen miles might take days. That he sustained this for nearly twenty years, returning again and again to ground he had already covered, is a feat of endurance as much as of preaching.

The work also required permission and cooperation at every level. Kosmas held the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarchate for his mission (see The Call to Preach), and he was careful, on the ground, to work with the local bishops of the regions he entered, preaching where he was received and lending his authority to their flocks rather than acting as a freelance enthusiast (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 11–24; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). Under Ottoman rule the Church was the recognized civil authority of the Orthodox population through the millet system, and a preacher who drew crowds of thousands could not operate without the goodwill both of the hierarchy and, at least tacitly, of the Ottoman officials in whose districts he gathered the people. The sources present Kosmas as moving within these structures rather than against them, securing the cooperation of bishops and the toleration of local authorities — a toleration that, in the end, failed him in Albania (see Arrest and Execution).

The Crowds

The single most striking feature of the tours, attested again and again, is the size of the crowds. Kosmas preached not in churches — which could not hold the numbers — but in the open air, in fields and squares and on hillsides, and the people came in their thousands. One contemporary eyewitness estimate, often cited, puts a single gathering at around fifteen thousand hearers (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–22; the figure is reported in the early biographical material and repeated in the standard accounts). Whether or not any single number is exact, the consistency of the testimony — from his disciples, from the local bishops who received him, and from the sheer scale of his school-founding — establishes that Kosmas drew audiences without parallel in the Greek world of his day.

The crowds were drawn by more than curiosity. The sources describe people walking for days to hear him, sleeping in the open to keep their place, weeping and confessing as he preached, and reordering their lives at his word — abandoning feuds, restoring stolen goods, ceasing to hold markets on Sunday so that the poor could rest and worship (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–24; for the content that moved them, see The Content of the Preaching). He preached in a plain, vivid demotic Greek that the unlettered could follow, illustrated by homely parables and arresting images, and structured so as to be remembered and repeated. The rhetorical training of the Athoniada was bent entirely to the service of the simplest hearer (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–22).

The choice of demotic Greek — the living speech of the villages rather than the archaizing, learned idiom of the educated clergy — was itself a deliberate instrument of the mission. Kosmas’s audiences were overwhelmingly poor and unlettered, and a sermon in elevated language would have passed over their heads; by speaking as they spoke, in short sentences, with repetition and direct address, with questions put to the crowd and answered, and with images drawn from farming, herding, and household life, he made the whole of Christian teaching available to people who could not read a word of it (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–22; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). The surviving teachings, preserved in the form in which his hearers remembered them, retain this oral, demotic character (Menounos, Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές).

The effects on the crowds were not merely emotional but measurable in the visible reordering of social life. The sources dwell on concrete fruits: enemies publicly reconciled; stolen goods restored to their owners; the Sunday markets abandoned so that the Lord’s Day might be kept and the poor might rest; usury and oppression of the weak rebuked; and a great turning of the people to confession (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–24; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). These were the standard signs by which the lives measured the success of a visit, and they recur from region to region across the journeys. A preaching that left behind reconciled villages, restored property, and a renewed Sabbath was understood by the tradition as bearing exactly the fruit a true apostolic mission should bear.

The Pattern of a Visit

A typical visit followed a recognizable pattern, reconstructed from the lives and from local memory. Arriving at a town, Kosmas would have the people erect a large wooden cross at the chosen open-air spot; before it he would set up his portable preaching-stool or bench, mount it, and preach (see The Method of the Missionary for the cross and the stool). He would call the people to repentance and confession, urge the founding or repair of a school, often arrange for baptismal fonts and distribute prayer-ropes and small crosses, and reconcile enemies before moving on. When he left, he took the portable stool but left the great cross standing as a permanent memorial and a place of prayer; several of these crosses, or their successors, survive as relics (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24; on the surviving crosses, see The Method of the Missionary).

This pattern, repeated across hundreds of communities over nearly twenty years, is the concrete shape of the mission. It was not a series of revival meetings but a systematic, mobile work of catechesis and institution-building, leaving behind it schools, fonts, crosses, and reconciled communities — and, in the end, a continuous band of Greek Orthodox memory stretching from Aetolia to the place of his death in Albania (see Arrest and Execution).

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The routes through Aetolia-Acarnania, Epirus, Macedonia, Thessaly, the Ionian Islands, and Albania; the reconstruction of three apostolic journeys; the crowds and the eyewitness estimate of c. 15,000; the pattern of a visit.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The geography of the mission and the character of the preaching.)
Menounos, Ioannis. Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία). Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979. (Biographical reconstruction and the dating of events.)
Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), August 24. (The itinerant mission in summary; the popular four-journey framing in the devotional tradition.)