The Cult and the Shrine

The growth of Kosmas’s veneration from his death to the present: the cult that began almost at once among the people who had heard him, the burial-place and monastery-shrine at Kolkondas (Kolikontasi) in present-day Albania near the place of his martyrdom, and the relics and surviving crosses venerated as memorials of his mission. It treats the shrine’s history through the Communist persecution in Albania and its post-1990 recovery, and reports relic and miracle traditions as the tradition attests them.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

A Cult Begun at Once

Kosmas’s veneration did not wait for any formal act; it began among the people almost immediately. He had been heard and revered by vast crowds across two decades (see The Preaching Tours), and his violent death at the hands of his enemies confirmed in the popular mind what his preaching had already suggested — that he was a holy man and a martyr (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 33–40). Within a few years his disciple Sappheiros Christodoulides had composed the Life and the liturgical service (Akolouthia) that gave the cult its texts (see The Didaches), and his memory was kept at the surviving crosses he had left across the land (see The Method of the Missionary) and at the place of his burial.

The pattern by which Kosmas’s cult arose is the ordinary Orthodox one, but it is worth noticing how completely the people anticipated the Church’s later formal act. A veneration that begins among those who have actually heard and seen a holy man — and who then witness his violent death — carries a kind of evidentiary weight in the Orthodox understanding: the vox populi recognizing sanctity is not treated as mere sentiment but as a real, if unofficial, attestation that the Church may afterward ratify (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 33–40). In Kosmas’s case the recognition was immediate and broad, spread across the very regions of his itinerant mission rather than confined to a single locality, so that the cult was from the first a thing of the open countryside and the village as much as of the monastery. This diffuse, popular character — a saint of the roads and the marketplaces where he had preached — would mark the cult through all its later history, and explains why its memorials are not concentrated at one tomb but scattered, as his preaching had been, across a wide landscape (see The Preaching Tours).

Christodoulides’ double labor — the Life and the Akolouthia together — deserves emphasis, because it is the textual foundation on which the whole cult stands. The Life supplied the narrative that the faithful would remember and retell; the Akolouthia supplied the hymns, troparia, and readings by which the saint could actually be commemorated in the Church’s worship (see The Didaches). Without a liturgical service a cult cannot be celebrated in the divine offices, and so cannot fully enter the Church’s common life; with one, it acquires a fixed shape and a recurring annual occasion. That a disciple who had known Kosmas personally provided both within a few years of the martyrdom gave the cult both its authority and its early coherence, and it is from this same service that the modern liturgical commemoration ultimately descends (see Glorification 1961).

The Shrine at Kolkondas

After his execution by hanging and the casting of his body into the river near Berat, the tradition relates that Christians recovered the body and buried it, and that a shrine and monastery grew up at the site — at Kolkondas / Kolikontasi, near Berat, in present-day Albania, the place most closely associated with his martyrdom and tomb (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 33–40; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 24). The monastery dedicated to the saint at this site became the principal center of his cult, a place of pilgrimage drawing Orthodox Christians — Greek and Albanian alike — to venerate the relics and pray at the tomb of the martyr.

The recovery and burial of the body, as the tradition relates it, is itself an early act of the cult and not merely a postscript to the martyrdom. That Christians sought out the body cast into the river, recovered it, and gave it honorable burial — at risk to themselves, under the same Ottoman authority that had permitted or ordered the execution — is the kind of detail by which a community declares, in deed, that it regards the dead man as a martyr and not a criminal (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 33–40; see Arrest and Execution). The grave became at once a focus of prayer, and the monastery grew up around it as such sites characteristically do in the Orthodox world: the tomb draws pilgrims, the pilgrims require a church and clergy, and a monastic community forms to keep the shrine and serve those who come. So the shrine at Kolkondas was, in its origin, simply the place where the body lay, dignified over time into a monastery (Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 24).

The location of the shrine — near Berat, in the Orthodox heartland of what is now central Albania — placed it in a region that was, in Kosmas’s own day and long after, ethnically and linguistically mixed: a land of Orthodox Christians some of whom were Greek-speaking and some Albanian-speaking, all under the same Ottoman rule. The shrine therefore stood from the beginning at a meeting-place of peoples, not at a national frontier; the frontier that now runs between Greece and Albania was a creation of the twentieth century, two long lifetimes after the saint’s death (see Saint and National Symbol). To understand the cult at Kolkondas it is necessary to hold this in mind: the saint was buried among the Orthodox of his mission, not among “Greeks” or “Albanians” as the modern nations would later define them, and the shrine’s whole subsequent history of shared veneration and contested meaning flows from that original setting (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 33–40).

The shrine’s situation in Albania has given it a difficult history, bound up with the troubled fortunes of Orthodoxy in that land. Under the militantly atheist Communist regime of Enver Hoxha, which from 1967 declared Albania officially atheist and waged a severe persecution against all religion, the monastery and the open practice of the cult suffered with the rest of the Albanian Church; churches and monasteries were closed, destroyed, or repurposed, and religious life was driven underground (on the Albanian Church and its persecution and recovery, see Orthodoxy Guide: Greece, Bulgaria and Others). With the fall of Communism after 1990 and the revival of the Orthodox Church of Albania under Archbishop Anastasios, the shrine and the veneration of Kosmas were restored, and the monastery at the site of his martyrdom was renewed as a center of pilgrimage (the post-1990 revival of the Albanian Church and of the Kosmas shrine is reported in the literature on the Albanian Orthodox revival).

The severity of the Hoxha persecution bears emphasis, because it makes the survival of the cult the more striking. Albania under its Communist regime went further than any other state of the Eastern bloc, declaring itself in 1967 the world’s first officially atheist state and proceeding to a systematic campaign to extinguish religious practice altogether: clergy of every confession were imprisoned, defrocked, or killed; church buildings were demolished, locked, or converted to secular uses such as warehouses, cinemas, and gymnasia; and even private and domestic religious observance was criminalized (on the Albanian Church and its persecution and recovery, see Orthodoxy Guide: Greece, Bulgaria and Others). For nearly a quarter-century the open cult of Kosmas, like all open Orthodox practice on Albanian soil, was suppressed; what veneration survived did so privately, in memory and in the hidden devotion of the faithful, until the regime fell. That the cult could be publicly renewed at all after 1990 is a measure both of its depth and of the resilience of Orthodox memory under persecution.

The post-1990 revival of the Albanian Orthodox Church under Archbishop Anastasios (Yannoulatos) is the larger story within which the restoration of the Kosmas shrine belongs. Anastasios — himself a missiologist and a leading figure in the modern Orthodox missionary movement (see Glorification 1961) — found on his arrival an Orthodox Church reduced almost to nothing, its hierarchy gone, its churches ruined, and set about its reconstruction from the ground up. In that reconstruction the memory of Kosmas had a particular fitness: here was a saint who had actually preached and died on Albanian soil, an apostle of the Orthodox faith to the very land Anastasios was now re-evangelizing, and the renewal of his shrine joined the recovery of the Church’s buildings to the recovery of its missionary self-understanding (the connection of the Kosmas cult to the post-1990 Albanian revival is reported in the literature on that revival; relic and miracle traditions reported per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Relics and Surviving Crosses

The physical memorials of Kosmas are of two kinds. There are his relics — associated above all with the shrine at Kolkondas, where his tomb is venerated, with portions distributed to other churches as is the Orthodox custom (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 33–40; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). And there are the surviving crosses — the great wooden crosses he had communities raise at his preaching-places and left standing when he departed, several of which (or their successors) survive and are venerated at sites such as Votrisi, Lia, and Mousini (see The Method of the Missionary). The crosses are a distinctive feature of Kosmas’s cult, found with few parallels among other saints: a network of relic-memorials scattered across the landscape of his mission, marking the places where he preached.

The crosses repay a closer look, for they connect the cult directly to Kosmas’s missionary method. It was his practice, on arriving at a place to preach, to have the community raise a large wooden cross at the spot where he would stand and speak; the cross marked the place of the sermon and was left standing when he moved on, so that it remained as a permanent memorial of his passage and a continuing summons to the faith he had preached there (see The Method of the Missionary). The surviving crosses venerated at sites such as Votrisi, Lia, and Mousini are thus not relics of his body but relics of his work — material survivals, or honored successors, of the actual instruments of his preaching. This gives Kosmas’s cult its unusual topography: where most saints are venerated chiefly at a single tomb-shrine, Kosmas is venerated also at a dispersed network of cross-sites strung across the countryside of his mission, each one a fixed point at which his preaching is remembered. The network of crosses is, in effect, a map of the mission written on the land, and its persistence — through the centuries and through the Albanian persecution where the sites fell on that side of the border — is itself part of what the cult attests.

It is worth adding that the geography of the relics, like that of the shrine, straddles the modern border. Portions of Kosmas’s relics, distributed to churches in the Orthodox custom, are venerated in Greece as well as at Kolkondas, and the cross-sites of his late mission lie partly in regions now Albanian; so the physical memorials of the saint, taken together, lie on both sides of the Greek-Albanian frontier (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 33–40; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). The dispersal that began as a feature of his missionary method has become, in the modern situation, a feature of the cult’s cross-border character.

As with all relic and miracle material, these are reported here as what the tradition venerates and attests, pinned to that tradition rather than certified as historical fact, in keeping with the repository methodology (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The shrine attributes healings and answered prayers to the saint’s intercession, as Orthodox shrines do; these are part of the living cult and are reported as such.

The Feast and the Living Veneration

Kosmas is commemorated on 24 August, the day of his martyrdom (see Glorification 1961). His veneration is strong across the Greek Orthodox world — in his native Aetolia-Acarnania, in Epirus, on the Ionian Islands, on Mount Athos where he was tonsured, and in the Greek diaspora — and, since the post-1990 revival, in Albania, where the shrine of his martyrdom stands and where he is venerated as a saint of that land as well (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). Churches, schools, and institutions across Greece bear his name; he is a patron of missionaries and of Orthodox education, and the modern Orthodox missionary movement has taken him as a model (see Scholarship and Editions).

The shrine in Albania is, finally, the point at which the saint’s veneration crosses the modern national divide between Greece and Albania — a crossing that is both an opportunity and a source of tension, treated in its own place (see Saint and National Symbol). That the tomb of the great Greek ethnomartyr stands on Albanian soil, venerated by both peoples, is a fact full of meaning, and the cult at Kolkondas carries that meaning whether or not those who keep it always agree on what it means.

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The early cult; the burial and shrine near Berat; the relics; the feast and veneration; Christodoulides’ Life and service.)
Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), August 24. (The shrine, relics, and feast.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The cult and its memorials.)
Literature on the post-1990 revival of the Orthodox Church of Albania under Archbishop Anastasios (Yannoulatos), including the restoration of the Kosmas shrine at Kolkondas. Relic and miracle traditions reported per METHODOLOGY §3.5.