01 — Foundations
The refugee ground from which St. Iakovos Tsalikis (1920–1991) rose: birth at Livisi (Makri) in Asia Minor in 1920, the catastrophe of 1922 that made his family refugees, and the devout, desperately poor youth in Evia who longed for the monastery but was drafted into the Greek army first. These two files establish who Iakovos was before the Monastery of St. David and what forces — piety, poverty, and displacement — formed him.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox (20th-c. elder; glorified 2017)
Iakovos’s whole spirituality — the humility, the identification with the poor and the suffering, the intense attachment to the liturgical and saintly life of his adopted island — is unintelligible apart from the fact that he was a child of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, raised in a refugee storehouse in the poverty of interwar Greece. This section sets that context: the lost homeland and the flight, and the years of piety and poverty that ended only when, his family duties discharged and his military service completed, he was at last free to become a monk.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| A Refugee Childhood in Asia Minor | Born at Livisi (Makri) in Asia Minor on 5 November 1920 to Stavros and Theodora Tsalikis, one of the few of nine children to survive infancy; the 1922 Catastrophe, the father’s captivity, and the family’s flight through Itea and Amfissa to the village of Farakla in Evia. |
| Piety, Poverty, and the Army | The devout boy who is said to have memorized the Divine Liturgy before he could read; the crushing poverty of the refugee community; the deaths of his mother (1942) and father (1949); his military service (1947–49) and the soldiers who mockingly called him “Father Iakovos.” |
See Also
- Arrival at the Ruined Monastery (1951–52) — where the longing of these years finally led
- The Sources for His Life — the biography and witnesses on which this account rests
- Orthodoxy: Monasticism — the monastic vocation Iakovos carried from childhood
References
- Bousias, Haralambos M. “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes, the Long-Range Star of Evia.” Trans. John Sanidopoulos. johnsanidopoulos.com, 20 November 2014.
- The Garden of the Holy Spirit: Saint Iakovos of Evia — the English spiritual biography compiled from the Monastery of Venerable David the Elder.
- “Iakovos of Evia.” Used to locate dates and the settlement itinerary; followed to the underlying monastery biography and Bousias’ Life.