A Refugee Childhood in Asia Minor

St. Iakovos Tsalikis was born on 5 November 1920 at Livisi (Makri) in Asia Minor, into a devout family of nine children of whom only a few survived infancy. Within two years the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 uprooted the family; after the father’s captivity and the flight across the Aegean, they settled at last in the village of Farakla in northern Evia, where Iakovos grew up in the poverty of the refugee.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (20th-c. elder; glorified 2017)

Birthplace and Family

Iakovos Tsalikis was born on 5 November 1920 in the town of Livisi in Asia Minor — the largely Greek settlement (also rendered Levissi or Livissi) in the region of Lycia, adjacent to the harbor town of Makri (modern Fethiye, in southwestern Turkey), from which his family’s home is sometimes named (Bousias, “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes, the Long-Range Star of Evia,” trans. Sanidopoulos, 2014; The Garden of the Holy Spirit: Saint Iakovos of Evia, the monastery biography). [Disputed: the town of his birth is given both as Livisi and, by association, as Makri (Makrí); the two are neighboring settlements in the same Lycian district, and popular sources use the names loosely. His birth date is consistently given as 5 November 1920, though sources differ on incidental particulars of the family record.]

His parents were Stavros and Theodora Tsalikis, a pious couple of a family that, according to the tradition preserved by the monastery, counted priests among its forebears (Wikipedia summary of the monastery biography, followed to The Garden of the Holy Spirit; Bousias, 2014). Theodora is said to have borne nine children, of whom only a few survived infancy — a mortality that was ordinary for the place and time and that fixed on the household the atmosphere of suffering and prayer in which Iakovos was raised (monastery biography, in The Garden of the Holy Spirit). Among the siblings who lived was a sister, Anastasia, whose eventual marriage would, decades later, release Iakovos from his family obligations to enter the monastery (see Piety, Poverty, and the Army).

The world into which he was born was, within his own lifetime, about to be destroyed. The Greek communities of the Asia Minor coast — Smyrna, Cappadocia, Pontus, and the Lycian towns such as Livisi — were ancient, and in 1920 they still lived, as they had for centuries, under a now-collapsing Ottoman order. The Tsalikis family belonged to that world; Iakovos was among the last generation of Asia Minor Greeks born on their native soil.

The Catastrophe of 1922

The Asia Minor Catastrophe — the defeat and expulsion of the Greek population of Anatolia at the close of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), culminating in the burning of Smyrna in September 1922 — swept away the world of Iakovos’s infancy. The Greek communities of the western and southern coasts were killed, fled, or, under the 1923 Convention of Lausanne, were compulsorily exchanged, ending some three thousand years of Greek life in Asia Minor (standard history of the 1922 Catastrophe and the 1923 population exchange; for the general event see also the treatment in St. Paisios’ collection, St. Paisios having been born at Farasa in Cappadocia in 1924 and carried to Greece as an infant of the same exchange).

Iakovos was not yet two years old. In the family’s account, his father Stavros was taken captive by the Turks during the upheaval and was separated from his wife and children; the mother Theodora fled with the surviving children toward the sea and passage to Greece (The Garden of the Holy Spirit; the family itinerary as summarized from the monastery biography). The very young Iakovos thus began his life as what he would in a sense remain — a refugee, a man without a homeland on earth, whose only lasting home would be a monastery.

The Flight and the Settlement in Evia

The refugee itinerary of the Tsalikis family is preserved in some detail in the monastery tradition. The ship that carried the survivors of their community brought them first to Itea, the small port on the Gulf of Corinth beneath Delphi, and from there they moved inland and settled for a time at Amfissa, the town above the Delphic plain (monastery biography, in The Garden of the Holy Spirit; itinerary as summarized in the standard biographical accounts). There the fragments of a shattered community began the hard labor of survival in a Greece already overwhelmed by more than a million refugees — a burden that reshaped the demography, economy, and politics of the whole country in the interwar years.

In 1925, after roughly three years of separation, Stavros Tsalikis found his family, and the reunited household moved to the village of Farakla in northern Evia (Euboea), the large island off the eastern coast of central Greece (monastery biography; the 1925 reunion and the move to Farakla are given in the standard accounts). It was in Evia, and eventually within a short journey of the ruined Monastery of Venerable David the Elder, that Iakovos would spend the whole remainder of his life; the island of his exile became the island of his sanctity.

There the family lived in the extreme poverty of the refugee. According to the monastery’s account, the Tsalikis household shared a storehouse with other refugee families, the individual living-quarters divided from one another only by hanging blankets (The Garden of the Holy Spirit; the storehouse detail is preserved in the popular biography). It is a scene worth holding: the future abbot of a great monastery, the elder to whom bishops and thousands of pilgrims would one day come, passed his childhood behind a blanket in a shared shed, among people who had lost everything but their faith.

The Meaning of the Refugee Origin

It would be sentimental, and untrue to the sources, to treat the refugee childhood merely as hardship to be transcended. In the tradition of Iakovos’s own words and in the reading of those who knew him, the displacement was formative in a positive sense. The Asia Minor refugees carried with them an intense and concrete piety — a Christianity woven into daily life, attached to particular saints, relics, feasts, and the physical practices of Orthodox devotion — and they carried, too, the memory of martyrdom and loss, which set the horizon of ordinary suffering low and the value of the Church high (a general characterization of Asia Minor refugee piety, of which Iakovos and Paisios are the two most celebrated ecclesiastical products). The same exchange that carried the infant Iakovos to Evia carried, to another Greek village, the infant Arsenios Eznepidis — the future St. Paisios the Athonite — so that two of the greatest Greek elders of the century were both children of the Catastrophe (on Paisios’ Cappadocian-refugee origin, see his collection).

Iakovos’s lifelong devotion to St. John the Russian, whose incorrupt relics rest at Nea Prokopi in Evia — a shrine itself created by refugees, who in 1924 carried the saint’s body from Prokopion in Cappadocia to their new home on the same island — is a direct expression of this refugee world (see Veneration of Saint David and Saint John the Russian). The child of Livisi and the relics of the Cappadocian saint reached Evia by the same historical catastrophe; that the two should meet in the devotion of the elder is one of the quiet coherences of his life.

Per the repository methodology, the particulars of this childhood reach us almost entirely through the monastery’s devotional biography, compiled after Iakovos’s death by those who venerated him, and are reported here as that tradition attests them, with the incidental variants (Livisi/Makri, the details of the family record) flagged where the sources diverge (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Sources for His Life).

See Also

References

  • Bousias, Haralambos M. “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes, the Long-Range Star of Evia.” Trans. John Sanidopoulos. johnsanidopoulos.com, 20 November 2014. (Birth 5 November 1920 at Livisi/Makri; refugee origin.)
  • The Garden of the Holy Spirit: Saint Iakovos of Evia. The English spiritual biography compiled from the Monastery of Venerable David the Elder, Rovies, Evia. (Parents Stavros and Theodora; nine children; the father’s captivity; the flight through Itea and Amfissa; the 1925 reunion and settlement at Farakla; the refugee storehouse.)
  • “Iakovos of Evia.” Reference summary used to locate dates and the settlement itinerary; followed to the monastery biography and Bousias. (Birthplace Livisi; family of nine; settlement in Evia.)
  • On the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1919–1922) and the 1923 population exchange under the Convention of Lausanne: standard modern histories of the events. Cross-reference St. Paisios the Athonite for the parallel Cappadocian-refugee case.