Rebuilding and the Eldership

For more than two decades Iakovos labored to restore the ruined Monastery of St. David — in poverty, often near-solitude, with his own hands — while quietly becoming known as a confessor and healer of souls. He was made abbot on 25 June 1975, an office he accepted only in obedience; under his eldership the monastery filled with pilgrims and was materially rebuilt, though he himself kept to austere poverty until his death.

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

Two Decades of Poverty and Labor

When Iakovos entered the Monastery of Venerable David the Elder in the early 1950s, he joined a community of a few aged monks in a house physically and economically ruined (see Arrival at the Ruined Monastery (1951–52)). The decades that followed his ordination were, before they were anything else, decades of manual labor and material want. The monastery had almost no income; its buildings were dilapidated; the surrounding country was poor. Iakovos worked with his hands at the endless tasks of a mountain monastery — building and repair, the garden and the animals, the water and the wood — while keeping the full round of services (monastery biography, in The Garden of the Holy Spirit; the manual labor and poverty of these years are standard in the accounts).

For long stretches he was effectively alone, or nearly so, as the old monks died and few came to replace them. This period of hidden, obscure faithfulness — a young priest keeping a ruined monastery alive by his own labor and prayer, unknown to the wider world — is the substance of the middle of his life, and the school in which the qualities of his last years were formed. The humility for which he became famous was not a pose adopted in celebrity but the habit of a man who had spent twenty years as the servant of a poor house (a reading offered in the monastery tradition; see Humility and Spiritual Warfare).

The Growth of a Reputation

Even in these obscure years, Iakovos’s gifts as a confessor and spiritual guide began to be known. People from the surrounding villages and then, gradually, from further afield came to the monastery to confess, to ask prayers, and to seek counsel from the hieromonk whose discernment and evident holiness were spoken of (monastery biography; the growth of his reputation as a confessor is standard). What had been a nearly forgotten ruin began, on account of the man who lived there, to draw visitors — the beginning of the great tide of pilgrimage that marked his last decades (see Clairvoyance and Counsel; Spiritual Fatherhood).

The Abbacy of 1975

On 25 June 1975, Iakovos was made abbot (igoumenos) of the Monastery of Venerable David the Elder (Bousias, “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes,” trans. Sanidopoulos, 2014, giving 25 June 1975; the abbacy from 1975 is standard across the accounts). By the tradition of his life, he accepted the office not from ambition — of which he had none — but in obedience, reluctantly, regarding himself as unworthy of it; the self-accusation and self-effacement that mark all the accounts of his eldership are reported as genuine and constant (monastery biography, in The Garden of the Holy Spirit; the reluctant acceptance is standard). The reluctance is characteristic: the man who had waited thirty years to become a monk, and had then spent twenty years as the anonymous servant of a ruined house, did not grasp at authority when it came.

As abbot from 1975 until his death in 1991, Iakovos presided over the transformation of the monastery. Under his eldership the community grew, drawing new monks; and the monastery became one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in Greece, with thousands of pilgrims coming to confess to the elder, to ask his prayers, or simply to see his face (Wikipedia summary of the monastery biography, followed to The Garden of the Holy Spirit, on the thousands of pilgrims; the great pilgrimage is standard). With the pilgrims came, for the first time, resources — offerings that allowed the long-needed physical restoration of the monastery to be carried through, so that the ruin Iakovos had entered became, by his death, a rebuilt and flourishing house (“Monastery of Saint David the Elder,” reference summary, on the reconstruction under Iakovos as igoumen 1975–1991).

Wealth for the Monastery, Poverty for Himself

The material revival of the monastery did not alter Iakovos’s own way of life. The accounts are unanimous that the resources brought by the pilgrims were spent on the monastery, on hospitality, and on the poor, while the abbot himself continued in personal austerity and poverty — eating little, keeping nothing for himself, sleeping little, and pouring out on his visitors the charity of a man who had known hunger (monastery biography; the abbot’s continued personal poverty and lavish hospitality are standard). The revived monastery became a place of remarkable philanthropy: the elder was known for feeding and helping the poor and for a generosity that the newly available means made possible but did not create, since its root was the refugee child who had lived behind a blanket in a shared shed (see Piety, Poverty, and the Army).

The Center of His Life’s Work

The abbacy is best understood not as a promotion but as the visible fruit of what Iakovos had been doing quietly for a quarter-century. He had entered a ruin and, by labor, prayer, and the celebration of the Liturgy, had kept it alive; the office of 1975 simply set him formally over a house he had already saved, at the moment when the wider world was beginning to find its way to him. The two great works of his eldership — the physical rebuilding of the monastery and the spiritual rebuilding of the souls who came to it — were, in his own mind, subordinate to the one thing he most cared for: the daily celebration of the Divine Liturgy, to which the next section turns (see The Divine Liturgy of Elder Iakovos).

References

Bousias, Haralambos M. “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes, the Long-Range Star of Evia.” Trans. John Sanidopoulos. johnsanidopoulos.com, 20 November 2014. (Abbot from 25 June 1975.)
The Garden of the Holy Spirit: Saint Iakovos of Evia. Monastery of Venerable David the Elder, Rovies, Evia. (The decades of poverty and manual labor; the reluctant acceptance of the abbacy; the personal austerity amid the monastery’s revival; the philanthropy.)
“Monastery of Saint David the Elder” and “Iakovos of Evia.” Reference summaries used to locate the abbacy (1975–1991), the reconstruction of the monastery, and the great influx of pilgrims; followed to the monastery’s own accounts.