Veneration of Saint David and Saint John the Russian

St. Iakovos Tsalikis’s spiritual world was fixed on two saints of his adopted island: St. David of Evia (c. 1519–1589), founder of the monastery that became Iakovos’s home, and St. John the Russian, whose incorrupt relics were carried by Asia Minor refugees to Nea Prokopi in Evia in 1924. Iakovos venerated both intensely, is said to have seen and conversed with them, and served in the monastery that guards St. David’s relics — a devotion that binds his own refugee history to the saints of the island.

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

St. David of Evia, the Founder

St. David of Evia — Hosios David the Elder (Ὅσιος Δαυΐδ ὁ Γέρων, c. 1519–1589) — was a monk, priest, and wonderworker of sixteenth-century Evia, remembered for asceticism, miracles, and the founding of the monastery near Rovies that bears his name (Ιερά Μονή Οσίου Δαυΐδ του Γέροντος), established around 1520 (on the monastery and its founder, “Monastery of Saint David the Elder,” reference summary; see Arrival at the Ruined Monastery (1951–52)). His relics are treasured in the monastery, whose reliquary holds portions of St. David together with relics of many other saints (“Monastery of Saint David the Elder,” reference summary, on the monastery’s reliquary). St. David is the patron of the whole region and the presiding saint of the house that was Iakovos’s home for forty years.

Iakovos’s relationship to St. David was, from the beginning, personal and formative. The tradition of his life holds that it was an experience of St. David during his first visit that redirected him from his intended pilgrimage to the Holy Land and fixed him in Evia (see Arrival at the Ruined Monastery (1951–52); The Garden of the Holy Spirit: Saint Iakovos of Evia, the monastery biography). Thereafter Iakovos understood himself as St. David’s servant and successor in the monastery, laboring to restore the founder’s ruined house, and — in the accounts of his Liturgy — as one who saw and spoke with St. David as a present companion at the altar (Bousias, “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes,” trans. Sanidopoulos, 2014, that “he often saw and spoke with Venerable David and Saint John the Russian”; see The Divine Liturgy of Elder Iakovos). It was a fitting coherence, in the eyes of his tradition, that a saint should spend his life in the monastery of a saint and be buried within its walls (see Repose (1991)).

St. John the Russian and the Refugees of Evia

The second great object of Iakovos’s devotion was St. John the Russian (Ἅγιος Ἰωάννης ὁ Ρῶσος, c. 1690–1730), the Russian soldier taken captive in the Russo-Turkish wars of the early eighteenth century and held as a slave at Prokopion (Ürgüp) in Cappadocia, who bore his servitude with such humility and holiness that his master’s household came to revere him, and whose body was found incorrupt after his death (standard Life of St. John the Russian). His incorrupt relics became one of the great treasures of the Greek community of Prokopion.

The saint’s connection to Evia is a direct product of the same catastrophe that made Iakovos a refugee. When the Greeks of Cappadocia were expelled in the population exchange of 1923–24, the community of Prokopion carried the incorrupt relics of St. John the Russian with them to Greece, and settled at a village in Evia that they named Nea Prokopi (“New Prokopi”) in memory of their lost home; there the relics rest to this day, in a great church built to receive them, a major pilgrimage shrine of the island (standard history of the translation of St. John the Russian’s relics to Nea Prokopi in 1924–25). The saint of the Cappadocian refugees thus came to rest a short journey from the monastery of the refugee Iakovos.

This shared refugee history gives Iakovos’s devotion to St. John a particular depth. Iakovos was himself a child of the Asia Minor Catastrophe (see A Refugee Childhood in Asia Minor); St. John’s relics had reached Evia by the same expulsion that carried the infant Iakovos there. In venerating the Cappadocian saint whose body the refugees had carried to their new home, Iakovos venerated, in a sense, the holiness of his own uprooted people. The accounts hold that he was close to St. John as to St. David — that he too saw and conversed with him — and that the two saints, the founder of his monastery and the saint of the refugees, were the abiding companions of his prayer (Bousias, 2014, on his seeing and speaking with both saints).

The Relics and the Reliquaries

The Monastery of Venerable David the Elder is, materially, a house of relics: its reliquary holds the relics of St. David the founder together with those of numerous other saints, gathered over the monastery’s long history, some said to have been brought from the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the sixteenth century (“Monastery of Saint David the Elder,” reference summary, on the monastery’s relics). [Disputed: some popular accounts associate a relic of St. John the Russian with the monastery of St. David itself; the saint’s principal and incorrupt relics rest at the church of Nea Prokopi in Evia, and the collection reports the monastery’s relic-holdings as attested (St. David and many other saints) without asserting an unverified relic of St. John at the monastery.] For Iakovos, the relics were not museum pieces but the presence of the saints he served among; his life at the altar, amid the relics of David and within reach of the relics of John, was lived in what he took to be their tangible company.

Local Saints and a Local Sanctity

The devotion to David and John situates Iakovos’s holiness firmly in a place. He was not a cosmopolitan theologian or a traveler but a monk of one mountain, whose spiritual world was populated by the saints of his island — the sixteenth-century founder of his monastery and the eighteenth-century Cappadocian saint whom the refugees had carried to the same island in his own lifetime. This concreteness, this attachment to particular saints, relics, and holy places, is characteristic of the Asia Minor piety Iakovos inherited (see A Refugee Childhood in Asia Minor), and it is inseparable from the liturgical holiness that was the center of his life. The saints he is said to have seen at the altar were the saints of Evia; his sanctity was, in the deepest sense, local.

See Also

References

  • Bousias, Haralambos M. “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes, the Long-Range Star of Evia.” Trans. John Sanidopoulos. johnsanidopoulos.com, 20 November 2014. (“He often saw and spoke with Venerable David and Saint John the Russian.”)
  • The Garden of the Holy Spirit: Saint Iakovos of Evia. Monastery of Venerable David the Elder, Rovies, Evia. (The experience of St. David; the devotion to both saints.)
  • “Monastery of Saint David the Elder.” Reference summary of the monastery’s history and reliquary (foundation c. 1520 by St. David; the relics of St. David and other saints); followed to the monastery’s own accounts.
  • On St. John the Russian (c. 1690–1730) and the translation of his incorrupt relics from Prokopion in Cappadocia to Nea Prokopi in Evia during the 1923–24 population exchange: standard Life and history of the shrine.