A Contemporary Elder of Evia

Since his glorification in 2017, the veneration of St. Iakovos Tsalikis has spread rapidly from his monastery in Evia through the Greek Orthodox world and the diaspora: the pilgrimage to St. David’s, the new hymnography and iconography, and his place among the beloved modern Greek elders. This file describes that living veneration and the character of the devotion he attracts.

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

The Pilgrimage to St. David’s

The center of Iakovos’s veneration is where his life was spent: the Monastery of Venerable David the Elder near Rovies in northern Evia. The monastery he raised from ruin, and which now guards his relics alongside those of St. David (see The Relics and Reported Miracles), is a major site of Greek pilgrimage, drawing the faithful throughout the year and in great numbers on his feast of 22 November. The pattern of his lifetime — thousands coming to the remote mountain monastery to seek the elder — has continued and grown since his death, now directed to his tomb and intercession rather than his living counsel (monastery tradition; the continuing pilgrimage is standard). In this the monastery has become a double shrine of Evia: of the sixteenth-century founder and of the twentieth-century abbot, the two saints of the one holy place.

Hymnography, Iconography, and the Cult

With his glorification came the ordinary apparatus of a saint’s veneration. An icon of St. Iakovos was written for the celebration, showing the elder in his monastic habit, and has since been widely reproduced; a liturgical service (akolouthia) with hymnography for his feast was composed, drawing on hymnographers such as Haralambos Bousias, who had earlier written his synaxarion Life (see The Sources for His Life; Glorification (2017)). Because his death was so recent, the iconography has the unusual quality of being grounded in photographs and even recordings of the living man (see His Reported Words) — so that the faithful venerate an icon of a face many of them, or their parents, actually saw. This immediacy is part of the distinctive texture of the veneration of the recent saints: Iakovos is venerated not as a remote figure of legend but as a father remembered.

Among the Modern Greek Elders

Iakovos’s veneration belongs to, and is carried by, the wider devotion to the beloved elders of twentieth-century Greece — the renewal of the charismatic eldership of which he was a part. He is venerated alongside, and often in the same breath as, St. Paisios the Athonite and St. Porphyrios, the two contemporaries with whom the tradition groups him as the “three great elders” (see Friendship with Paisios and Porphyrios); and more broadly with the whole company of recent Greek and Athonite saints — Joseph the Hesychast and his lineage, St. Nikephoros the Leper, St. Sophrony of Essex, and others — whose glorifications in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have made the modern elders a central object of contemporary Orthodox devotion. Within this company Iakovos has a distinctive profile: the saint of the Liturgy, of hidden humility, of the refugees, and of a single holy place.

The Character of the Devotion

Two features mark the devotion Iakovos attracts. First, its liturgical and intercessory character: the faithful come to him above all as to a father and an intercessor, seeking his prayers for healing, for family, for the ordinary troubles that they had brought to the living elder — a continuity of devotion across his death that is itself the substance of the cult (see The Relics and Reported Miracles). Second, its association with humility and consolation: Iakovos is loved not for grandeur or for teaching but for the gentleness, mercy, and self-effacement that the accounts uniformly report (see Humility and Spiritual Warfare; His Reported Words). He is, in the devotion of those who venerate him, a comforting saint — a father who received everyone, judged no one, and pointed all beyond himself to the mercy of God.

A Saint of the Refugees and of Evia

There is, finally, a particular resonance in Iakovos’s veneration among the descendants of the Asia Minor refugees and in the island of Evia. The child of Livisi who came to Evia as a refugee, lived his whole life in one of its mountain monasteries, and died there a saint has become one of the island’s own — a local sanctity that is at the same time a memorial of the whole displaced people from whom he came (see A Refugee Childhood in Asia Minor). In him, as in St. John the Russian whose relics the same refugees carried to the same island, the Asia Minor Catastrophe that scattered a people is answered by the sanctity it produced. Evia, which received the refugees, now venerates two of their saints; and the humble abbot of St. David’s is, in the fullest sense, a contemporary elder of Evia — of the island, of his people, and of the wider Church that has received him.

References

“Canonization of St. Iakovos (Tsalikis) of Evia celebrated by Patriarch Bartholomew with 30 bishops.” OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/113492.html. (The celebration at the Monastery of St. David; the icon and service of the new saint.)
The Garden of the Holy Spirit: Saint Iakovos of Evia. Monastery of Venerable David the Elder, Rovies, Evia. (The continuing pilgrimage; the character of his veneration.)
Bousias, Haralambos M. “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes, the Long-Range Star of Evia.” Trans. John Sanidopoulos. johnsanidopoulos.com, 20 November 2014. (The synaxarion and hymnographic veneration.)