Legacy

St. Iakovos Tsalikis leaves a fourfold legacy: a great monastery raised from ruin; a witness to the primacy of the Divine Liturgy and to the sanctity of hidden humility; a saint who redeemed, in his own person, the catastrophe of the Asia Minor refugees; and a central place in the modern Greek renewal of the charismatic eldership. This file draws together what he leaves to the Church.

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

A Monastery Raised From Ruin

The most tangible of Iakovos’s legacies is the Monastery of Venerable David the Elder itself. He entered it around 1951 as a half-ruined, nearly deserted house of a few aged monks (see Arrival at the Ruined Monastery (1951–52)); he left it, at his death in 1991, a rebuilt and flourishing monastic center visited by thousands, with a living community and restored buildings (see Rebuilding and the Eldership). By his labor, prayer, and the pilgrimage his holiness drew, he saved and revived one of the historic monasteries of Evia — and made it, in addition, his own shrine, so that the house of St. David is now the house of two saints. This is a legacy of the plainest, most documentable kind: a real institution, still functioning, that exists in its present form because of him.

The Primacy of the Liturgy and the Sanctity of Humility

Iakovos’s deeper legacy is a witness — a pattern of holiness held up for imitation. Two features define it. First, the primacy of the Divine Liturgy: Iakovos was, above all, a priest for whom the Liturgy was everything, celebrated daily and tearfully to the end, and his tradition presents this liturgical holiness as the source of all the rest — the discernment, the charity, the miracles (see The Divine Liturgy of Elder Iakovos). In an age of many spiritualities, his witness is starkly traditional: the center of the Christian life is the altar.

Second, the sanctity of hidden humility. Iakovos sought nothing, hid his gifts, accused himself, and pointed all beyond himself to God (see Humility and Spiritual Warfare). He was a saint of self-effacement, whose greatness lay precisely in his smallness — the refugee child who waited thirty years for the monastery, served twenty more in obscurity, and accepted the abbacy only in obedience. His legacy is a rebuke to the cult of the spiritual celebrity: a holiness that consists in disappearing behind Christ.

A Saint of the Refugees

Iakovos leaves, too, a particular gift to a particular people. He was a child of the Asia Minor Catastrophe — born at Livisi, uprooted at two, raised in a refugee storehouse in the poverty of interwar Greece (see A Refugee Childhood in Asia Minor). That such a life should end in sanctity is, for the descendants of the more than a million refugees who reshaped modern Greece, a redemption of their history: the catastrophe that scattered a people is answered by the holiness it produced. Together with St. Paisios the Athonite, the other great elder born of the same exchange, and with St. John the Russian, whose relics the refugees carried to Iakovos’s own island (see Veneration of Saint David and Saint John the Russian), Iakovos stands as a saint of the uprooted — evidence that the God who was worshipped in the lost churches of Asia Minor was not lost with them.

A Pillar of the Modern Greek Eldership

Finally, Iakovos leaves his place in the renewal of the charismatic eldership in modern Greece. He was one of the “three great elders” — with Ss. Paisios and Porphyrios — whose lives and glorifications have made the modern elders a central object of contemporary Orthodox devotion (see Friendship with Paisios and Porphyrios; A Contemporary Elder of Evia). His witness confirmed, for a skeptical age, that the ancient gifts — discernment, healing, the vision of the saints — were not confined to antiquity but were alive in the twentieth century, in a poor monastery on a Greek island, in a man who had learned the Liturgy before he could read. That the Church glorified him within a generation of his death is a measure of how vivid and how needed that witness was.

The Shape of the Legacy

The four strands are one. Iakovos revived a monastery because he was a man of the Liturgy and of humble labor; he was a saint of the refugees because the poverty and displacement of his origin were the school of his sanctity; he belongs among the modern elders because his hidden holiness bore, in the end, the charismatic fruits the Church recognized. What he leaves is not a body of teaching or a school of thought but a life — a pattern of humility, liturgical devotion, and hidden holiness that his tradition holds up as a way, in the modern world, of becoming a saint. The assessment of that life, offered soberly and provisionally, is the subject of the final file (see Assessment).

See Also

References

  • The Garden of the Holy Spirit: Saint Iakovos of Evia. Monastery of Venerable David the Elder, Rovies, Evia. (The revival of the monastery; the liturgical and humble holiness; the refugee origin.)
  • Bousias, Haralambos M. “Elder Iakovos Tsalikes, the Long-Range Star of Evia.” Trans. John Sanidopoulos. johnsanidopoulos.com, 20 November 2014. (The synaxarion account of his life and virtues.)
  • “Monastery of Saint David the Elder.” Reference summary of the monastery’s restoration under Iakovos; followed to the monastery’s own accounts.