Frangiskos and the Call to Athos

The origins of St. Joseph the Hesychast: born Frangiskos Kottis on the Cycladic island of Paros around 1897/98, a poor and fatherless youth who went to sea, experienced a conversion, immersed himself in the lives of the saints and the ascetic fathers, and set out for Mount Athos around 1921 resolved to become a monk of hesychast prayer.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

Paros and a Fatherless Childhood

The future Elder Joseph was born Frangiskos Kottis (Φραγκίσκος Κόττης) in the village of Lefkes, in the hill country of the island of Paros in the Cyclades, into a poor family (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings, Vatopaidi, 1999, on his birth and family). His baptismal name, Frangiskos — the Greek form of Francis, common in the Catholic-influenced Cyclades — is the name the sources use for his years in the world.

His birth year is not securely fixed. [Disputed: the sources give slightly different years for Frangiskos Kottis's birth. Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi's biography and the tradition of the brotherhood place it around 1897–1898 (Joseph of Vatopaidi, *Elder Joseph the Hesychast*, 1999); 1897 and 1898 both circulate in the derivative literature and in the material issued at his 2020 glorification. No civil birth record is cited in the devotional sources, and the disagreement is reported here rather than resolved.] What the sources agree on is the shape of the childhood: the early death of his father, real poverty, and the necessity of work from a young age, so that the boy carried responsibility for helping his widowed mother and siblings (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the hardship of his early years). His mother is remembered in the tradition as a pious woman whose prayer and example left a mark on him (ibid.).

The Years at Sea and in the World

As a young man Frangiskos went to sea, in the manner of many islanders of his generation, working as a sailor and turning his hand to small trade to support his family (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on his life as a seaman and trader). The biography does not idealize these years: it presents a capable, ambitious, and at times worldly young man, energetic and even reckless, who knew the ports and the hard life of the merchant marine, and who for a time set his sights on worldly success and adventure (ibid.; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013, recalling the elder’s own accounts of his youth). This candor is characteristic of the tradition around Joseph, which does not present his sanctity as innate but as the fruit of a conversion and a lifetime of violent effort — a point his own letters press repeatedly (see Monastic Wisdom in the Letters).

The devotional sources preserve, in the manner of hagiography, vivid episodes from this period — moments in which the young man’s worldly plans were checked and his heart turned. Chief among them is a dream or vision in which he was led, as if by an officer, through a great palace, an experience the tradition reads as a summons to a higher service (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the turning of his heart). Per the repository methodology (§3.5), such episodes are reported here as what the sources attest of his conversion — the earliest witness to them being the biography written by his disciple decades later, drawing on the elder’s own recollections — not as independently documented events (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5; see Experiences Pinned to Testimony).

Conversion and the Reading of the Fathers

The decisive turn came through reading. Having acquired literacy, Frangiskos began to read the lives of the saints and the ascetic literature of the Church, and was seized by the accounts of the desert fathers and of the hesychasts — the monks of unceasing prayer (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on his reading of the Synaxarion and ascetic texts; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013). The reading did not remain literary. It produced in him a burning desire to find such men still living and to become one of them — to seek not merely salvation in the ordinary way but the “science of sciences,” the noetic prayer of the heart of which the books spoke (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the awakening of his desire for prayer). This is the seed of everything that follows: Joseph came to Athos already convinced that the highest thing in the monastic life was inner prayer, and already fearing — rightly, as it proved — that he might not easily find a living teacher of it.

His conversion was thus specifically ascetic and contemplative in its orientation from the beginning. Where many came to Athos to enter the settled liturgical and coenobitic life of the great monasteries, Frangiskos came seeking the desert and the prayer of the heart, drawn by the very texts — the Philokalia tradition, the sayings of the fathers — that the eighteenth-century revival associated with St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and St. Paisius Velichkovsky had made available again (on that revival see St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and St. Paisius Velichkovsky; on the prayer itself, The Jesus Prayer).

The Journey to the Holy Mountain

Resolved to become a monk, Frangiskos made his way to Mount Athos around 1921 (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on his arrival on the Holy Mountain). [Disputed: the date of his arrival on Athos is given as c. 1920–1921 in the biographical tradition; the precise year, like his birth year, is not fixed by a documentary record and is reported here as an approximation (Joseph of Vatopaidi, *Elder Joseph the Hesychast*, 1999).] He arrived a layman in his early twenties, without formal education, but carrying an intense and specific desire: to find a genuine elder of prayer under whom he could learn the inner work.

The Holy Mountain he entered was not the flourishing desert of his reading. It was a Mount Athos in the long decline that historians of the twentieth-century revival describe — its numbers falling, much of its life idiorrhythmic rather than strictly coenobitic, and the living practice of noetic prayer, by the testimony of Joseph’s own circle, grown rare (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on the condition of the Mountain in the early twentieth century; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the difficulty of finding a teacher of prayer). The gap between the tradition he had read about and the tradition he could actually find would define his first years and drive the search that is the subject of the next file. It is one of the ironies of his story — and, his disciples would say, the measure of his providential importance — that the man who arrived seeking a living hesychast and struggled to find one became, within a generation, the hesychast through whom the tradition was handed on again (see The Athonite Renaissance).

Frangiskos would be tonsured a monk on Athos and given the name Joseph, under which he is known; the details of that entry into the monastic life, and of the elders he first attached himself to, belong to the account of his search (see The Search for a Living Elder).

References

Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (Birth on Paros; the fatherless, poor childhood; the years at sea and in trade; the conversion and reading; the arrival on Athos c. 1921.)
Ephraim of Philotheou (of Arizona), Elder. My Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2013. (The elder’s own recollections of his youth and conversion, as remembered by a disciple.)
Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The condition of Mount Athos in the early twentieth century.)