St. Cosmas of Aetolia

Cosmas was born about the year 1714 in a village of Aetolia in western Greece. He was schooled with difficulty in those poor and oppressed years, and came at last to the Holy Mountain of Athos, where he was tonsured a monk and was ordained priest, giving himself to study and to prayer.

But a great compassion for his enslaved people drew him out of the quiet of the Mountain. Under the long Turkish domination the Greeks were sinking into ignorance, despair, and the loss of their faith, and Cosmas, with the blessing of the Patriarch, went out to preach. For some twenty years he traveled on foot through Greece, the islands, and Albania, preaching in the open air to vast crowds, setting up a great wooden cross and a stool from which he spoke.

He called the people to repentance, to keep the Lord's Day, to honor the Church and the family, and above all to learn to read, that they might know the faith; and he founded with the people's own gifts some hundreds of schools, both lower and higher, knowing that a people without learning would not keep its soul. He spoke also many things that were taken as prophecy, of times to come for the nation.

His preaching turned many from sin and strengthened the people in their faith, and so drew upon him the enmity of those whose interests it crossed. He was seized in Albania and, by the order of the authorities, put to death by hanging on the twenty-fourth of August, 1779, and his body was cast into a river.

The Church honors him as Cosmas Equal-to-the-Apostles and a new hieromartyr, and keeps his memory on the twenty-fourth of August, a preacher who gave his people both the Gospel and the school, and his own life at the last.