St. Iakovos of Evia

He was born in 1920 in Livisi in Asia Minor, and as an infant his family was uprooted in the great exchange of populations and brought to Greece, where they lived in bitter poverty on the island of Evia. From childhood he was drawn to the Church and to prayer, mocked for it by some, and he passed through hunger, hard labor, and the sufferings of the war and occupation, carrying always a tender and forgiving heart.

After his military service and the death of his mother he entered the ancient and half-ruined Monastery of St. David the Elder on Evia, and was tonsured and ordained. In time, against his own wish, he was made the abbot, and he labored to restore the monastery in poverty and to keep its services with exactness and awe.

Those who knew him bore witness that he served the Liturgy as one who saw, that he spoke of the saints of the monastery as of living companions, and that he was given to see angels and the departed and to know the thoughts and burdens of those who came to him. Yet he hid these gifts under a constant self-reproach, calling himself the least and weeping for his own unworthiness.

The suffering of all the region came to his door, and he received them with a fatherly love, casting out demons, comforting the despairing, and sending many back to life and to the Church. He bore his own long illnesses without complaint, and labored to the end for the souls entrusted to him.

He reposed on the twenty-first of November, 1991, the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple, whom he had loved. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in 2017, and the Church keeps his memory on the twenty-second of November.