Saint Kosmas the Aetolian as a Missionary Part 2

  What did this man not do for the benefit of the Greek nation!

First, the young Christian women serving as wet-nurses to the tyrants’ children in the palaces of the Beys and Paschas were in constant danger of being lured away from the faith through various temptations, or of being lead into debauchery, and therefore of being lost completely. Saint Kosmas succeeded in convincing many Turks to release such women from their service by telling them that they would insight the wrath of Uranus on account of their debauchery and their mingling with women of foreign religions, and that their race would thus be wiped off the face of the earth. “Where,” he asked, “has your former glory gone? Are you not the ones who under Sulayman conquered lands as far away as Vienna? Your debauchery had humbled and destroyed you. Repent, cast out the Christian women you have in your palace.” On the other hand, he advised Christian women not to become wet-nurses to Turkish children lest they suffer the same fate as the hen who hatched the viper’s eggs in the Aesopian fable. According to Vasileios Zotos, author of The Dictionary of all the Saints of the Orthodox Church, some 1500 Christian wet-nurses who had been serving in the palaces of the Paschas and the Beys were set free as a result of the Saint’s activities.

Saint Kosmas the Aetolian as a Missionary Part 1

1. Introduction.

A holy anniversary has recently been celebrated in Greece: this past 24th of August marked the passage of 180 years from the very day on which a glorious son of a Northern Epirian village on the shore of the Apsus River, next to the city of Veratios, finished the course of his life as a martyr. His very name – Kosmas that Aetolian (1714-1779) – continues to stir us even today.

Newspapers and periodicals of both the Capital and the provinces published articles marking this anniversary, however, as one journalist has remarked, most of these do not paint a true picture of Saint Kosmas. Each attempts to shade the picture according to his own preferences, thoughts, and sentiments so that the ideas of worldly circles have found expression through the mouth of the saint: were he alive today to hear these things, the saint would be distraught, seeing that the meaning of his struggle had been so manipulated and distorted. For example, because in some exceptional case the saint allowed the materials from a destroyed church to be used in order to erect a school, the conclusion has been drawn that Saint Kosmas did little more than destroy churches in order to build schools. Who did this?