St. Cosmas of Aetolia (1714-1779)

A monk of the Philotheou monastery on Athos who asked leave of the Patriarch in 1760 to preach, and spent the next nineteen years walking the villages of Ottoman Greece and southern Albania. He preached in the open air to crowds of thousands, from a portable wooden platform, in plain spoken Greek, and wherever he went he asked for a school: tradition counts two hundred founded, so that children would learn to read the faith for themselves. His sayings about the future were remembered and repeated long after him. Accused of stirring up the people, he was hanged near Berat in 1779 without a trial, and his body thrown into a river. He is called Equal-to-the-Apostles. Glorified in 1961. Feast: August 24.