St. Kosmas the Aitolian

Kosmas was a monk of Mount Athos who left the Holy Mountain to preach in the villages of Greece and Albania under Ottoman rule. For twenty years he walked from village to village, preaching in simple Greek, setting up crosses, and urging people to found schools, and he started more than two hundred. Many of his sayings were remembered as prophecies. In 1779 the Ottomans strangled him near Berat and threw his body into a river.

• Feast: August 24 (New Calendar)
• Lived: 1714–1779
• Place: Kolkondas, Albania