The life of St Cosmas of Zographou
He was tonsured there and, after proving himself in humility and obedience, was given responsibility as ecclesiarch, overseeing the church's own services, before his superiors judged him ready for a more solitary life and released him to it. Tradition holds that at the feast of the Annunciation, keeping vigil at the neighboring monastery of Vatopedi, he saw among those serving in the church a woman, an irregularity that troubled him deeply until he realized, with a very different feeling, that he had been given a vision of the Mother of God herself. Some time afterward, praying before her icon and asking in tears how he might be saved, he heard what he took to be her own voice instructing him to withdraw into the desert outside the monastery; two days later, as if in answer to that same instruction, he reposed, on September 22, 1323. When the monks came forty days after to move his body into the monastery, tradition says, his grave was found empty, and he is remembered since as the greatest solitary the community of Zographou produced.
