About Photios Kontoglou

The ever-memorable Elder Philotheos Zervakos, on the 13th of July 1965, on the occasion of the death of Photios Kontoglou, wrote among other things the following:

 

Photios was for me, his spiritual father, a spiritual staff in the struggle against the visible and invisible enemies of our immaculate faith and of the patristic traditions. For this reason, his death cost me especially dearly.

We have lost a spiritual treasure. We have been deprived of a soldier of Christ with the zeal of Elijah. He was fiery in heart, fervent with the pen, unmatched with the brush. His departure from the temporal to the eternal has left a great void, difficult to fill, in the Orthodox Church and in Greece. He loved and struggled unto death for the faith and for the homeland. He has been added and enrolled as a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem, but his earthly homeland, suffering and martyric Greece, has been deprived of a son of hers, a citizen who longed and thirsted to see his homeland great and glorious, as it was exalted and handed down to us by the great emperors of Byzantium and the glorious heroes of 1821; the Greek homeland, which many of today’s Hellenophobes seek to deliver into the hands of godless barbarian enemies.

The ever-blessed Photios toiled, sweated, kept vigil, labored tirelessly and steadfastly in the mystical vineyard of the Lord, and multiplied the talent given to him—or rather, the talents given to him; thus it was just that he should find rest from his labors. Clearly, he will have heard and will hear at the final judgment the sweetest address and invitation of the Master Christ: “Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” Surely, because he fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith, he will receive the crown of righteousness from Him who sees the hearts of men and bestows an incorruptible crown. He sowed in tears upon the earth; he already reaps in gladness the sheaves of everlasting life in the heavens. May he also find us imitators of his zeal and his good confession. May his memory be eternal.

 

Greek source: https://eugenikos.blogspot.com/2025/07/blog-post_89.html