Father Christos Pappas of Alyko, the first priest ordained by Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, has passed away at the age of 88.
“The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (Psalm 117 [118]:22)
Father Christos passed away in the early hours of this morning at the University General Hospital in Ioannina, where he had been receiving treatment. His son, Leonidas, announced his repose in a post. The funeral service will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, September 23, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. local time, at the Church of the Forty Martyrs in Alyko. That is where he was born in 1938, and that is where he has returned, as all those who never truly leave eventually return.
He bore a surname inherited from a priestly ancestor several generations back. The ancestor was gone; the name remained, waiting. It took several generations for that name to be filled with meaning once again, and Father Christos was the one who filled it, at the age of fifty-three.
Alyko is one of approximately seventy Greek villages in the region of Saranda and Delvina. It belongs to Vurko, one of the areas that the Hoxha regime deigned to designate as a minority region. This meant that a few rudimentary rights were permitted. In primary school, for example, lessons were taught in the mother tongue: Greek. When asked what those years had been like, he put it bluntly: “Albania was an immense prison for everyone, but for us Greeks, the difficulties were doubled.”
In 1940, his family welcomed the Greek army as liberators. His father and brothers enlisted as volunteers. He himself was then two years old. He had not lived long enough to understand what was happening, but he lived long enough to pay the price. When the Greek army withdrew and communism arrived, his family was placed on the list of the “undesirables.” They were branded nationalists—that is, enemies of the people.
He completed the seven-year school and wanted to continue his education so that he could contribute something, laying his own little “stone” in the building of his homeland. To attend secondary school, however, one needed a certificate of political reliability, and there was no chance that his family would ever be granted one. In 1958, he found the only narrow opening available to him. He went to the neighboring district of Gjirokastër to conceal, as he put it, the traces of his “bad political convictions,” and also because the only secondary school where instruction was given in Greek operated there. It was the renowned Pedagogical School of Gjirokastër, which trained teachers for the villages of the Greek National Minority.
He completed the school, too. He received his diploma. And then — nothing.
“They would never appoint a teacher who was ‘tainted,’” he said, using the word coined by the Hoxha regime for those it considered “enemies.” Besides, you did not choose your job. You went wherever the Party told you to go. The Party sent him to work as a laborer for the state service responsible for road construction and maintenance.
He remained there for thirty years. Until 1991.
Thirty years, an entire working life, with a sledgehammer in his hands, breaking stone to fill potholes. The teacher they had forbidden to enter a classroom was breaking stone beside the road, while people with the “right” certificate drove past him in their cars.
Meanwhile, churches were being demolished throughout Albania. Those that were not demolished were turned into warehouses. From 1945 to 1967, the faith was persecuted, as it was in other countries of the Eastern Bloc; after 1967, even the smallest religious symbol was forbidden. Albania became the only state in the world to impose atheism by law. The priests were stripped of their cassocks and thrown into prison. And the people in our villages were left, by his own reckoning, for twenty-seven years without a priest and without the Divine Mysteries, with the sacred vessels and icons buried in hiding places. “We lived as crypto-Christians,” he would say — a phrase that takes you back three centuries, not to the twentieth.
In 1989, the Eastern Bloc began to collapse, and the wave reached Albania as well. The regime chose a controlled collapse rather than confrontation. People once again entered their churches openly, dug up the sacred vessels, rehung the icons, and then stood looking at one another.
There was no priest.
“The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (Psalm 117 [118]:22)
Father Christos passed away in the early hours of this morning at the University General Hospital in Ioannina, where he had been receiving treatment. His son, Leonidas, announced his repose in a post. The funeral service will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, September 23, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. local time, at the Church of the Forty Martyrs in Alyko. That is where he was born in 1938, and that is where he has returned, as all those who never truly leave eventually return.
He bore a surname inherited from a priestly ancestor several generations back. The ancestor was gone; the name remained, waiting. It took several generations for that name to be filled with meaning once again, and Father Christos was the one who filled it, at the age of fifty-three.
Alyko is one of approximately seventy Greek villages in the region of Saranda and Delvina. It belongs to Vurko, one of the areas that the Hoxha regime deigned to designate as a minority region. This meant that a few rudimentary rights were permitted. In primary school, for example, lessons were taught in the mother tongue: Greek. When asked what those years had been like, he put it bluntly: “Albania was an immense prison for everyone, but for us Greeks, the difficulties were doubled.”
In 1940, his family welcomed the Greek army as liberators. His father and brothers enlisted as volunteers. He himself was then two years old. He had not lived long enough to understand what was happening, but he lived long enough to pay the price. When the Greek army withdrew and communism arrived, his family was placed on the list of the “undesirables.” They were branded nationalists—that is, enemies of the people.
He completed the seven-year school and wanted to continue his education so that he could contribute something, laying his own little “stone” in the building of his homeland. To attend secondary school, however, one needed a certificate of political reliability, and there was no chance that his family would ever be granted one. In 1958, he found the only narrow opening available to him. He went to the neighboring district of Gjirokastër to conceal, as he put it, the traces of his “bad political convictions,” and also because the only secondary school where instruction was given in Greek operated there. It was the renowned Pedagogical School of Gjirokastër, which trained teachers for the villages of the Greek National Minority.
He completed the school, too. He received his diploma. And then — nothing.
“They would never appoint a teacher who was ‘tainted,’” he said, using the word coined by the Hoxha regime for those it considered “enemies.” Besides, you did not choose your job. You went wherever the Party told you to go. The Party sent him to work as a laborer for the state service responsible for road construction and maintenance.
He remained there for thirty years. Until 1991.
Thirty years, an entire working life, with a sledgehammer in his hands, breaking stone to fill potholes. The teacher they had forbidden to enter a classroom was breaking stone beside the road, while people with the “right” certificate drove past him in their cars.
Meanwhile, churches were being demolished throughout Albania. Those that were not demolished were turned into warehouses. From 1945 to 1967, the faith was persecuted, as it was in other countries of the Eastern Bloc; after 1967, even the smallest religious symbol was forbidden. Albania became the only state in the world to impose atheism by law. The priests were stripped of their cassocks and thrown into prison. And the people in our villages were left, by his own reckoning, for twenty-seven years without a priest and without the Divine Mysteries, with the sacred vessels and icons buried in hiding places. “We lived as crypto-Christians,” he would say — a phrase that takes you back three centuries, not to the twentieth.
In 1989, the Eastern Bloc began to collapse, and the wave reached Albania as well. The regime chose a controlled collapse rather than confrontation. People once again entered their churches openly, dug up the sacred vessels, rehung the icons, and then stood looking at one another.
There was no priest.
During Holy Week in 1990, the village’s two elderly chanters, Yannis Raftis and Philippos Kotsis, chanted all the services in Alyko. The readings were delivered by the road worker. In the summer of that same year, after the service for Pentecost, one of the two chanters took him aside and told him, in these exact words:
“Kitso, you must make up your mind and find a way to go to Greece so that you can prepare to become a priest. I would go myself, but you are younger and better educated. It will not be easy, but it is a cross we will all bear together.”
He was fifty-two years old, and they called him young. That tells you a great deal about what remained of the Church in our homeland.
He did not answer. But, he said, the words struck him so forcefully that for days he could think of nothing else. In December 1990, he crossed into Greece.
Some might have expected him to be welcomed here with open arms. That was not what happened. He spoke about it himself, without bitterness and, rather, with understanding for the others. The first clergymen he met in Ioannina looked at him with suspicion, perhaps not without reason: they saw before them a man in rags who had arrived from Albania and was telling them that he was thinking of becoming a priest. There was only one bright exception: Father Georgios Karampelas.
A few days later, he went up to Konitsa to see Metropolitan Sebastianos of Dryinoupolis. He was the man whom the people of Northern Epirus secretly listened to on their radios and wept as they heard him. Father Christos himself described their meeting as revelatory. There, he said, all his reservations disappeared. Sebastianos sent him to the Holy Mountain, to the Great Lavra, where he worked to support himself while also taking intensive lessons. At fifty-two, he became a student once again.
In June 1991, he learned that the Ecumenical Patriarchate had appointed Bishop Anastasios of Androusa as Patriarchal Exarch for Albania. Without a second thought, he went down to Athens. Anastasios arranged for him to stay at the Monastery of Penteli and ordained him a deacon on July 7, 1991. He told him that he would accompany him on his first pastoral tour of Albania.
For a month, they traveled throughout the country. Before the Exarch departed to report to the Patriarchate, one of their final stops was Alyko. There, in the Church of Saint Barbara, built upon foundations dating to the fifth century, Anastasios ordained him a priest on August 16, 1991. It was the first ordination of a Northern Epirote priest after the fall of the regime, even before the Theological School in Durrës had opened.
“This day is important for the Church and for this land,” the late Anastasios said at the time.
Whenever Father Christos recalled that day, he said that the hymn from the Praises would spontaneously come to his lips: “What shall we render to the Lord for all that He has rendered to us?”
Thirty-five years of priesthood followed. For decades, he served as a parish priest in the parish of the Forty Martyrs, with his ministry centered on the Church of Saint Barbara in Alyko, in the Municipality of Finiq. He served under the Metropolitans of Gjirokastër, Demetrios and, in recent years, Nathanael.
In 2021, marking thirty years of priesthood, he gave an interview to the newspaper Orthodox Truth, speaking with Sotirios Letsios. He was asked what work he was leaving behind. First, he replied, “That is not an easy question.” Then he spoke in numbers: more than 1,200 baptisms; nearly 1,000 couples whose marriages he had blessed; more than 3,000 Divine Liturgies. He ended with the humility that characterized him: “I do not feel that I have done anything remarkable.”
In that same answer was a phrase that, without his knowing it, summed up his entire life. “I give glory to the Lord,” he said, “because I became a little stone in the rebuilding and functioning of our Church.”
A little stone. The words of a man who had spent thirty years breaking stone with his hands and had never imagined that he himself was the cornerstone holding the wall together.
Elder Paisios used to say that God does not look at the result; He looks at the effort. If that is so, the numbers associated with Father Christos are the least of it. His account begins thirty years before his ordination, in the gravel of that road, when nobody saw him and nothing indicated where all that toil was leading.
Nor were the years after his ordination peaceful. He repeatedly became a target of nationalist circles in Albania. He said that they faced no major problems with worship and that even people of other faiths respected them, with a few exceptions. But he spoke differently about the state. He spoke of sacred relics and icons that had never been returned and were being kept in museums and warehouses. He spoke of Church properties that had not been restored to the Church, and of monasteries and churches designated as cultural monuments that remained state property. He spoke about these things in 2021, and they remain true today.
He was also asked what moved him most in his liturgical life. He answered that he felt awe when celebrating the Divine Liturgy in the old, abandoned monasteries of his homeland. In the ruins, in other words. Where another person sees a collapsed roof, he saw a liturgical life that had not been interrupted, but had merely been delayed for twenty-seven years.
“Kitso, you must make up your mind and find a way to go to Greece so that you can prepare to become a priest. I would go myself, but you are younger and better educated. It will not be easy, but it is a cross we will all bear together.”
He was fifty-two years old, and they called him young. That tells you a great deal about what remained of the Church in our homeland.
He did not answer. But, he said, the words struck him so forcefully that for days he could think of nothing else. In December 1990, he crossed into Greece.
Some might have expected him to be welcomed here with open arms. That was not what happened. He spoke about it himself, without bitterness and, rather, with understanding for the others. The first clergymen he met in Ioannina looked at him with suspicion, perhaps not without reason: they saw before them a man in rags who had arrived from Albania and was telling them that he was thinking of becoming a priest. There was only one bright exception: Father Georgios Karampelas.
A few days later, he went up to Konitsa to see Metropolitan Sebastianos of Dryinoupolis. He was the man whom the people of Northern Epirus secretly listened to on their radios and wept as they heard him. Father Christos himself described their meeting as revelatory. There, he said, all his reservations disappeared. Sebastianos sent him to the Holy Mountain, to the Great Lavra, where he worked to support himself while also taking intensive lessons. At fifty-two, he became a student once again.
In June 1991, he learned that the Ecumenical Patriarchate had appointed Bishop Anastasios of Androusa as Patriarchal Exarch for Albania. Without a second thought, he went down to Athens. Anastasios arranged for him to stay at the Monastery of Penteli and ordained him a deacon on July 7, 1991. He told him that he would accompany him on his first pastoral tour of Albania.
For a month, they traveled throughout the country. Before the Exarch departed to report to the Patriarchate, one of their final stops was Alyko. There, in the Church of Saint Barbara, built upon foundations dating to the fifth century, Anastasios ordained him a priest on August 16, 1991. It was the first ordination of a Northern Epirote priest after the fall of the regime, even before the Theological School in Durrës had opened.
“This day is important for the Church and for this land,” the late Anastasios said at the time.
Whenever Father Christos recalled that day, he said that the hymn from the Praises would spontaneously come to his lips: “What shall we render to the Lord for all that He has rendered to us?”
Thirty-five years of priesthood followed. For decades, he served as a parish priest in the parish of the Forty Martyrs, with his ministry centered on the Church of Saint Barbara in Alyko, in the Municipality of Finiq. He served under the Metropolitans of Gjirokastër, Demetrios and, in recent years, Nathanael.
In 2021, marking thirty years of priesthood, he gave an interview to the newspaper Orthodox Truth, speaking with Sotirios Letsios. He was asked what work he was leaving behind. First, he replied, “That is not an easy question.” Then he spoke in numbers: more than 1,200 baptisms; nearly 1,000 couples whose marriages he had blessed; more than 3,000 Divine Liturgies. He ended with the humility that characterized him: “I do not feel that I have done anything remarkable.”
In that same answer was a phrase that, without his knowing it, summed up his entire life. “I give glory to the Lord,” he said, “because I became a little stone in the rebuilding and functioning of our Church.”
A little stone. The words of a man who had spent thirty years breaking stone with his hands and had never imagined that he himself was the cornerstone holding the wall together.
Elder Paisios used to say that God does not look at the result; He looks at the effort. If that is so, the numbers associated with Father Christos are the least of it. His account begins thirty years before his ordination, in the gravel of that road, when nobody saw him and nothing indicated where all that toil was leading.
Nor were the years after his ordination peaceful. He repeatedly became a target of nationalist circles in Albania. He said that they faced no major problems with worship and that even people of other faiths respected them, with a few exceptions. But he spoke differently about the state. He spoke of sacred relics and icons that had never been returned and were being kept in museums and warehouses. He spoke of Church properties that had not been restored to the Church, and of monasteries and churches designated as cultural monuments that remained state property. He spoke about these things in 2021, and they remain true today.
He was also asked what moved him most in his liturgical life. He answered that he felt awe when celebrating the Divine Liturgy in the old, abandoned monasteries of his homeland. In the ruins, in other words. Where another person sees a collapsed roof, he saw a liturgical life that had not been interrupted, but had merely been delayed for twenty-seven years.
Last December, on the feast of Saint Barbara, in the thirty-fourth year of his priesthood, Metropolitan Nathanael of Gjirokastër bestowed upon him the ecclesiastical distinction of Stavrophoros, the Cross-Bearer. The cry of “Axios!”—“Worthy!”—rose spontaneously from the people. During the same service, his son Leonidas Pappas and Petros Galanis were instituted as Readers. It was Leonidas himself who announced his father’s death in the early hours of September 22, 2026.
When pressed to assess his work, Father Christos had answered simply: “The Lord is the only righteous Judge of our work.”
Tomorrow, the martyr-soaked soil of Alyko, at the Church of the Forty Martyrs, will receive him. It is the same village where he had been branded an enemy of the people and forbidden to enter a classroom. Those he baptized will be there, along with couples from among the nearly one thousand whose marriages he blessed, and families whose hands he held through difficult times. An entire community to which he restored what had been taken from it by force.
Farewell, Father Christos. The stone you broke with your own hands became a foundation that cannot be demolished.
May your memory be eternal.
September 22, 2026
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
When pressed to assess his work, Father Christos had answered simply: “The Lord is the only righteous Judge of our work.”
Tomorrow, the martyr-soaked soil of Alyko, at the Church of the Forty Martyrs, will receive him. It is the same village where he had been branded an enemy of the people and forbidden to enter a classroom. Those he baptized will be there, along with couples from among the nearly one thousand whose marriages he blessed, and families whose hands he held through difficult times. An entire community to which he restored what had been taken from it by force.
Farewell, Father Christos. The stone you broke with your own hands became a foundation that cannot be demolished.
May your memory be eternal.
September 22, 2026
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
