Panagia Portaitissa

 A Japanese man from Tokyo is now one of the keepers of the most venerated icons on Mount Athos. Father Timotheos, born Takayuki Kozaki, converted to Orthodox Christianity and has spent the last several years living permanently at the Iviron Monastery on the Holy Mountain, where he guards the miraculous icon of the Panagia Portaitissa.

His path there was anything but direct. Kozaki originally studied aerospace engineering in Japan, working multiple jobs to survive while searching for something none of the religions of his upbringing could give him. He found Protestantism first, began reading the Bible, and felt drawn toward Christianity. After connecting with Orthodox communities in the United States, then Korea, he eventually learned of Mount Athos and the Iviron Monastery and asked his spiritual elder for permission to go. He never left.

Iviron is the third monastery in the Holy Mountain's hierarchy, founded in the 8th century by Georgian monks. Father Timotheos now speaks flawless Greek and often jokes with pilgrims that his surname sounds Cretan, saying "I'm from Tokyo but my last name is Kozakis."

He spends his days waiting patiently for pilgrims to arrive so he can tell them the legend of the Portaitissa. According to the tradition he recounts, the icon was kept in Nicaea during the Iconoclasm period, when a pious widow threw it into the sea to protect it. Years later, after the Iviron Monastery was established, the icon appeared offshore, standing upright and glowing, rising from the sea in a pillar of light reaching to the sky. Every monk who tried to approach it found it moving further away. Only the monk Gabriel succeeded in retrieving it.

The monks placed it in the monastery's main church, but it repeatedly moved on its own to a position above the monastery gate. The Virgin appeared to Gabriel and told him she had not come to be guarded by the monks, but to guard them. A chapel was built for her at the entrance, where the icon has remained ever since. Father Timotheos describes the experience of living there as a constant awareness of the miraculous, and speaks with deep affection about the late abbot of Iviron, Vasileios Gondikakis, whom he knew during his first years at the monastery.