Searching for a miracle?

Come visit Tarpon Springs for this event, reminiscent of a Greek Island festival.

Service on the eve of St. Michael is 7 to 9 p.m., Nov. 7. The Shrine of St. Michael is at 113 Hope Street in Tarpon Springs. Doors open at 7 a.m. and close at 6 p.m. every day except Tuesday and Wednesday, when doors close at 7 p.m.

Here’s a story I wrote of the roots of this little chapel.

TARPON SPRINGS — The faithful come from near and far.

They come with pain and anguish, torment and suffering and the terror of death. Some days a dozen come. Other days buses pull to the curb and the faithful spill out with a bone deep quiver, crossing themselves before pausing outside to light candles. They slip inside a darkened shrine on Hope Street.

This stone chapel, a few blocks from the Tarpon Springs Sponge Docks, was built to satisfy an 11-year-old boy’s promise made to the Archangel Michael during a vision as he lay near death. Steve Tsalickis (pronounced sa-LEEK-iss) was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor in 1940. God’s angel cured him, his family said, through a miracle.

Today, the devout flock to his childhood shrine to pray for their own miracles. They tell stories, fluid and peculiar, as ancient as humankind: tumors gone, sight and hearing restored. The lame leave crutches and walk out.

Every year, hundreds return to the chapel on November 8 for the feast of St. Michael, which the Greek Orthodox. On the feast’s eve, local priests lead a Vesper service. The cadence of Greek scriptures casts a spell over the gathering. The waxy warmth of candles rides the still air as if the little chapel itself is exhaling.

Faith comes instinctually to some. Faith in God, faith in miracles, faith beyond belief. Others remain skeptics.

In earlier times, the hope for miracles was the refuge of the ill and infirm who clung with undulating courage in search of divine intervention. They traveled great distances to pray at Lourdes or to drink from the chalice in England’s Glastonbury or for a pinch of earth from El Santuario de Chimayo. They claimed to experience a power, like an ocean current that kindled some resurgence inside, some connection to divinity, some impulse of life older and more obscure than thought, older than the instincts of a crocodile.

For many, like young Steve Tsalickis, it was a last hope.His head had ached for weeks with mind-crushing pain. His fourth-grade teacher sent him home, and a doctor referred him to Tampa for tests. Needles poked into his back, riddling down his spine, and returned the diagnosis of a brain tumor. His mother stayed by his bedside in Tampa for months, her hand soothing his forehead. One day, doctors told her there was nothing more they could do: Prepare for his death.

That night in the hospital, Steve was feverish and incoherent. He mumbled deliriously.

“Mama, bring me the icon of St. Michael.” His mother sent for the icon, which she kept in her living room on a table under her Iconostasion, next to a sacred lamp, aware that St. Michael is the angel of death who carries souls to Heaven.

When it arrived, Steve held it to his chest and crossed his arms over it. He knew of the miracles that caromed down through his family tree. The next morning he told his mother: “I have just seen St. Michael.”

***

Miles off shore and a decade earlier, Steve’s father, James Tsalickis, was lost to a storm.

Roiling gray clouds had marbled the sky over the Gulf of Mexico as a squall came up, unexpected and strong with whitecaps and James’ boat fought hard against the crests, pounding ceaselessly into the depths until it went skidding off into the surge, lost to the other diving boats.

After the storm passed, his friends went to his wife, Maria, to tell her James had perished.

She went out on the Sponge Docks, where the stench of drying sponges curdled the air. His boat was missing from the spot where he usually docked. She fell to her knees under a torrent of stars and begged for her husband. The sea answered with silence.

On these same docks a decade earlier, Maria had first set eyes on James Tsalickis. She arrived by ship at the seaside town from Symi, a Greek island in a chain of Dodecanese. He was waiting on the dock. He had arrived five years earlier, among the immigrants who came to harvest the sponges that grew in the Gulf. He was Adam, before Eve, lonely in this Eden. James married Maria promptly and soon they had four children. Steve was their second.

Days passed and Maria remembered what Jesus said about faith. How a person with faith in his heart could tell a mountain to throw itself into the sea and it would be done. She prayed for a miracle.

James returned the next morning, an archipelago of sunspots charting a path across his forehead. He told his wife how he had bargained for his life in the storm, promising to send money to a church back in Symi. He had clung to his boat as a wave beached him on a barrier island amidst a suddenly quiescent sea. There he spent days repairing his boat to launch home.

James sent Maria with the children and all his savings to sail to their homeland to keep his promise. There, she presented three hundred dollars to the Abbot Prior of the Monastery in the Holy Abbey of Taxiarchis Michael of Panormitis. The abbot was speechless at the great sum of money. He took a small silver icon from the wall and handed it to Maria.

On the same island, four centuries earlier, another miracle had transpired. A woman tilled the earth near the shoreline on Symi when her tool hit the icon. The woman dug it out and took it home only to find in the morning it was gone. She later found it back in the hole where she first discovered it. After retrieving it several more times, the villagers came to a decision: They would build a church at that site on the shoreline, where years later, the abbot gave Maria the icon.

“As I held the icon in my hands, chills of emotion and awe seized my body and soul immediately.”

Maria planned to stay a year in Symi, but it was 1943 and Nazis had arrived. So she packed the icon and took her children back to Tarpon Springs.

Steve clutched the icon when he woke, completely recovered. He told his mother that St. Michael came to him in the night and led him to their home. The angel showed Steve the space next door where he was to build a shrine. When he told his mother this, she said, “We can’t afford that.”

“I know,” Steve said. “I told him we are too poor to build a shrine. But he insisted. And he promised he would make me well.”

Steve told a local newspaper reporter this story when he was twelve and his family petitioned the bishop to build the shrine. Steve said that the angel flew with him to Greece, gave him communion and told him he would become a priest. But Steve became a different kind of priest. He grew up, served in the Korean War and became a guidance counselor at Tarpon Junior High School. In his retirement, he owned a shrimp restaurant on the Sponge Docks until 2007, when he died.

***

I met with Steve’s younger sister Goldie Parr in her home next to the shrine, tucked between houses on a side street, like an old world church. She remembers her brother’s illness uniting the family to build the sanctuary. She took over as caretaker after her mother died in 1994. She offered a seat, pulling from under a table a fat album stuffed with aged news clippings, pictures and letters.

The first page reads:

“This book is dedicated to all who believe in a higher power; all whose belief enables them to bring the light of God into their own lives and the lives of others.”

A yellowed clipping told of an eight year old with a rare hip disease who visited the shrine, leaving behind a leg harness and crutches. In another, a deaf teen could hear after oil was dripped into her ear. A man came after his legs were crushed and he was facing amputation. He walked out, healed.

I once arrived on a Greek island on the eve of St. Michael’s and recall the spiritual feast-day celebration, welcomed, as we were to join them. We had followed the sounds of music from our hotel room. Upon leaving the celebration after nightfall, we became hopelessly lost in a labyrinth of alleyways and paths. A man, coincidentally named Michael, finally rescued us and led us back to our hotel.

The saint guided you, she said, as she flipped through notes of gratitude. I go on with my story. The next day, we fell in with hundreds of islanders as they boarded a ferry to a volcanic island with only one structure on it, a small chapel. We followed the others, no guides, no explanations; we just flowed along. Once inside the chapel, a priest blessed us and then we were offered soup and macaroni.

People come from as far as Canada, Parr said. She held up a note addressed to her mother Maria, from a woman eager to conceive who sent a baby picture with her thanks for a wick, dipped in oil, which she swallowed, and then, per Maria’s instructions, refrained from sex for three days. “There are dozens of miracle babies,” Parr said. She gives out such wicks for the asking.

I read a news story of a housewife named Hortense Urso, diagnosed with jaw cancer while expecting her fifth child. She came in 1971 on the eve of St. Michael. Late that night, she placed her face against an icon and it turned red. A great light shone and tears flowed from paintings of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. Those gathered became hysterical and prayed. Several papers reported that story. According to an Associated Press report, about 4,000 people visited the shrine the following week.

They came in wheelchairs and with canes and left with cotton dipped in blessed oil and hope. Some were less faithful and more curious. They wondered if humidity caused the watermarks on the icons.

It makes no difference to Parr. She is in the coda of her life. This woman has known pain and her eyes understand you. She shepherds each guest into the holy space where the ambient ache of those who left lingers. She points to the icon hanging to the left of the alter. She nods you on your way with a calling stronger than any medieval monk. She keeps the doors to the shrine open all night on the eve of St. Michael’s.