From Brigand to Penitent
By the surviving accounts, Barbaros began as a corsair who raided the coastlines of the eastern Mediterranean and came with a pirate band to Acarnania in western Greece. After his band was defeated by the local population, he survived and turned to brigandage and murder, becoming notorious through the Xeromeros region.
The tradition relates that his conversion came when he set out to plunder a chapel of Saint George. During the Divine Liturgy he beheld the serving priest surrounded by light and, as the account has it, supported in the air by angels. A priest named John, associated with Nikopolis, became his spiritual father, baptized him, and gave him the name Barbaros - 'barbarian' - as a perpetual reminder of his former life.
Another telling describes the turning point as a moment in a cave, where, gazing on his stolen goods, he was moved by divine grace and recalled the penitent thief crucified beside Christ.
Ascetic Life
After his conversion he withdrew into the wilderness of the Xeromeros (Xiromero) area, in some accounts the woods of Tryfo, where he lived a severe ascetic life. The synaxarion relates that he went about with little or no clothing and bound himself with chains - by one account three chains, kept in honor of the Holy Trinity and in memory of those he had wronged - to mortify his body.
The sources differ on the length of this penance, giving twelve years or eighteen years.
Death
By tradition Barbaros was killed accidentally: hunters or merchants, taking the wild-looking ascetic for an animal or a threat, shot him with arrows. He is said to have died in prayer and thanksgiving; one account records the date of his repose as June 23.
Relics & Shrines
The accounts relate that after his death a curative myrrh issued from his grave, and that healings followed - among them a blind woman healed at his burial and others cured at a nearby spring; from this the epithet 'Myrrh-gusher' derives.
Tradition records that in 1571 a Venetian named Sklavounos, healed after venerating the saint's tomb, carried the relics toward Venice. Putting in at the village of Potamos on Corfu, the saint is said to have healed a paralytic, and a church dedicated to him was built there and remains. The relics are surmised to be kept in a village in northern Italy that bears the saint's name, San Barbaro.
