War Survivor Peter Kalellis Devotes Life to Compassion
When you devote your life to bettering the lives of others, your actions often have a sweeping impact with many overlapping effects.
On a trip to Athens, Greece close to 50 years ago, Father Peter Kalellis searched for a store carrying Greek music records and asked a passerby for a recommendation. “The young man pointed to a nearby music store, but then called me back giving me directions to a smaller shop with good prices,” recalled Kalellis. While conversing with the shopkeeper, the fact that Kalellis was a priest in California surfaced.
The shopkeeper shared that his mother had recently passed away in California, and he was heartbroken that he wasn’t able to attend the funeral. “I asked his mother’s name, and when he told me, I realized I was the priest who presided over his mother's funeral,” explained Kalellis. “I was also with his mother before she had passed and shared with him how peaceful she had been.” This young man represented only one of the legion of people Kalellis touched during his dynamic career.
Born in Philadelphia to a Greek family, Kalellis’s mom died when he was less than 3 years old. No one told him she had died. Instead, his father traveled with Kalellis to Greece and repeatedly told him that his mother was sick and had to stay at the hospital in America. They settled on the Greek island of Lesvos, and within the year, his father found a new wife and tried to convince Kalellis that she was his mother. This experience of the confusing and devastating loss of his source of safety and comfort planted the seeds for a robust growth of compassion and empathy that would empower Kalellis throughout his life.
Kalellis’s father and stepmother soon had two children together. While she seemed primarily focused on her two biological children, his stepmother came to love and appreciate her stepson, “Taki,” as he was nicknamed as a young boy. She raised him and his siblings while his father returned to the United States for work.
On a spring day in 1941, when Kalellis was 13 years old, he rode his bike to school as he did each day. The Greek flag at the school was gone, and in its place was a swastika. Germany had invaded Greece.
In his memoir, The Olive Picker, Kalellis wrote, “The one-armed teacher, Mr. Livanos, who had just come back from the war in Albania, fighting against the Italian Fascists, raised his left arm high [he lost his right arm in combat] and addressed the entire high school student body with a thunderous yet sad voice, ‘Our island, my dear young people, succumbed to the enemy last night. Like the rest of Europe, Greece is under Hitler’s yoke. But we need to be of courage and patience...the Nazis may conquer our land, but they can never conquer our Greek spirit.’ The students spontaneously began to sing with courage: ‘Invaded but never defeated, our Greece is afraid of no one. Enduring the pain of slavery, again we will earn glorious victory.’”
The German occupation of Lesvos continued for four years. Kalellis’ home was invaded and ransacked, and soldiers stole the bicycle he spent hours picking olives to earn the money for. Many families suffered great abuse, hardship and even death during the occupation. Out of the island population of 2000, over 300 people died of starvation. Within the extended country of Greece, 1 million people died during the war.
Kalellis wrote, “So began one of the darkest periods in all Greek history. From the Yugoslavian border, Nazi tanks had moved through the Greek towns with invincible power. Fighting airplanes furrowed the ever blue sky of Greece, vomiting fire and showering death upon the innocent below. The scourge of Hitler's war reached the entire Greek nation, even the little island of Lesvos.”
At the war's end, Kalellis returned to the United States and began his adult life on a different yet familiar continent. Despite the resistance of his family, he answered the call to join the seminary.
While presiding over the parish at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles, Kalellis founded a mission that would eventually change the lives of thousands of people. The Ladies Philoptochos Society — the philanthropic arm of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America that cared for the poor and afflicted — funded and brought three young children from Greece to receive open-heart surgery. All three suffered from congenital heart failure, and this surgery was not performed in Greece at that time.
Kalellis saw a chance to help even more people suffering from similar heart conditions. After reading about a team of seven cardiac surgeons from Loma Linda University Hospital who recently returned from Pakistan where they donated their services, he arranged for this team to travel to Greece and train Greek surgeons to perform life-saving cardiac surgeries. The surgeons would donate their time and skills, but Kalellis would need to find funding for their travel.
Kalellis convinced the manager of Olympic Airlines, then owned by Aristotle Onassis, to donate six airline tickets for the mission. While challenging to execute, the mission trips were repeated, and over the course of five years, more than 1,000 surgeries were performed. However, Kalellis knew the “teach a man to fish” approach would have more longevity, and the newly-trained resident doctors needed a way to perform future surgeries.
Kalellis recruited one of the cardiac surgeons to create a prospectus for a clinic with 100 beds which he presented to Onassis. In his will, Onassis left funding for the clinic to be opened in Athens. Today, the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center stands at seven stories tall and performs 2,000 surgeries a year.
Later, Kalellis left the priesthood, but not without mixed emotions. Desiring to continue his mission of helping others, he completed training in marriage and family therapy and earned a doctorate in psychotherapy. During this time, Kalellis welcomed his fourth child. He maintained a thriving practice in Westfield for 40 years.
In 2019, Kalellis and his wife Pat moved into a home in Virginia Beach not far from their daughter, Great Neck resident Katina Vassiliou, and her family which included three of their grandchildren. In total, Kalellis has five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
At almost 96 years old, the legacy Kalellis has built is extensive. He has mended a multitude of hearts, literally and spiritually, through his mission work, his council and his pen. To date, he is the published author of 22 books and counting. He continues to write for publications and various forums.
Kalellis truly lives by the words with which he ended his memoir — “Regardless of your age or status, when you come to know who you really are — in all your strange complexity — the unexpected miracle will appear in your life. Give thanks for this miracle and embrace it. You are that miracle!”
