Director and longtime artistic director of the Municipal and Regional Theater of Corfu (DIPETHE), Varvara Douka—one of the most well-known and respected figures in Greek cinema and theater—recounts to protothema.gr the incredible meeting between Pope Leo XIV and Thanasis Veggos. The encounter took place in 1993 during the filming of the movie Zoi Charisameni (“A Blessed Life”), in which Veggos starred.

“Apparently, the current bishop and now Pope Leo XIV was on a mission at the time, as it was his duty to help people living in favelas who were being persecuted by Escobar. These people lived in brick houses covered with tarps, essentially ruins, having lost everything in the civil war that ravaged the country. They were very kind people who once belonged to the middle class but had fallen on hard times. The filming conditions were necessarily poor, since we had scenes set in the favelas, where Veggos was supposed to be pulling children out of muddy water as part of the script written at the time by Malvina Karali.”

The screenplay involved a group of elderly people searching in Colombia for traces of a lost friend and the ship he had bought using their pooled money. The film was directed by Patrice Vivancos. Co-starring alongside Greek-American Varvara Douka were Eva Kotamanidou, Giorgos Moschidis, and Giorgos Veletzas. They had all traveled to Colombia to film in the Magdalena region.

“It’s well known that Veggos was a germaphobe and had difficulty adapting to such challenging sanitary conditions. He was even required to shoot scenes with children playing soccer in an open field, supposedly in the favelas of Bogotá, in water that, understandably, wasn’t the cleanest. But because he was a deeply polite man, he was embarrassed to refuse the meals offered to him. So he lied and said he had a stomach issue to justify the fact that he only ate rice. He systematically avoided the on-set food, and eventually, everyone noticed.”

“So when he was introduced to the then Bishop ‘Bobby’—as he introduced himself—who is now Pope, and was asked about his impressions, he said he wasn’t eating actively because he was fasting. The priest, believing that Veggos was following a Greek Orthodox fast (as he knew Greeks strictly observe fasting), accepted this explanation. So Veggos, unable to say it was for hygiene reasons, used fasting as his excuse.”

“Still, they had a lovely conversation, and the bishop came across as someone who truly sympathized with the poor and genuinely cared about their problems. He asked us about Greece and also about the screenplay that Malvina was writing at the time.”

Pope Leo XIV introduced himself to Varvara Douka as Bobby, asked about her origins—which were also from Chicago—and they had a pleasant and engaging conversation. Robert Prevost, as he was then known, had taken on the responsibility of protecting people suffering from the ongoing civil war, advising them on how to stay safe and transporting them from one area to another as part of his mission. As for the current Pope’s appearance back then, she describes him as a man with a warm and colorful presence, friendly and likeable, someone who easily won people over.

“Who would have imagined,” Douka says, surprised by the unexpected turn of events, “that this passionate man who spoke to us so fervently about missions across different parts of the Americas, and about the Church’s fight against drugs, would one day become Pope?” And who would have believed that from the muddy waters of Colombia, Robert Prevost would eventually find himself in the Sistine Chapel and later on the famous balcony of St. Peter’s Square, blessing the crowds.