He was born in Ioannina in 1790. As a young man he was forced to leave Greece and emigrate to Russia where his father was a merchant. His real surname was Tekelis or Tsakalos. He spent a short time in Paris for studies, where he even participated in the founding of the “Greek-speaking Hotel“, a secret society with educational and patriotic aims connected with the Great East of France.

He then went to Vienna, Austria, where he came into contact with the tactician Ioannis Kapodistrias, who was then the Tsar’s foreign minister. Eventually, he ended up in Moscow, where he met the Masons Nikolaos Skoufas and Emmanuel Xanthos.

In July 1818, Athanasios Tsakalov arrived in Odessa, an important port and organized Greek community of the Black Sea, where he was very active and contributed to the methodical organization of the Society. He then followed Tecton Anthimos Gazis, a prominent member of the Society of Friends, to Constantinople, where he continued to catechize new members, and on successive trips to Smyrna, Macedonia, Thrace, reaching as far as eastern Thessaly.

Immediately after the outbreak of the revolution, he went to the Danubian principalities, where the first battles had already begun. He became Alexander Ypsilanti ‘s aide-de-camp in the Ieros Lochos and after the destruction of Dragatsani he managed to return and fight in Greece. After the end of the Revolution and the final liberation of Greece from the Turkish yoke, during the period of the country’s first governor, Ioannis Kapodistrias, Tsakalov served in the military accounting department of the General Commissariat and appeared as a proxy of Epirus in the National Assembly of Argos.

In the summer of 1832 he left Greece and settled in Russia, in Moscow, where he lived until 1851. There is information that he married and had children there. To honour him, the Greek state gave his name to a main street in the centre of Athens, namely Kolonaki, which leads to the Square of the Society of Friends.