THE GREEK REVOLUTION

By Vladimir Moss

Greek nationalism under the Turkish yoke was nourished and sustained from three sources. One, the purest, was the Orthodox faith: since the Gospel and most of the patristic writings were written in Greek, a good knowledge of Orthodoxy required a good knowledge of Greek and Byzantine history in which Hellenism, the patriotic belief in the greatness of the Greek nation, was linked inseparably with its confession of the Orthodox faith. This Greek Orthodox nationalism (with the emphasis on “Orthodox”) was to be found especially among the monks of Mount Athos.

Another source was a natural desire to be liberated from the Ottoman yoke. The situation of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire was very difficult. As time passed and Ottoman power weakened, persecution of the faith increased. “The rights of the patriarch,” writes Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “were gradually reduced to nothing; all that was left to him was the ‘right’ of being responsible for the Christians. In the course of seventy-three years in the eighteenth century, the patriarch was replaced forty-eight times! Some were deposed and reinstalled as many as five times; many were put to torture. The rebellions of the Janissaries were accompanied by terrible bloodshed. Churches were defiled, relics cut to pieces, and the Holy Gifts profaned. Christian pogroms became more and more frequent. In the nineteenth century Turkey was simply rotting away, but the ‘sick man of Europe’ was supported at all points by other nations in opposition to Russia,”[1] the only real protector of the Orthodox in the Ottoman empire.

The Patriarch was bound by his oath of allegiance to the Sultan not to encourage protest against the Turks. However, as Sir Steven Runciman writes, “the Greek in the provinces could not understand the subtle politics of the Patriarchate. He could not appreciate the delicacy that the Patriarch and his advisers had to show in their dealings with the Sublime Porte. He looked to his village priest or to the local abbot or the bishop to protect him against the Turkish governmental authorities, and he gave his support to anyone who would champion him against the government. In the great days of the Ottoman Empire, when the administration had been efficient and on the whole just, Greek nationalism could be kept underground. But by the eighteenth century the administrative machinery was beginning to run down. Provincial Turkish governors began to revolt against the Sultan and could usually count on the support of the local Greeks. A growing number of outlaws took to the mountains. In Slav districts they were known by the Turkish name of haidouks; in Greece they were called the Klephts. They lived by banditry, directed mainly against the Turkish landowners; but they were quite ready to rob Christian merchants or travellers of any nationality. They could count on the support of the local Christian villagers, to whom they were latter-day Robin Hoods; they could almost always find refuge from the Turkish police in some local monastery…”[2]

The first and second sources of Greek nationalism combined: it was because the faith was being trampled on that the Greek revolution of 1821 had widespread support in the Church and was understood as a struggle “for faith and fatherland” in response to the insults cast at both by the Turks.

A third, less pure source of Greek nationalism was the western teaching on freedom promulgated by the French revolution, and brought back to Greece by the sons of the wealthy Phanariot families of Constantinople. By the end of the eighteenth century most educated Greeks were deeply tainted by westernism. There were other, political and economic factors exciting the dreams of the Phanariots: the conquest of the Ionian islands by Napoleon and then by the British; the rebellion of the Mohammedan warlord Ali Pasha against the Sultan in 1820; the inexorable gradual southward expansion of the Russian Empire, which drew Greek minds to the prophecies about the liberation of Constantinople by “the yellow-haired race”, the Russians; and the restrictions on the accumulation of capital in the Ottoman empire, which contrasted unfavourably with the more business-friendly regimes they had encountered in the West. However, the most important influences were undoubtedly ideological – the influence of western ideas made available by the explosion in the provision of educational opportunities for young Greeks that the Phanariots created in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth.

Such an emphasis on education had been made by Hieromartyr Cosmas of Aitolia (+1779), who built over two hundred schools. But he emphasised education in Orthodoxy in order to escape the snares of western culture.[3] These merchants, however, sent young Greeks to the universities of Western Europe, especially Germany. “Here,” writes Richard Clogg, “they came into contact not only with the heady ideas of the Enlightenment, of the French Revolution and of romantic nationalism but they were made aware of the extraordinary hold which the language and civilisation of ancient Greece had over the minds of their educated European contemporaries.

The Europeans were originally interested only in the ancient monuments. Hence the removal of the Elgin marbles and the Venus of Milo to London and Paris respectively. However, attitudes were changed, as Adam Zamoyski points out, “by Lord Byron’s visit to Greece in 1809, whose fruits were the second canto of Childe Harold, published in 1809, The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (1813), and The Siege of Corinth (1816). More interested in people than in stones, Byron concentrated on depicting the craggy nobility of the natives. He was also much affected by the notion of a once great people under alien oppression. The negative picture of the Turks and their culture – rococo Ottomania had given way to priggish neoclassical contempt – made the oppression all the crueller to the European imagination, in which the Turk combined lustfulness with barbarity. The educated European of 1800 was as disgusted by the idea of the ‘terrible’ Turk defiling Greece as his twelfth-century forebear had been at the idea of Saracens profaning the Holy Land. And just as the Holy Land called out to Christendom for vengeance and crusade, so the oppressed Greek land called out for liberation” [4]

“During the centuries of the Tourkokratia,” writes Clogg, “knowledge of the ancient Greek world had all but died out, but, under the stimulus of western classical scholarship, the budding intelligentsia developed an awareness that they were the heirs to an heritage that was universally revered throughout the civilised world. By the eve of the war in independence this progonoplexia (ancestor obsession) and arkhaiolatreia (worship of antiquity), to use the expressive Greek terms, had reached almost obsessive proportions. It was precisely during the first decade of the nineteenth century that nationalists, much to the consternation of the Church authorities, began to baptise their children with the names of (and to call their ships after) the worthies of ancient Greece rather than the Christian saints….”[5]

Such nationalistic worship of Greek pagan antiquity could be combined with contempt for the real glory of Greece – the Orthodox Church. A case in point was Adamantios Korais. Runciman writes: “He was born at Smyrna in 1748 and went as a young man to Paris, which he made his headquarters for the rest of his life. There he made contact with the French Encyclopédistes and their successors. From them he learnt a dislike for clericalism and for tradition. From reading Gibbon he came to believe that Christianity had ushered in a dark age for European civilization. His friend Karl Schlegel taught him to identify nationality with language. ‘Language is the nation.’ He wrote; ‘for where one says la langue de France one means the French nation.’ The Greeks of his time were therefore of the same race as the ancient Greeks. But to make the identification closer he sought to reform the language so that it would be nearer to the Classical form. He was, in fact, primarily responsible for the katharevousa... For the Byzantine past of Greece and for the Orthodox Church he had no use at all. His writings were eagerly read by the young intellectuals at the Phanar and by men of education all over Greece.”[6]

One of the few defences that the Church was able to produce against this rampant westernism was a work entitled The Paternal Exhortation and published in 1798. “The author’s name was given as Anthimus, Patriarch of Jerusalem. Anthimus was a sick man at the time and not expected to survive; but when he surprised his doctors by making a recovery he indignantly repudiated the authorship. The true identity of the author is unknown, but there is reason to believe that it was the Patriarch Gregory V, then entering on his first spell at the Patriarchate. Gregory, or whoever the author was, clearly knew that the book would arouse angry criticism and hoped that the critics would be checked by the saintly reputation of the moribund Anthimus. The Paternal Exhortation opens by thanking God for the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, at a time when Byzantium had begun to slip into heresy. The victory of the Turks and the tolerance that they showed to their Christian subjects were the means for preserving Orthodoxy. Good Christians should therefore be content to remain under Turkish rule. Even the Ottoman restriction on the building of churches, which the author realized might be hard to explain as beneficial, is excused by the remark that Christians should not indulge in the vainglorious pastime of erecting fine buildings; for the true Church is not made by hands, and there will be splendour enough in Heaven. After denouncing the illusory attractions of political freedom, ‘an enticement of the Devil and a murderous poison destined to push the people into disorder and destruction’, the author ends with a poem bidding the faithful to pay respect to the Sultan, whom God had set in authority over them…

“It was a document that found little sympathy with its Greek readers. Korais hastened to reply in a tract called the Fraternal Exhortation, in which he declared that the Paternal Exhortation in no way represented the feeling of the Greek people but was the ridiculous raving of a hierarch ‘who is either a fool or has been transformed from a shepherd into a wolf’…”[7]

Another product of the West that was beginning to have a baleful influence on the Greeks was Freemasonry. Runciman writes: “Though there does not seem to have been any Lodge within the Ottoman Empire, a number of Phanariots and of other Greeks became Masons in the course of journeys to the West; and in 1811 a lodge was founded at Corfu. The ideas of eighteenth-century Freemasonry were hostile to the old-established Churches. There were even a few Greek ecclesiastics among the Masons; but the effect of the movement was to weaken the influence of the Orthodox Church.”[8]

How? Mainly through its preaching of religious ecumenism – that is, the idea that all religions have a part of the truth, that none of them is perfect, and that there is no one perfect revealed truth. Patriarch Gregory opposed ecumenism as part of westernism: “Let us neither say nor think that [they who teach erroneous doctrines] also believe in one Lord, have one Baptism, and confess the one Faith. If their opinions are correct, then by necessity our own must be incorrect. But if our own doctrines are upheld and believed and given credence and confessed by all as being good, true, correct, and unadulterated, manifestly then, the so-called sacraments of all heretics are evil, bereft of divine grace, abominable, and loathsome, and the grace of ordination and the priesthood by which these sacraments are performed has vanished and departed from them. And when there is no priesthood, all the rest are dead and bereft of spiritual grace. We say these things, beloved, lest anyone – either man or woman – be misled by the heterodox regarding their apparent sacraments and their so-called Christianity. Rather, let each one stand firmly in the blameless and true Faith of Christ, especially that we may draw to ourselves those who have been led astray and, as though they were own members, unite them to the one Head, Christ, to Whom be glory and dominion unto the ages of ages. Amen.”[9]

Unfortunately, the Church’s reaction against westernism was often combined, especially among the monks, with a less healthy reaction against education as such, which was thought to be the root cause of Phanariot impiety. Runciman writes: “Cyril V’s brave attempt to found an Athonite academy showed by its failure that the monks refused to accept the intellectualism of the Phanar. There was a growing lack of sympathy between the monasteries even on Athos and the Greeks of Constantinople. With the monastic atmosphere growing hostile to culture, Athos lost its appeal to men of education. The monasteries received cruder and less worthy recruits. By the end of the eighteenth century the rate of literacy on the Holy Mountain had seriously declined; and by the early nineteenth century the monks had sunk into the state of boorish ignorance so brilliantly and maliciously described by travellers such as Richard Curzon.

“These travellers were not guiltless of exaggeration. They remarked on the exploitation by the clergy, but seldom mentioned that there were also kindly and saintly priests. They noticed how narrow were the interests of the monks and how neglected were most of their libraries. But there were still houses on Athos, such as the Grand Lavra, where the treasures of the past were still tended with care, as they were, too, in monasteries such as Sumela or Saint John on Patmos. Moreover, this distressing anti-Western anti-intellectualism was in its way an expression of integrity. The Republic of the Holy Mountain was trying to avoid the infection of worldly pride and ambition which seemed to be pervading Greek society. It was trying to keep alive the true Orthodox tradition of concentration on the eternal verities unharmed by man-made philosophies and scientific theories. The monks had been made to listen to Vulgaris’s lectures on German philosophy in the days of the Athonite academy; and they were shocked. Yet this was what they were now offered when they sought for spiritual guidance from Constantinople…”[10]

The fall in intellectual standards in turn led to another kind of nationalism which was detrimental to Ecumenical Orthodoxy: the assumption that Greek Orthodoxy was necessarily superior to other national forms of Orthodoxy, and that in consequence the other nations had to be led by Greeks. “Even on Athos nationalism reared its head. The Greek monasteries began to show hostility to the Serbian and Bulgarian houses and soon, also, to the Roumanians and Russians; and the hostility was to grow in the nineteenth century.”[11]

The Phanariots tended to share the monks’ condescending attitude to other national Orthodox traditions. This was especially the case in relation to the Serbs and Bulgars. Thus “the first Greek had been appointed to the patriarchate of Peč in 1737 at the insistence of the Dragoman Alexandros Mavrokordatos on the plea that the Serbs could not be trusted. The Phanariotes began a policy which led to the exclusion of any Serbian nationals in the episcopacy.”[12] In September, 1766 the Ecumenical Patriarch Samuel took over the Serbian patriarchate at Peč, and in January, 1767 the Bulgarian Church was absorbed with the forced retirement of Archbishop Arsenius of Ochrid.

“Everywhere former bishops who were native Bulgars and Serbs were deposed and replaced by Greeks. This canonical abuse of power was accompanied by forced ‘Grecizing’, particularly in Bulgaria , where it later served as the basis of the so-called Bulgarian question.

“This same sad picture prevailed in the East as well, in the patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, where Orthodox Arabs became the victims of this forced unification. All these offenses, stored up and concealed – all these unsettled accounts and intrigues – would have their effect when the Turkish hold began to slacken and the hour for the rebirth of the Slavic peoples drew near…”[13]

Even in the eleventh century, when Emperor Basil II “the Bulgar-slayer” destroyed the First Bulgarian empire, and demoted the Bulgarian patriarchate to the status of a “holy archiepiscopate”, he did not destroy the autocephaly of the Bulgarian Church. Moreover, he appointed a Bulgarian as first archbishop of Ochrid in the new dispensation.[14] In the eighteenth century, however, the Greeks achieved through “peaceful” means – and through the agency of the Turks – what they had not achieved in the eleventh century: the complete suppression of Slavic ecclesiastical independence.

And so, mixed with the righteous nationalism, “for faith and fatherland”, was an unrighteous, fallen nationalism influenced by the ideas of the French revolution and ready at times to put the narrow interests of the Greek nation above those of the other oppressed Orthodox under the Turkish yoke. Such was the nationalist bombast of, for example, Benjamin of Lesbos, who wrote: “Nature has set limits to the aspirations of other men, but not to those of the Greeks. The Greeks were not in the past and are not now subject to the laws of nature…”[15]

This mixed character of the Greek revolution determined its mixed outcome, and the fact that, in the course of the nineteenth century, Orthodox Eastern Europe was liberated, not through a single, united Orthodox movement of liberation, but by separate nationalist movements – Greek, Bulgarian, Serb, Romanian – which ended up, in 1912-1913, fighting each other as much as the common enemy…

“One of the first to develop plans for a co-ordinated revolt,” writes Clogg, “was Rigas Velestinlis, a Hellenised Vlach from Thessaly. After acquiring his early political experience in the service of the Phanariot hospodars of the Danubian principalities, he had been powerfully influenced by the French Revolution during a sojourn in Vienna in the 1790s. The political tracts, and in particular his Declaration of the Rights of Man, which he had printed in Vienna and with which he aspired to revolutionise the Balkans, are redolent of the French example. Potentially the most significant was the New Political Constitution of the Inhabitants of Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Aegean and the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. This envisaged the establishment of a revived Byzantine Empire but with the substitution of republican institutions on the French model for the autocracy of Byzantium. Although it was intended to embrace all the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, Greeks, whether by birth or by culture, were to predominate. Rigas’ carefully articulated schemes were without result for he was betrayed (by a fellow Greek) in Trieste as he was about to leave the Hapsburg territory to preach the gospel of revolution in the Balkans. With a handful of fellow conspirators he was put to death by the Ottomans in Belgrade in May 1798.”[16]

However, the revolution was opposed also by the Patriarchate. Runciman writes: “A test came early in the nineteenth century when Sultan Selim made a serious effort to suppress brigandage. The Klephts in Greece, thanks to the spirit of revolt and to the hymns of Rhigas, had become popular heroes. It was a patriotic duty for a Greek to give them shelter against the police; and the village priest and the monks of the country monasteries were eager to help them. But they were a menace to orderly rule; and when the Sultan demanded of the Patriarch that he should issue a stern decree threatening with excommunication any priest or monk who would not aid the authorities in their suppression, the Patriarch could not well refuse. The decree was published in the Peloponnese; and though most of the higher clergy sullenly obeyed it, the villages and the poorer monasteries were outraged; and even at the Phanar there was open disapproval. It became clear that when the moment for revolt arrived the Patriarch would not be at its head.

“In spite of the Patriarch the plots continued. At the end of the eighteenth century there were even several secret societies in existence, with names such as the Athena, which hoped to liberate Greece with French help and which counted Korais among its members, or the Phoenix, which pinned its hopes on Russia. In 1814 three Greek merchants at Odessa in Russia, Nicholas Emmanuel Xanthos and Athanasius Tsakalof, the first a member of the Phoenix and the latter two freemasons, founded a society which they called the Hetaireia ton Philikon, the Society of Friends. Thanks chiefly to the energy of Skouphas, who unfortunately died in 1817, it soon superseded all the previous societies and became the rallying point of the rebellion. Skouphas was determined to include in the society patriots of every description; and soon it had amongst its members Phanariots such as Prince Constantine Ypsilanti and his hot-headed sons, Alexander and Nicholas, all now living in exile in Russia, and members of the Mavrocordato and Caradja families, or high ecclesiastics such as Ignatius, Metropolitan of Arta and later of Wallachia, and Germanus, Metropolitan of Patras[17], intellectuals such as Anthimus Ghazis, and brigand leaders such as the armatolos George Olympios and Kolokotronis. It was organized partly on Masonic lines and partly on what the founders believed to have been the early Christian organization. It had four grades. [18] The lowest was that of Blood-brothers, which was confined to illiterates. Next were the Recommended, who swore an oath to obey their superiors but were not permitted to know more than the general patriotic aims of the society[19] and were kept in ignorance of the names of their superiors and were supposed not even to know of the existence of the Blood-brothers. Above them were the Priests, who could initiate Blood-brothers and Recommended and who, after solemn oaths, were allowed to know the detailed aims of the society. Above them again were the Pastors, who supervised the Pastors, who supervised the Priests and saw that they only initiated suitable candidates; a suitable Recommended could become a Pastor without passing through the grade of Priest. From the Pastors were chosen the supreme authorities of the society, the Arche. The names of the Arche were unknown except to each other, and their meetings were held in absolute secrecy. This was thought necessary not only security against external powers but also for the prestige of the society. Had the names of its directors been known, there might have been opposition to several of them, particularly among such a faction-loving people as the Greeks; whereas the mystery surrounding the Arche enabled hints to be dropped that it included such weighty figures as the Tsar himself. All grades had to swear unconditional obedience to the Arche, which itself operated through twelve Apostles, whose business it was to win recruits and to organize branches in different provinces and countries. They were appointed just before the death of Skouphas; and their names are known. It was first decided to fix the headquarters of the society on Mount Pelion, but later, after the initiation of the Maniot chieftain, Peter Mavromichalis, it was moved to the Mani, in the south-east of the Peloponnese, a district into which the Turks had never ventured to penetrate.

“There were however two distinguished Greeks who refused to join the Society. One was the ex-Patriarch Gregory V. He had been deposed for the second time in 1808, and was living on Mount Athos, where the Apostle John Pharmakis visited him. Gregory pointed out that it was impossible for him to swear an oath of unconditional obedience to the unknown leaders of a secret society[20] and that anyhow he was bound by oath to respect the authority of the Sultan. The reigning Patriarch, Cyril VI, was not approached. Still more disappointing was the refusal of the Tsar’s foreign minister, John Capodistrias, to countenance the Hetairia.[21]

“John Antony, Count Capodistrias, had been born in Corfu in 1770, and as a young man had worked for the Ionian government there, before going to Russia at the time of the second French occupation of the Ionian islands in 1807. He was given a post in the Russian diplomatic service and was attached to the Russian Embassy at Vienna in 1811, and next year was one of the Russian delegates at the treaty negotiations at Bucharest. His remarkable abilities impressed Tsar Alexander, who in 1815 nominated him Secretary of State and Assistant Foreign Minister. In his youth Capodistrias had made contacts with many of the Greek revolutionary thinkers, and he was well known to be a Greek patriot. In the past many Greeks had looked to France to deliver them from the Turks; but after Napoleon’s collapse the whole Greek world turned to Russia, and Capodistrias’s accession to power gave them confidence. The Russian sovereign was the great patron of Orthodoxy. The Greeks forgot how little they had gained from Catherine the Great, the imperialistic German free-thinker, who had incited them to revolt in 1770 and then had abandoned them.[22] But at the Treaty of Kučuk Kainarci in 1774 Russia had acquired the right to intervene in Turkish internal affairs in the interests of the Orthodox. Catherine’s son, … Paul, was clearly unwilling to help the Greek cause; but when Alexander I succeeded his murdered father in 1801 hopes rose. Alexander was known to have liberal views and mystical Orthodox sympathies. Belief in his aid had encouraged the Princes of Moldavia and Wallachia to plot against the Sultan in 1806; and, when they were deposed by the Sultan, the Tsar cited his rights under the Treaty of Kučuk Kainarci and declared war on Turkey. The only outcome of the war had been the annexation by Russia of the Moldavian province of Bessarabia. But the Greeks were not discouraged. Now, with a Greek as the Tsar’s Secretary of State, the time had surely come for the War of Liberation. The plotters refused to realize that Capodistrias was the Tsar’s servant and a practical man of the world; and they did not know that the Tsar himself was becoming more reactionary and less willing to countenance rebellion against established authority.

“The planners of Greek independence could not count on the open support of the Patriarchate. They should have realized that they also could not count on the support of Russia. And the nationalist ecclesiastical policy of the Church during the last century deprived them of the friendship of the other peoples of the Balkans. The leaders of the Hetairia were aware of this. They made earnest attempts to enrol Serbian, Bulgarian and Roumanian members. When Karageorge revolted against the Turks in Serbia Greek armatoles and klephts came to join him. Even the Phanariot princes had offered support; but they were rebuffed. ‘The Greek Princes of the Phanar,’ Karageorge wrote, ‘can never make common cause with people who do not wish to be treated like animals.’ Karageorge’s revolt was put down by the Turks in 1813. Two years later the Serbs revolted again, under Miloš Obrenovitć, a far subtler diplomat, who secured Austrian support and eventually induced the Sultan to accept him as a reliable vassal-prince. Miloš had no contact with the Greeks. The Hetairia therefore pinned its faith on Karageorge, who was persuaded to become a member in 1817. As Karageorge was greatly admired by the Bulgarians it was hoped that numbers of them would now join the movement. Karageorge was then sent back to Serbia. But the Serbs, who were satisfied with Miloš’s achievements, offered him no support; and Miloš regarded him as a rival to be eliminated. He was assassinated in June 1817. With his death any hope of interesting the Serbs in the coming Greek rebellion faded out; and there was no one capable of rallying the Bulgars to the cause. Karageorge alone could have given the Hetairia the air of not being exclusively Greek.

“The Hetairia had higher hopes of the Roumanians. There a peasant leader, Tudor Vladimirescu, who had led a band to help the Serbs, was defying the Turkish police in the Carpathian mountains and had gathered together a considerable company. He was in close touch with two leading hetaerists, George Olympius and Phokianos Savvas, and he himself joined the society, promising to co-ordinate his movements with the Greeks’. But he was an unreliable ally; for he was bitterly opposed to the Phanariot princes, who, he considered, had brought ruin to his country…”[23]

[1] Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977, p. 274.
[2] Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 391.
[3] “It is better,” he said, “my brother, for you to have a Greek school in your village rather than fountains and rivers, for when your child becomes educated, then he becomes a human being. The school opens churches; the school opens monasteries.” And to the people of Parga he said: “Take care to establish without fail a Greek school in which your children will learn all that you are ignorant of [because] our faith wasn’t established by ignorant saints, but by wise and educated saints who interpreted the Holy Scriptures accurately and who enlightened us sufficiently by inspired teachings” (Nomikos Michael Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period 1437-1860, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, p. 202).
[4] Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p. 233. There is a tradition in Greece that Byron died as an Orthodox Christian… (V.M.)
[5] Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 27-28.
[6] Runciman, op. cit., pp. 392-393.
[7] Runciman, op. cit., pp. 394-395, 396. Cf. Frazee, op. cit., p. 8.
[8] Runciman, op. cit., p. 392. The Greek Church officially condemned Freemasonry in 1744, and Archbishop Cyprian of Cyprus anathematised it in 1815. Capodistrias condemned it in 1828 and 1831. However, some still argue that he was a Mason, and one of the secret leaders of the Hetairia. Thus according to the Grand Lodge of Greece, Capodistrias was both a member of the Hetairia and a member of the “Rosia” lodge (http://www.grandlodge.gr/Famous_gr_home.html). Cf. Ioannis Michealetos, “Freemasonry in Greece: Secret History Revealed”, http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/10oct/greekfreemasonry.html, Vsevolod Sakharov, “Russkij Ministr, ‘Kormchij’ Gretsii, Vol’nij Kamenschik”, http://archives.narod.ru/gr-web.htm (in Russian).
[9] St. Gregory, An Explanation of the Apostolic Lections. The movement to reject the sacraments of the Latin and Protestant heretics had been initiated by Patriarch Cyril V in his famous synodal decree of 1756, which ruled that all western heretics coming to Orthodoxy must be baptized. It was supported by the monk Auxentios and the Chian doctor Eustratios Argenti, and opposed by Patriarchs Paisios and Callinicus IV, who exiled Cyril V to Rhodes.
[10] Runciman, op. cit., p. 390.
[11] Runciman, op. cit., p. 391.
[12] Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece 1821-1853, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 7, note 1.
[13] Schmemann, op. cit., p. 280.
[14] Alexander Dvorkin, Ocherki po Istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (Sketches on the History of the Universal Orthodox Church), Nizhni-Novgorod, 2006, p. 678 (in Russian).
[15] Benjamin, Stoikheia tis Metaphysikis (The Elements of Metaphysics), 1820 (in Greek); quoted in Clogg, op. cit., p. 33.
[16] Clogg, op. cit., pp. 29, 31.
[17] He came from the same village of Dhimitsana in the Peloponnese as Patriarch Gregory V. The attitudes of these two hierarchs came to symbolise a fundamental division in Greek society that was to continue for decades… (V.M.)
[18] Although the Philiki Hetairia recalled Masonry in its four grades, its oaths of secrecy and obedience to unknown leaders, and in the fact that two of its three founders were in fact Freemasons, it was nevertheless Orthodox in its ideology, according to Archimandrite Ambrose, (Tektonismos kai Philiki Hetairia (Masonry and the Society of Friends), Athens, 1972 (in Greek)). (V.M.)
[19] Adam Zamoyski writes that “its ultimate aim was the liberation of Greece and the restoration of a Greek Empire. More immediately it was concerned with the ‘purification’ of the Greek nation…. By 1821 the Hetairia had a total of 911 members.” (Holy Madness, p. 234) (V.M.)
[20] Frazee, op. cit., p. 24. Moreover, these “highest authorities” (anotati arkhi) were called “Great Priests of the Eleusinian Mysteries” (Clogg, op. cit., p. 35). Almost certainly, no real connection with the pagan mysteries was meant. Nevertheless, it is understandable that the first priest in Orthodoxy could not be involved in such things! (V.M.)
[21] The Hetairia sent an envoy to Capodistrias in St. Petersburg. He was appalled, and advised them that “if they [the conspirators] do not want to perish themselves and destroy together with themselves their innocent and unfortunate Race, they should abandon their revolutionary plots and live as before under the Governments they find themselves, until Providence decides otherwise.” (Archimandrite Ambrose, op. cit., p. 77). Again, when the revolution broke out, he said: “So, a premature revolution for Greece that is going to destroy all my efforts for a happy future” (Frazee, op. cit., p. 17). However, he did not betray the plan of the plotters, and when the revolution began he resigned his post as minister and went to Geneva, where he worked quietly to help the insurgents. (V.M.)
[22] In 1770 “the ill-fated Orlov expedition to the Peloponessos, launched by Catherine the Great, and the combined Russian-Greek attempt to free the Peloponnesos from the tyranny of the Ottoman Mohammedans, ended in disaster. In addition to destroying the Greek military forces and many of the Russians, the Albanian Mohammedan mercenaries, who were called in by the Ottoman Mohammedans, wreaked havoc on the local population…” (Vaporis, op. cit., p. 337) (V.M.)
[23] Runciman, op. cit., pp. 398-402. That the Romanians should have placed their hopes of freedom from the Turks on the Russian tsar rather than on a Greek phanariot was hardly surprising. Moldavia had been closely linked to Russia for many centuries, and in November, 1806, when the Russo-Turkish war began, Metropolitan Benjamin (Kostake) in his pastoral epistle wrote: “The true happiness of these lands lies in their union with Russia”. And when Bessarabia, that is, the part of Moldavia east of the Prut, was united to Russia in 1812, there was great rejoicing among the people, and in five years the population of Bessarabia almost doubled through an influx from the lands west of the Prut. (Vladimir Bukarsky, “Moskovskij Patriarkhat pod udarom: na ocheredi – Moldavia”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 23 (1836), December 1/14, 2007, p. 4 (in Russian).

“By the end of 1820,” continues Runciman, “everything seemed to be ready. Ali Pasha of Janina was in open revolt against the Sultan; and had promised help to the Greeks; and though Osman Pasvanoglu was dead, his pashalik of Vidin was in disorder, tying up Turkish troops south of the Danube. The Arche of the Hetairia had a few months previously elected a Captain-General, choosing a young Phanariot Alexander Ypsilanti, son of the ex-Prince Constantine of Moldavia. It is interesting to note that the plotters considered that only a Phanariot had sufficient experience and prestige for the post. Alexander Ypsilanti was born in 1792 and spent his youth in Russia. He had won a reputation for gallantry and military skill when serving in the Russian army and had lost an arm at the battle of Kulm, fighting against the French. He was known to be an intimate friend of the Tsar and the Tsaritsa and of Capodistrias. He made it his first task to improve the efficiency of the Society and summoned the one and only plenary meeting of the Arche, which was held at Ismail in southern Russia in October 1820. The original plan had been to start the revolt in the Peloponnese, where there would be a secure base in the Mani and where the sympathy of the inhabitants was assured. Alexander now changed his mind. It would be better to start the main campaign in Moldavia. By the Treaty of Bucharest the Turks had undertaken not to send troops into the Principalities without Russian consent. Vladimirescu would distract what Turkish militia was there already; and a successful army sweeping through Wallachia and across the Danube was the only thing that might induce the Bulgarians and the Serbians to join in. Meanwhile a subsidiary rising in the Peloponnese, which Alexander’s brother Demetrius was sent to organize, would further embarrass the Turks.

“The invasion of Moldavia was timed to begin on 24 November (O.S.) 1820. Alexander had already gathered together a small army of Greeks and Christian Albanians on the Russian side of the frontier. Almost at the last moment Capodistrias counselled delay. The Austrian secret police had discovered the plans and had sent to warn the Sultan; and the Tsar was nervous of international reactions. But, in January 1821, Vladimirescu, encouraged by George Olympus, against the advice of Phokianos Savvas, began to attack Turkish police posts and was scornful of Ypsilanti’s hesitation. About the same time the Prince of Wallachia, Alexander Soutzo, died, poisoned it was rumoured by the Hetairia, of which he was known to disapprove. Demetrius Ypsilanti reported from the Peloponnese that everyone there was impatient of further delays. Alexander Ypsilanti decided that the time had come to act. He sought an audience of the Tsar before leaving St. Petersburg, but it was refused. [1] The Tsaritsa, however, sent him her blessing; and he was assured that the Tsar would personally protect his wife. On 22 February (O.S.) Alexander and his little band crossed over the Pruth into Moldavia.

“In his desire to prevent a leakage of news Alexander had not warned his fellow-plotters. When news of his advance reached the Peloponnese, his brother Demetrius hesitated, fearing that it might be a false rumour. But the people would not wait. They found a leader in Germanus, Metropolitan of Patras, who, in defiance of the Patriarchate and of Orthodox tradition, raised the standard of revolt at the monastery of Agia Lavra, near Kalavryta, on 25 March. [2] The Mani had already risen. The islands of Spetsai and Psara and a little later Hydra rose in early April. By the end of April all central and southern Greece was up in arms.

“But it was now too late for Alexander Ypsilanti. He had marched unopposed on Bucharest. But there was no news of any rising among the Bulgarians or the Serbs; and when he reached Bucharest he found that Tudor Vladimirescu and his troops were there before him; and they refused to let him into the city. ‘I am not prepared to shed Roumanian blood for Greeks,’ said Vladimirescu. There were skirmishes between the two forces. Then came news that the Tsar had repudiated the whole rebellion at the Congress of Laibach, and with his permission a huge Turkish army was approaching the Danube, ready to invade the Principalities. Ypsilanti retired north-east, towards the Russian frontier. Vladimirescu, after lingering for a few days in Bucharest trying to make terms with the Turkish commander, moved back on 15 May into the Carpathians. But he had lost control over his own followers. They allowed George Olympus to take him prisoner and to put him to death, on the evening of 26 May, for his treason to the cause. Phokianos Savvas and a garrison of Albanians held Bucharest for a week, then also retired into the mountains. The Turks entered Bucharest before the end of May, then moved in pursuit of Ypsilanti. On 7 June (O.S.) they routed his army at a battle at Dragasani. His best troops perished. He himself fled over the Austrian border into Bukovina, where by Metternich’s orders he was arrested. He spent the remainder of his life in an Austrian prison. The remnant of his army was rallied by George Cantacuzenus, who led them back towards the Russian frontier. But the frontier was closed to them. The Turks caught up with them at Sculeni on the Pruth and massacred them there, on 17 June, in sight of Russian territory. Savvas surrendered to the Turks in August and was put to death by them. George Olympus held out till September in the monastery of Secu. When all hope was lost he fired his powder stores and blew up the monastery with himself and all his garrison within it.”[3]

However, while the Phanariot rebellion in the north failed, the rebellion of the bishops in the south succeeded. But the cost was high. A characteristic of the Greek War on Independence was the extreme cruelty on both sides. Within a few months, shouting “Kill all the Turks in the Morea”, the Greeks had killed 20,000 men, women and children. At Tripolitsa, the Scottish Philhellene Thomas Gordon watched as the Greeks, “mad with vindictive rage, spared neither age nor sex – the streets and houses were inundated with blood, and obstructed with heaps of dead bodies. Some Mohammedans fought bravely and sold their lives dearly, but the majority were slaughtered without resistance…” 2000 women and children were massacred in a defile of Mount Maenalion. The Turks responded in kind. The most famous massacre took place in May, 1822 in Chios, where, in response to the arrival of a small party of Greek revolutionaries from Samos, 30,000 Muslims invaded from Asia Minor, killed 25,000 Greeks and took 45,000 into slavery.

The war placed Patriarch Gregory V in Constantinople in an impossible position. The Sultan was convinced that he was at least in part to blame for the insurrection. So Gregory, writes Frazee, “called a meeting of the Greek leaders and people to discuss their common peril that same day after he had met with the sultan. Mahmud had demanded that the patriarch and Synod excommunicate those responsible for the uprising and those who had killed innocent Turks. At the patriarchate, therefore, the patriarch of Jerusalem, Polykarpos, four synodal archbishops, Karolos Kallimachi, Hospodar of Wallachia, the Dragoman of the Porte, Konstantinos Mourousi, and the Grand Logothete, Stephanos Mavroyeni, gathered to decided on their next step. A number of other Greeks were also in attendance ‘of every class and condition’. Gregorios and Mourousi presided. The assembled Greeks were all exhorted ‘to carefully guard against any move or action contrary to their allegiance and fidelity to their Sovereign’. A letter was drafted which incorporated the sultan’s suggestion and was sent off to be printed at the patriarchal press. The patriarch then urged that the Greeks prepare to leave the city quickly, promising that he would stay: ‘As for me, I believe that my end is approaching, but I must stay at my post to die, and if I remain, then the Turks will not be given a plausible pretext to massacre the Christians of the capital.’

“The letter of excommunication against the revolutionaries appeared on Palm Sunday, 4 April, in all the Greek churches of the capital signed by the patriarch, Polykarpos of Jerusalem, and twenty-one other prelates. In part, the document stated: ‘Gratitude to our benefactors is the first of virtues and ingratitude is severely condemned by the Holy Scriptures and declared unpardonable by Jesus Christ; Judas the ungrateful traitor offers a terrible example of it; but it is most strongly evidenced by those who rise against their common protector and lawful sovereign, and against Christ, who has said that there is no rule or power but comes from God. It was against this principle that Michael Soutzos and Alexandros Ypsilantis, son of a fugitive, sinned with an audacity beyond example, and have sent emissaries to seduce others, and to conduct them to the abyss of perdition; many have been so tempted to join an unlawful hetairia and thought themselves bound by their oath to continue [as] members, but an oath to commit a sin was itself a sin, and not binding – like that of Herod, who, that he might not break a wicked obligation committed a great wickedness by the death of John the Baptist.’ The text ended by solemnly condemning and excommunicating Soutzos and Ypsilantis, having been signed on the altar itself. The patriarchal letter was the final blow to strike Ypsilantis’ fading expedition in the Principalities.”[4]

Some have argued that the patriarch secretly repudiated this anathema; which is why the Turks, suspecting him of treachery, hanged him on the Sunday of Pascha. Gregory’s biographer, Kandiloros writes: “As the representative of Christ it cannot be believed that the patriarch signed such a letter. But as the head of a threatened people, he had to take measures, as well as he could, to save his powerless and hard-pressed population from being massacred.”[5] “In any case,” writes Fr. Anthony Gavalas, “the anathema was ignored, as were all the other letters unfavourable to the plans of the revolutionaries, as having been issued under duress. There is an opinion that the patriarch knew that the anathema would be so considered and issued it, hoping to placate the Turks on the one hand, and on the other, to gain time for the revolution to gain strength.”[6] However, the righteousness of the patriarch’s character precludes the possibility that he could have been plotting against a government to which he had sworn allegiance and for which he prayed in the Divine Liturgy, or that he could have been hypocritical in such an important church act. After all, as we have seen, he had always refused to join the Philiki Hetairia. In this connection it is significant that the patriarch’s body was picked up by a Russian ship and taken to Odessa, mutely pointing to the place where the organisation that had indirectly caused his death was centred.

The Greeks paid a heavy price for the political freedom they gained. After the martyrdom of Patriarch Gregory, the Turks ran amok in Constantinople; and there were further pogroms in Smyrna, Adrianople, Crete and Chios. Although many Greeks undoubtedly fought for the sake of Orthodoxy against Islam, the essentially western ideology of several of their leaders[7] explains why so many young westerners, among whom the most famous was the poet Byron, decided to join the Greek freedom-fighters. But the westerners were fighting, not for Orthodox Greece, but for their romantic vision of ancient, pagan Greece. Significantly, there were no volunteers from Orthodox Russia, whose tsars correctly saw in the revolutionary spirit a greater threat to the well-being of the Orthodox peoples than Turkish rule.

The Greeks after the revolution were desperately poor and even more desperately divided. The new patriarch, Eugenius, again anathematised the insurgents. In response, twenty-eight bishops and almost a thousand priests in free Greece anathematised the patriarch, calling him a Judas and a wolf in sheep's clothing.[8] The Free Greeks now commemorated “all Orthodox bishops” at the Liturgy instead of the patriarch.

Meanwhile, in 1822 the Free Greeks appealed to the Pope for help against the Turks. President Mavrokordatos wrote to the Papal Secretary of State: “The cries of a Christian nation threatened by complete extermination have the right to receive the compassion of the head of Christendom.”[9] Greek delegates to the meeting of the Great Powers in Verona wrote to Pope Pius VII that the Greek revolution was not like the revolutions of other nations raised against altar and throne. Instead, it was being fought in the name of religion and “… asks to be placed under the protection of a Christian dynasty with wise and permanent laws”. In another letter the delegates addressed the pope as “the common father of the faithful and head of the Christian religion”, and said that the Greeks were worthy of the pope’s “protection and apostolic blessing”. Metropolitan Germanus was even empowered to speak concerning the possibility of a reunion of the Churches. However, it was the Pope who drew back at this point, pressurized by the other western States which considered the sultan to be a legitimate monarch.[10] And so the faith was betrayed – although, fortunately, things did not go as far as they had done at the council of Florence. How soon had a struggle fought “for faith and fatherland” betrayed the faith while only partially winning the fatherland!

Nor had real political independence been achieved: if the Turks had been driven out, then the British and the French and later the Germans came to take their place. The election of Capodistrias as “governor of Greece” in 1827 brought a limited degree of order under a truly Orthodox ruler. In an encyclical to the clergy he wrote: “Speak to the hearts of the people the law of God, rightly dividing the word of truth. Announce peace. Evangelize unanimity. Teach philanthropy, love for each other, that all may be one in Christ”.[11] But he made many enemies by his contempt for the élites of Greek society. Thus “he dismissed the primates as ‘Christian Turks’, the military chieftains as ‘robbers’, the intelligentsia as ‘fools’ and the Phanariots as ‘children of Satan’”.[12] And so on October 9, 1831 he was assassinated as he entered a church in Nauplion…

On May 7, 1832 Britain, France, Russia and Bavaria signed a treaty in London which guaranteed Greece’s independence and named Otto, son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, as king. And yet this independence was purely nominal. When Byron was dying in Greece in 1824, the Duc d’Orléans had commented “that he was dying so that one day people would be able to eat sauerkraut at the foot of the Acropolis”. He was not far from the truth; for Greece was now under a German Catholic king ruling through German ministers and maintained in power by German troops. Zamoyski comments sardonically: “Sauerkraut indeed…”[13]

Until King Otto came of age, three regents were appointed by the Great Powers to rule Greece in his name: Colonel Heideck, a Philhellene and the only choice of the Tsar but a liberal Protestant, Count Joseph von Armansperg, a Catholic but also a Freemason, and George von Maurer, a liberal Protestant. Pressed by the British and French envoys, von Armansperg and von Maurer worked to make Greece as independent of Russia and the patriarchate in Constantinople as possible. Russian demands that the king (or at any rate his children) become Orthodox, and that the link with the patriarchate be preserved, were ignored…

It was Maurer who was entrusted with working out a new constitution for the Church. He “found an illustrious collaborator, in the person of a Greek priest, Theocletus Pharmacides. This Pharmacides had received his education in Europe and his thought was exceedingly Protestant in nature; he was the obstinate enemy of the Ecumenical Patriarch and of Russia .”[14]

Helped by Pharmacides, Mauer proceeded to work out a constitution that proposed autocephaly for the Church under a Synod of Bishops (more precisely: five bishops, four priests and one layman, the representative of the king) [15], and the subordination of the Synod to the State on the model of the Bavarian and Russian constitutions, to the extent that "no decision of the Synod could be published or carried into execution without the permission of the government having been obtained". As Frazee comments: “If ever a church was legally stripped of authority and reduced to complete dependence on the state, Maurer’s constitution did it to the church of Greece.”[16]

In spite of the protests of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Tsar, and the walk-out of the archbishops of Rethymnon and Adrianople, this constitution was ratified by thirty-six bishops at a council in Nauplion on July 26, 1833.

The conservative opponent of Pharmacides in the government was Protopresbyter Constantine Oikonomos. He said that the constitution was “from an ecclesiastical point of view invalid and non-existent and deposed by the holy Canons. For this reason, during the seventeen years of its existence it was unacceptable to all the Churches of the Orthodox, and no Synod was in communion with it.”[17] Not only did the Ecumenical Patriarchate condemn the new Church: many Greeks in Greece were also very unhappy with their situation.

The Greek Church therefore exchanged the uncanonical position of the patriarchate of Constantinople under Turkish rule for the even less canonical position of a Synod unauthorized by the patriarch and under the control of a Catholic king and a Protestant constitution! In addition to this, all monasteries with fewer than six monks were dissolved (425 out of 500), and heavy taxes imposed on the remaining monasteries. And very little money was given to a Church which had lost six to seven thousand clergy in the war, and whose remaining clergy had an abysmally low standard of education.

Among the westernising reforms envisaged at this time was the introduction of the new, Gregorian calendar. Thus Cosmas Flammiatos wrote: “First of all they were trying in many ways to introduce into the Orthodox States the so-called new calendar of the West, according to which they will jump ahead 12 days [now 13], so that when we have the first of the month they will be counting 13 [now 14]. Through this innovation they hope to confuse and overthrow the feastdays and introduce other innovations.”[18] And again: “The purpose of this seminary in Halki of Constantinople which has recently been established with cunning effort, is, among other things, to taint all the future Patriarchs and, in general, all the hierarchy of the East in accordance with the spirit of corruption and error, through the proselytism of the English, so that one day, by a resolution of an ‘ecumenical council’ the abolition of Orthodoxy and the introduction of the Luthero-Calvinist heresy may be decreed; at the same time all the other schools train thousands and myriads of likeminded individuals and confederates among the clergy, the teachers and lay people from among the Orthodox youth.”

For his defence of Orthodoxy, Cosmas was imprisoned together with 150 monks of the Mega Spilaion monastery. The monks were released, but Cosmas died in prison through poisoning.[19]

And so, like all revolutions motivated as much by political or nationalist dreams as by purely spiritual desires, the fruits of the Greek revolution were distinctly mixed…

And yet, by a miracle of God, many of the bad fruits were reversed in time. Thus more lasting than the move towards the West that we have just described was the Kollyvades movement, which revived spirituality in Greece and beyond. The Philokalia, a huge collection of ascetic-mystical texts of the Holy Fathers was published by two of the Kollyvades Fathers. It was translated into Slavonic by the Russian Athonite monk St. Paisius Velichkovsky, who thereby brought the neo-hesychast movement to Romania and Russia. Here it was destined to bring forth much fruit, notably among the famous Elders of Optina monastery…

Gradually Divine grace worked to strengthen the Orthodox Church in Greece, in spite of its uncanonical position. The bishops gradually acquired more freedom from the state. And in 1839 the Synod forbade marriages between Orthodox and heterodox. Gradually, within the Synod and outside, support for reunion with the patriarchate grew stronger. Then, in 1843, a bloodless coup forced the king to dismiss his Bavarian aides and summon a National Assembly to draw up a constitution in which the indissoluble unity of the Greek Church with Constantinople was declared.

In 1844 the Synod declared: “The Orthodox Church of Greece acknowledges our Lord Jesus Christ as her Head. She is inseparably united in faith with the Church of Constantinople and with every other Christian Church of the same profession, but is autocephalous, exercises her sovereign rights independently of every other Church and is governed by the members of the Holy Synod.”

In 1849 the Greek government sent the Patriarch the Order of St. Saviour; but he was still not mollified. However, under Russian pressure, he and his Synod finally, on June 29, 1851, issued a Tomos which recognized the autocephaly of the Greek Church, but with conditions: that the State should not interfere in the affairs of the Church (as if it never interfered in the affairs of the Patriarchate!), that the name of the Patriarch should be commemorated at every Liturgy in Greece, that the Holy Chrism should be sent from Constantinople, and that the Greek Holy Synod should submit all important questions to the Patriarch. After vigorous debate for a year, a compromise (the so-called “Law 201”) was worked out, the anathema on the Greek Church was lifted, and full communion restored…[20]

Vladimir Moss.
January 6/19, 2010.
Holy Theophany.

[1] Michael Binyon writes: “A letter from Alexander I, signed by Capo d’Istrias, … denounced Yspilanti’s actions as ‘shameful and criminal’, upbraided him for misusing the tsar’s name, struck him from the Russian army list, and called him to lay down his arms immediately” (Pushkin, London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 133). Ironically, the officer sent by the Russian government to report on the insurrection was Pestel, the future leader of the Decembrist rebellion (op. cit., p. 134). (V.M.)
Alexis Troubetskoy writes: “Under normal circumstances there would have been no doubt about the tsar’s reaction: as champion of the Orthodox world, he could hardly have rejected such a plea. The circumstances at the time, however, were anything but normal. Central Europe was captive to the views of Austrian chancellor Metternich, to whom any hint of insidious liberalism – revolutionary movements in particular – was anathema. The Holy Alliance, of which Russia was an enthusiastic signatory and driving force, was to assure this. Despite his personal sympathy for the Greeks and antipathy to the Turks, there was no way the tsar could let down the established new order. It was a conundrum that he painfully resolved by disavowing and censuring Ypsilantis. There was to be no Russian help for the Greeks. Massacres followed slaughters – particularly in the Peloponnesus – and for the following nine years Greece was embroiled in war. Alexander never forgave himself for having failed his coreligionists.” (Imperial Legend, Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2003, pp. 112-113)
[2] Germanus wrote to the ambassadors of the foreign powers: “We, the Greek race of Christians, seeing that the Ottoman people despises us and is intending destruction against us, sometimes in one way and at other times in another, have decided firmly: either we shall all die or we shall be liberated.” (Boanerges, 24, March-April, 2006, p. 32 (in Greek)). Germanus was supported by eight other bishops, five of whom died in prison. (V.M.)
[3] Runciman, op. cit., pp. 403-405.
[4] Frazee, op. cit., pp. 28-29.
[5] Kandiloros, in Frazee, op. cit. p. 29.
[6] Gavalas, “St. Gregory V, Patriarch of Constantinople”, Orthodox Life, vol. 28, № 2, March-April, 1978, p. 22.
[7] Ypsilantis’ ideology had little to do with Orthodoxy. “’Let us recollect, brave and generous Greeks, the liberty of the classic land of Greece; the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, let us combat upon the tombs of our ancestors who, to leave us free, fought and died,’ Ypsilantis wrote in his declaration of 24 February 1821. ‘The blood of our tyrants is dear to the shades of the Theban Epaminondas, and of the Athenian Thrasybulus who conquered and destroyed the thirty tyrants’ – and so on.” (Zamoyski, Holy Madness, p. 235).
[8] Frazee, op. cit., p. 44.
[9] Frazee, op. cit., p. 54.
[10] Frazee, op. cit., pp. 54-57.
[11] Boanerges, 24, March-April, 2006, p. 32 (in Greek).
[12] Clogg, op. cit., p. 46.
[13] Zamoyski, Holy Madness, pp. 243, 245.
[14] Fr. Basile Sakkas, The Calendar Question, Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1973, p. 61.
[15] Dvorkin, op. cit., p. 877.
[16] Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece 1821-1852, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 114.
[17] Oikonomos, quoted by Bishop Macarius of Petra, 1973-2003: Thirty Years of Ecclesiastical Developments: Trials-Captivity-Deliverance (MS, in Greek).
[18] Flammiatos, cited in Monk Augustine, “To imerologiakon skhisma apo istorikis kai kanonikis apopseos exetazomenou” (The calendar schism from an historical and canonical point of view), Agios Agathangelos Esphigmenitis, 129, January-February, 1992, p. 12 (in Greek).
[19] “A Biographical Note concerning Cosmas Flamiatos”, Orthodox Christian Witness, vol. XVIII, № 30 (833), March 18/31, 1985.
[20] Frazee, op. cit., ch. 8. On this period of Greek Church history, see the series of articles published in the early 1990s in Agios Agathangelos Esfigmenites (St. Agathangelos of Esphigmenou) under the title "To atheon dogma tou oikoumenismou, Prodromos tou Antikhristou" (“The Atheist Dogma of Ecumenism, Forerunner of the Antichrist”) (in Greek).