Minorities in Greece: Aspects of a Plural Society

RICHARD CLOGG editor

Minorities in Greece Aspects of a Plural Society

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

iSTANBUL SiLGi UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

CONTENTS First published in the United Kingdom by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, 38 King Street, London WC2E 8.JZ in association with the Centre of Contemporary Greek Studies

© 2002 selection, editorial material and II1troduction, Richard

Notes on the COlltributors

Clogg; Chapter I, Kallistos Ware; Chapter 2, Charles Frazee; Chapter 3, .John Iarrides; Chapter 4, Steven Bowman; Chapter S, Ronald Meinardus; Chapter 6, I. K. HasslOtis; Chapter 7, T . ./. Winnifrith; Chapter 8, Anastasia KarakaSl(lou; Chapter 9, John Campbell; Chaptcr 10, Elisabeth Mesthencos. All rights reserved. The authors have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBNs

1-8S06S-705-X case/}()lIIld 1-8S065-706-8 paperback Typeset in Sa bon by Curran Publishing Services Ltd, Norwich Printed and bound in Great Britall1

VI

Introduction IX

RICIIARD CI.O(;(;

1

Old Calendarists K,II.LlSTOS W,u(E

2 Catholics Ci IARI.ES

24

FI(,IZEI'

3 Evangelicals JOliN o. IATRIDES

48

4 Jews

64

STEVEN B()\V~IAN

5

Muslims: Turks, Pomaks and Gypsies

81

RONALD MEINARn(lS

6 Armenians l.

7

94

K. HASSIOTIS

Vlachs T.

112

J. WINNIFRITII

8 Cultural illegitimacy in Greece: the Slavo-Macedonian 'non-minority'

122

ANASTASIA KAR,\KASJI)()l)

9 The Sarakatsani and the klephtic tradition 165

JOliN CA~lPIIEI.I.

10

Foreigners ELISAIIETII MESTIIENEOS

179

BibliografJhicalnote

195

index

198 v

CONTRIBUTORS

a PhD in Eastern European History from the University of Indiana where his focus was on Greek studies. He is the author of Catholics and Sultans: The Church in the Ottoman Em/)ire (1983). His most recent articles (on Greece and Istanbul) were published in The Encyclo!)aedia of Monasticism (2000). He can be reached at [email protected].

NOTES ON TH E CONTRIBUTORS STEVEN BOWMAN is Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. His publications include The Jews of Byzantium, 1204-'/453 (\ 985; 2(00); and, as editor, Marco Nahon, Birhenau. Cam!) of Death (\ 989); 111 lure Veritas: Studies in Callan Law ill Memory of Scha/er Williams (1991); The Holocaust in Greece: Eyewit11ess Re/)orts (2002), together with a number of articles on Greek Jewry during the Byzantine period and during the Second World War. He is editor of The Sephardi and Greek Holocaust Library (four volumes presently in preparation). His Ago1ly of Greel< Jewry during World War II is currently in press in English and Hebrew versions. He is currently working on a study of the Jews in the Greek resistance and of the mediaeval book of Yossipon. JOHN CAMPBELL is an Emeritus Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford. He was the first British social anthropologist to carry out field research in Greece. He is the author of HOllour, Falllify, and Patrollage (1964) and, jointly with Philip Sherrard, of Modem Greece (1970), a historical and cultural survey. With J. de Pina-Cabral he was co-editor of Elt1'olJe Observed (1992). In 1962 he was UNESCO director of the Social Sciences Centre in Athens, and subsequently lecturer in modern Balkan history at Oxford University. He is an honorary Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Thessaloniki. RICHARD CLOGG is a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford. His publications include Politics and the Academy: Arnold TO)'l1bee and the J(oraes Chair (1986); Anatolica: Studies in the Gree/? East in the Eighteenth and Nineteellth Centllries (1996) and Anglo-Greeh Attitudes: Studies in History (2000). His A C011cise History of Greece (2nd. ed. 2(02) has been translated into a number of languages, including Greek and Turkish. He is currently working on a large-scale history of the Greek people in modern times which will seek to integrate the history of the Greek East and of the Greek diaspora with that of the Greek state.

JOHN O. IATRIDES received his education in Greece, the Netherlands, and the United States and served with the Hellenic National Defence General Staff and the Prime Minister's Press Office (1955-58). He is Connecticut State University Professor of International Politics and has taught courses on contemporary Greece at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and New York universities. His publications include Balhan Ti-imzgle: Birth and Decline of an Alliance across Ideological Boulldarres (1968); Revolt i11 Athens: the Greeh Communist 'Second Round', '/944-1945 (1972); Ambassador MacVeagh RelJOrts: Greece, 1933-1947 (1980); Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis (1981); and Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and its Legacy (1995). I-Ie is currently working on a book-length study of Greece in the Cold War.

I. K. HASSIOTIS, a Professor of Modern History in the University of Thessaloniki, is the author of some 150 articles and 12 books. These include, in Greek, The Greel<s Oil the Eve of the Naval Battle of Lel)anto, 1568-1571 (1970); A Concise History of the Modern Greeh Dias!JOra (J 993); The Origins of Euro/Jean Unity (2000); The Gree/;~ World During the Tour/whratia (2001). His edited works include The Jewish Communities of South-easte1'11 Europe from the Fifteenth Century to the end of World War 1J (1997); Thessalonihi: History, Society and Culture (2 vols. 1997) and The Gree/~s in Russia and the Soviet Union: Migration, Organization alld Ideology (1997). ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College. She holds graduate degrees 111 anthropology and archaeology, and has published on issues of nation-formation, ethnicity, nationalism and ideology in northern Greece and the Balkans. Her major publication is Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Gree/~ Macedonia, 1870-1990 (1997). She is currently working on medical and environmental issues and is involved in a study of cancer as an epidemic on the island of Crete.

CHARLES FRAZEE is Professor of History Emeritus of the California State University, Fullerton and currently teaches church history at the Episcopal Theological School, Claremont, California. In 1965 he received

RONALD MEINARDUS is the Resident Representative of the FriedrichNaumann Foundation in the Philippines. This German non-governmentalorganisation is engaged in the promotion of liberal democracy in many countries of the world. Before moving to Manila, he represented the Foundation in Greece and in South Korea, where he also taught as a

VI

VII

MINORITIES IN GREECE

Professor at Hanyang University in Seoul. He has published two scholarly books on international politics and written numerous academic articles on Greek affairs and on political developments in the Eastern Mediterranean. He is currently also a commentator on Asian affairs for media in Asia, Germany and Greece. ELIZABETH MESTHENEOS is a freelance social researcher and consultant who has undertaken research and programme evaluation on refugees and migrants in Greece for the UNHCR, the Greek Council for Refugees, and the Hellenic Red Cross. She has been responsible for European Unionfunded research on social exclusion, on refugee integration in Europe and on refugee self-employment in Greece. She has participated in European networks for refugees. She also works within the SEXTANT research group, National School of Public Health, and specialises in research on older people. A full list of her publications can be found on www.sextant.gr. KALLISTOS WARE is titular Bishop of Diokleia and an assistant bishop in the Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain (Ecumenical Patriarchate). Between 1966 and 2001 he was Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies in the University of Oxford, as well as priest in charge of the Greek Orthodox parish in Oxford. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. His publications include The Orthodox Church (Revised ed. 1993), which has been translated into more than ten languages, and also The Orthodox Way (1979) and The Inner Kingdom (2001). He is the co-translator of two Orthodox service books, The Festal Menaiol1 and The Lenten Triodion, and also of the The Philo/wlia, of which four volumes have so far appeared (a fifth is in preparation). TOM WINNIFRITH was born in 1938 and educated at Tonbridge and Christ Church, Oxford. He has taught at Eton College and the University of Warwick. In 1984 he was Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. In 1987 he published The Vlachs: The History of a Ballwn Peo/lle (2nd. ed, Duckworth 1987). In 1992 he edited Pers!Jeclives Oil Albania (Macmillan) and in 1995 produced Shattered Eagles: Bal/
Vlll

INTRODUCTION RICHARD CLOGG

'HJ.lde; uYU1t
We Greeks love and honour not only the Latins ICatholics!, being Christians and kin, but our fellow citizens of other religions, Muslims and .Jews, as well as Armenians. AioAO<; (19 August) 854)'

This mid-nineteenth century quotation from a newspaper published on Syros, an island in the Cyclades which had, and still has, a substantial Catholic population, may present too rosy a picture of Greek attitudes towards minorities during the 180 years of the country's independent existence. 2 For from the outset, Orthodox Christianity and the Greek language have been deemed to be thCkey detei:ininants of Greek identity.l Article .3 of the 1975 Constitution declares the dominant religion in Greece to be the 'Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ, recognizing as its head Our Lord Jesus Christ':1 Article 13 guarantees freedom of religious belief and practice in respect of all known religions but proselytism is proscribed. s As Nikiforos Diamandouros, one of the leading analysts of Greek political culture, wrote at the beginning of the 1980s: the sensitivity surrounding the issue of minorities in Greece is further indication that the process of national integration initiated over a century ago rem~-inc0I111;I~te.S~110ortexts at the primary and secondaryfevels are vii·tually silent on such groups as the Kutzovlachs, the Pomaks, the Sarakatsans, and the Albanian and Slav-speaking populations of Greece. The virtual identification of hellenicity with Orthodoxy, on the other hanel, has made it very IX

INTRODUCTION

MINORITIES IN GREECE

difficult for such religious minorities as the Roman Catholics, the Protestants, the Jews and the Muslims to become fully integrated into the dominant Greek culture. Even today, when the traumatic experiences associated with the irredentist struggles of the turn of the century and of the civil war years are fading, these groups remain, for the vast majority of the ethnically homogeneous Greek population, at worst unknown and at best obscure and alien entities." Minorities in many parts of the world have encountered, and continue to encounter, disabilities of various kinds. It is no surprise, therefore, that the lot of minorities in Greece has by no means always been an easy one, but there has been exaggerated criticism of the treatment by the Greek state of its minority populations. In a regional context, minorities have generally fared significantly better in Greece than have those in neighbouring countries. There remains, however, a great deal of Ignorance about the nature and situation of the country's minorities, both within Greece and without. The ignorance that exists about this particular aspect of Greek society is strikingly illustrated in a best-selling book of travels in the Mediterranean, The Pillars of Hercules, by the 'internationally acclaimed' travel writer Paul Theroux. This was published in 1995, not long after the workshop from which the papers contained in this volume issue was held. In the course of his 'Grand Tour of the Mediterranean' during the early 1990s Theroux visited lerapetra in Crete, There he was affronted by the sight of a halfruined eighteenth-century mosque apparently used for concerts. He asked himself whether this was worse than the Turks having turned Aghia Sophia, Justinian's great Church of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, together with many other churches, into a mosque. 'Probably not' was the answer. 'But', he went on, 'there were still Christians functioning in Turkey and there were no Muslims in Greece,' Apart from the tourists and some retirees, there were no foreigners in Greece. 7 'There were Arabs in Spain, Albanians and Africans in Italy, Moroccans in Sardinia, Algerians in France; but there were no immigrants of any kind in Greece. The Albanians that came had been sent back.' Whether it was Greece's 'feeble economy that kept everyone except Albanians (whose economy was abysmal) from wishing to settle there, or Greek intolerance', was something he did not know. H One of the purposes of this volume is to redress the casual but damaging ignorance demonstrated in such a passage, which will have been read by tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of readers. There are, of course, Muslims in Greece, whose minority status is enshrined in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, just as there are large numbers of foreigners, Moreover, although the overwhelming majority of Greeks, over 95 per cent, are, at least nominally, Orthodox Christians, there are small religious minorities, Catholics, Jews and Protestants, just as there are small linguistic minorities. x

Most members of the Muslim minority now consider themselves to be Turks. Likewise, a very small number of Slavic and Vlach speakers consider themselves to constitute part of an ethnic minority, Moreover, as many as 5 per cent of the population are Old Calendarists. These are Orthodox Christians who remain tenaciously attached to the Julian calendar, which in 1923/4 the Greek state and, somewhat more reluctantly, the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece replaced with the Gregorian calendar, These Old Calendarists reject the authority of the established Church and have their own parallel hierarchy and their own monasteries and nunneries. Establishing the size of Greece's minority populations, religious and linguistic, is not easy, as not since 195] have the decennial censuses sought to record religion, mother tongue ~d-"Cthnic origin, At that time, in a total population of 7,632,801, 7,472,559 citizens reported their religious affiliation as Orthodox (97.9 per cent); J~2,6§5. (1.4 per c~nt) asMu~iirll; 28,430 as Catholic (0.4 per cent); 12,6i7as Protestant Of other Cllristian (0.2 per cent); 6,325 as Jewish (0.1 per cent). (The number of Jews recorded in the 1951 census was scarcely a tenth of the Jewish community as it had existed on the eve of the Second World War, as almost the entire Jewish population of Greece had been deported by the German occupiers in 1943 to Auschwitz, where virtually all were killed.)" Greek was given as the mother-tongue of 7,297,878 (95.6 per cent), of the country's inhabitants; Turkish as that of 17~,89S (2.4 per cent), Slavic as that of 41,0] 7 (0.5 pe;~~'1t[Vf~~hTlf~j:iTIon~ol:;la~iai1)·-;~that of 39,855 (0.5 per cent) and Albanian as that of 22,736 (0.3per cent). 51,420 (0.7 per cent) gave another mother tongue. The figure for the number of mother tongue Slavicspeakers is almost certainly too low. The census was taken only a short time after the end of the civil war of 1946-49, and, given that Slavophones were disproportionately represented in the ranks of the defeated communist Democratic Army, there would have been a strong II1centive for Slavic speakers to play down their linguistic preference. ~~onsigerably more gave their mother tongue as Turkish than gave their religion as Mi.lsEI11:Tllis explained by the fact that many of the incoming refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s spoke Turkish as their first and, . in some cases, their only language. 'o Among some of the older generation of these /wramal1/i Greeks, Turkish remained their first language into the 19_fO~~nd later. Mo~·eoveI:, by no means all Muslims in Greece were Turkish speaking. The Muslim Pomaks, for instance, who were concentrated in Western Thrace along the border with Bulgaria and were recorded in the 1951 census as numbering 18,671, were Slav speaking. With the collapse of communism throughout most of the Balkans at the beginning of the 1990s, the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and, most significantly from the perspective of Greece, the emergence of an independent state of Macedonia from what had been the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the question of minorities in the Balkans

Is

XI

MINORITIES IN GREECE

became a pressing issue. The issue became a Iwfto thema, or burning issue, in Greece, despite the fact that Greece's educational system had proved to be an efficient mechanism for 'hellenizing' populations of diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds as they were gradually incorporated into the Greek state during the course of its expansion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and despite the fact that Greece, following the 1923 Exchange of Populations and the settlement of the refugees, became a more ethnically homogeneous country than any of the other countries ()f the Balkan peninsula." Claims emanating from Skopje, the capital of the new Republic of Macedonia, that there existed a Slav Macedonian minority in Greece inevitably occasioned heated discussion in Greece. There were a number of court cases in Greece, attracting aclverse publicity outside the country, as individuals, usually on the far left, were charged with spreading alarm and despondency by claiming the existence of a Slav-Macedonian minority. In Greece there had likewise been much anguished discussion of the fate of the Greek minority in Albania (numbering some 59,000 according to the] 989 Albanian census but over 300,000 strong according to Greek nationalists)'" and of the Greekmil2(lrity in Tm:lsey, once approximately the same size as Muslim nlinorit)' iI1 GI:eece:~I;llt n(~w on the verge of extinction, probably numbering not more than 2000. 11 A measure of this new interest in, and concern fOJ; minoritieslecl to the establishment in Greece of an offshoot of the London-based Minority Rights Group.'" This volume should not be taken as an attempt to demonstrate that Greece constitutes a patchwork of ethnic minorities but rather to provide some basic information, with particular regard to the historical background, about minority populations which, taken together, the Old Calendarists and recent immigrants apart, amount to scarcely 4 pCI' cent of the population. A widely accepted definition of what constitutes a minority is that formulated by F. Capotorti and adopted by the United Nations, for whom he acted as Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities: a group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose members - being nationals of the State - possess ethnic, religious m linguistic characteristics ) differing from the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, (\ traditions, religion or language." This sensible and non-threatening definition runs counter to theifrequently expressed view in Greece that a minority must have a recognized legal status, a status that is formally accorded only to the Turkish-speaking Muslims of Western Thrace by the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne of Xli

INTRODUCTION

J 923. This treaty, which remains in force, constituted the peace settlement that followed the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-22, a war that ended with the catastrophic defeat of the Greek armies in Asia Minor. 'The Muslims of Western Thrace, who were exempted from the Exchange of Populations that formed part of the Lausanne settlement, were guaranteed educational, religious and linguistic rights, together with control of their religious foundations. Similarly, the Greeks of Istanbul and of the islands of Inwros (Gok~~~Cla) and Tenedos (Bozcaada), which straddle the strategically important entrance to the Dardanelles, were likewise exempted from the Exchange of Populations amI<1ff()I:(I~~lguarantees of theIr educational, religi()us and linguistic rights, together with control of community property.'i' Both minorities over the years have a,wned that these treaty rights have been seriously infringed. It is worth noting that the Muslims of Greece are ( free to express their complaints with a considerably greater degree of ( vigour than are the Greeks of Turkey. ' -.J One of the funclamenta I reasons for the degree of sensitivity that exists ~in Greece over the issue of minorities, a sensitivity which sometimes puzzles outsiders given their small numerical size, lies in the way In which the issue became a live one during the civil war that wracked Greece between 1946 and 1949. During these years the Greek Communist Party fought to bring Greece within the orbIt of the communist bloc, into which her Balkan neighbours to the north, Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania, had been incorporated in the aftermath of the Second World War. When the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) announced on 24 December 1947 the establishment of a Provisional Democratic Government of Greece, it created a 'General Directorate of National Minorities', working to the 'Prime Minister' in attending to the problems of minorities." By early 1949 as many as half of the combatants of the communist Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) were Slav speakers frol11 the northern provinces of Greece. Their importance to the continuation of the struggle was reflected in a resolution adopted at the Fifth Plenum of the Central Comillittee of the KKE held in January! 949. This declared that such was the contribution of the Slav-Macedonians to the struggle against Anglo-American imperialism and domestic J1lonarcho-fascism that 'there should be no doubt' that, with the victory of the Democratic Army and of the People's Revolution, the 'Ivlacedonian people will realize their full national restitution, as they themselves want it .. ,''' Such a declaration was a forceful reminder that between 1924 and 1935 the Greek COJ1lmunist Party had advocated, at the behest of the Communist International which was itself under the IIlfiuence of the powerful Bulgarian ComJ1lunist Party, self-determination for the inhabitants of Greek MacedoJ1Ja and Thrace.'" Only in 1935 did the COJ11intern line change, when the challenge posed by German Nazism and Italian Fascism ushered in the era of the Popular Front and an attempt to form Xlll

MINORITIES IN GREECE

alliances with socialists, agrarians and others. The slogan now adopted by the KKE was 'equal rights for all nationalities' in place of the former advocacy of 'a united and independent Macedonia'. It is noteworthy that when, in 1982, Andreas Papandreou, newly elected as Greece's first socialist prime minister, granted blanket permission to return to Greece 20 to those communists who had fled to the Eastern bloc countries in the aftermath of the 1946-49 civil war, the concession was limited to those of Greek ethnic origin. This was seen as discriminating against the Slav Macedonians who had constituted such a large element of the communist Democratic Army of Greece by the closing stages of the civil war. When the Macedonian issue was at its height during the first half of the 1990s, Greece's partners in the European Union were baffled that a politically stable Greece, with a relatively strong economy, well-equipped armed forces and membership of both the NATO alliance and the European Union, could view with such apprehension the emergence of an independent Republic of MacedollJa (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) and perceive it as any kind of threat, given its small size, weak economy and the threat to its stability posed by a large and increasingly restless Albanian minority. Official Greek government propaganda focused on demonstrating that Macedonia as a geographical entity had been, as the slogan on telephone cards, T-shirts, beach bags and elsewhere had it, 'Greek for 4000 years' and on seeking to demonstrate Greece's prior claim to the region by reference to the glories of the era of Philip of Macedon and of Alexander the Great, to whom, somewhat improbably, lVlacedonian nationalists also laid claim. This emphasis on the distant past of the region resulted in there being little understanding outside Greece that Greek apprehensions were..m::,£asioned by events which had occurred withi~ fi~ii1g ;nen1~ry rather than in remote classical antiquity. The greater part of the refugees from Asia Minor -ai1(fersewhei~clla(rbecll'settled in Greek Macedonia in the 1 920s, and as a result many living in northern Greece had parents, grandparents or greatgrandparents whose lives had been turned upside down by the process of uprooting and re-settlement. They were naturally alarmed at any suggestion of claims against the country's territorial integrity, for these might result in further upheavals. Moreover, during the Second World War, western Thrace and a part of Greek Macedonia had suffered from a harsh Bulgarian occupation. Greeks had been killed in large numbers by the Bulgarian occupiers, 'ethnically cleansed' in larger numbers from the region, and Bulgarians settled in their place. Those from countries whose borders had been long established and were unchallenged sometimes found it difficult to appreciate the anxieties of those living in a country whose final borders were established as recently as 1947, when the Dodecanese islands were incorporated into the Greek state. Konstantinos Karamanlis, who retired from the presidency of Greece as recently as 1995, had been XIV

INTRODUCTION

born in the village of Kiipkoy or Proti in Macedonia in J 907 when the region still formed part of the Ottoman Empire and when the region was being bitterly fought over by rival Greek and Bulgarian bands. The papers included in this volume were given at a workshop held at St Antony's College, Oxford in 1994. A number of factors, not all within the control of the editor, have led to a major delay in their publication. Since the holding of the workshop, the situation in Greece has necessarily changed, particularly with regard to official attitudes towards minorities and to the status of aliens, and changed for the better. The following is but one example of the changed climate. Ioannis Kapsis, deputy foreign minister in the Papandreou admll11stration in the (\ ,\1; 1980s, forcefully impressed upon the American journalist, Robert Kaplan, (' that 'no Tu rks .Iivejl'.GI:££~~:~ ..Il1 ere are,()ll,lysSlD:£C:; reek§. Wh () 1~':l.P.l)~l}to be Muslim and happen to speak Ti.l;:lds11 to each other ... '21 But by 1999 the Greek foreign 111inister, Georg;~)s' Pal)andreou, the son of1\ndJ:eas Papandreou, was stating that he had no objection if members of the country's Muslim minority chose to call themselves Turks, and indeed, in the 1990s, it was clear that most members of what is officially termed the Muslim minority had come to consider themselves as forming part of an ethnic Turkish minority. Although the publication of these papers has been delayed, much of their content nonetheless remains relevant and this collection makes available a permanent record of a conference which brought together much interesting material about an issue about which relatively little has appeared in English. It is hoped that the various contributions will help to dispel some of the ignorance and misunderstanding surrounding the situation of minorities in Greece. A point that arose in discussion at the workshop was the paradoxical fact that until recently there was no unambiguous expression in Greek for 'ethnic minority', despite the fact that 'ethnic' in English is clearly of Greek derivation. The traditional term etlmiki melO11otita used in connection with , minorities was unsatisfactory, as the expression 'national minority' has rather different connotations from the term 'ethnic minority'. It might be: held, for instance, that neighbouring states would be entitled to take a I greater interest in a 'national' m1110rity than in an 'ethnic' one, DI' that a( y ( 'na.tional n.'.1' n.. orit ' might h. av.e....c1a.,.im. s~.(.).s. e.ce.'.:.I.e.•... 6rlfliite w .. it.. li.<11.1. o. t. he. r s.tare and thus be perceIved as a kmdof TrOjan Honse. It IS the case that there IS' ij(lW an expl'essionin Greek for 'ethnici'nii16I'ity', i.e. etlJ/lutih mCiC>llOtita,i but it is nc~t o~,e that would be\vldeIY[H1d~rstood at a pop,ular level. . An 1I1dICatlon of the seinantlc' confUSIon that'Tan anse occurred 111 February 1995 when the US State Department issued a statement critical of Greece following a dispute over the appointment of one of the Muslim community's two muftis. The statement declared that 'the issue of the treatment of ethnic ml110rities in this region of the world Ithe Balkansl is espe~.~'-

J

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MINORITIES IN GREECE

cially sensitive'. Commenting on the statement, the Greek government spokesman, Evangelos Venizelos, emphasised that the term used by the State Department was 'ethnic' and not 'national' minorities as had been reported in some news channels. Venizelos was reported as saying that 'the word "ethnic" is a term of an ethnographic nature which does not indicate any reference to a specific state. If the word was used literally, then there is no problem. Otherwise clarifications must be sought and diplomatic representations will be made, if necessary' Y This survey covers the main minority groups, Old Calendarists, Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, Muslims (Turks, Pomaks and Gypsies), Armenians, Vlachs, Slav-Macedonians, Sarakatsani and foreigners. Unfortunately, however, there is no coverage of one significant minority group. This comprises the Arvanites, the Orthodox Christians of Albanian descent, who migrated to the Greek lands during the Middle Ages and subsequently. These now fully identify with their Greek co-nationals, and generally only the older generation now speak arvallitika, or Albanian intermixed with Greek, Turkish and Slavic words. They are principally to be found in Attica, where they are prominent in the production of retsina, the resinated wine of the Mesogeio; Boeotia; Southern Euboea; in the regions of Nafplion and Megara and on some of the islands of the Saronic gulF' Admiral Pavlos Koundouriotis, the great naval hero of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and between 1924 and 1929 the President of the Greek Republic, was a native of Hydra and spoke Greek and arvallitilw. These Arvanites constituted an important element among those fighting for independence from the Ottoman Turks during the 1820s. Until the Second World War there was a small group of Muslim Albanians, the Chams, who were settled in Greece in Epirus, just over the border from Albania. These, however, fled, or were driven, across the border in late 1944, amid accusations that they had collaborated with the occupation forces.2-IALtl]ough the _~.l?asis forthecompulsory excl1,lnge of populations betweeI1 Gre-ece and - I~I'l(eYTI:;-the19~Q.~:.had been religious affiliation and not 'national consciollslless\i:11e Chams, although very largely Muslim, had been exempted on the grounds that they were Albanians. 25 Finally, I should like to express my gratitude to the contributors to this volume, not only for their contributions but for their forbearance during the long period of its gestation. It goes without saying that each contributor is responsible only for the contents of his or her contribution. I am grateful to Dr Anna Mastrogianni for compiling the index.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

3

4

S

6 7

8

1 Quoted in Vasilis Kardasis, Syros: stavrodromi tis Anatoli/::.is Mesogeiou (1832-1857), (Athens, 1987) 384. The emphasis on the Catholics arose fro111 the fact that Syros, where the newspaper was published, was home to the largest Catholic population in Greece. XVI

a critique of the policies of the Greek state towards minorities, see the of Adamantia Poll is, 'Greek National Identity: Religious Minorities, Rights and European Norms', Jotlmal of Modem Greeh SWdies, X (1992) 171-95. See also Panayote Dimitras, 'Minorities: An Asset or a Liability for Greece?', COlltel11!JOrary Ellropean Affairs, IV (1991) 139-54. The first constitution to be elaborated during the Greek War of Independence, that of EpIdavros of 1822, declared that 'those indigenous ll1habitants of the state of Greece who believe in Christ are Greeks and enJoy all political rights without distinction', A year later, the second National Assembly, meeting at Astros, WIdened the definition to include as Greeks those coming from outside who believed in Christ and who had Greek as their mother tongue. The constitution of Troezene of 1827 further broadened the defillltion of what constituted a Greek, Pantelis Kerkll1os, / Ellillihi Ithageneia ell AlgY/Jto, (Alexandria, 1930) 8-9. Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos who, as professor of history in the Ulllversity of Athens in the mid-nll1etecnth century, first adumbrated the notion of an unbroken continuity between classical antiquity, Byzantium and the emergent modern Greek state, a central tenet of traditIonal Greek historiography, declared that 'the Greek nation is composed of all the people who speak the Greek language as their own tongue', Konstantll1OS Paparrigopoulos, istona tOil Ellinilwu Etlmous (J proti lI/o/'jJhl: 1853), cd. K. Th. Dimaras, (Athens,1970) 33. See also Giorgos Veloudis, 0 jahob Phili/JjJ Fallmerayer hai i genesi tou EllillilwlI Istoris1l1ou, (Athens, 1982) 71 and llias Anagnostakis and Evangelia Balta, La decouverte de la CafJIJadoce all dix-lIellVihlle sii!c1e, (Istanbul, (994) 33. In the funeral oration which he gave in 1872 for his university colleague, Konstantinos Asopios, Paparrigopoulos asked rhetorically 'What is Hellenism? To which he gave the answer: 'the Greek language'. 'What then is the Greek language? Hellenism', K. Th. Dimaras, [(O/lstalltinos PaIJarrigo/loulos: I ejJol<.ln tau - / zoi tou - to ergo tOil, (Athens, (986) 260. Antoine Pantel is, Les grands {Jrobli!lI1es de la nouvelle collstillltion helleniqlle, (Athens, 1979) 319-22. Article 3 of the 1975 Constitution, whIch IS promulgated in the name of the Holy, Consubstantial and Undivided Trinity, likewise states that the text of the Holy Scriptures cannot be altered, nor can it be translated without the authorisation of the Autocephalous Church of Greece and of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul. . This constitutional ban on proselytism, underpll1necl by legislation dating from the pre-Second World War Metaxas dictatorship, has been the source of much confusion, as courts have interpreted it in different ways. Ir IS not even certain whether the ban on proselytism applies to the Orthodox Church Itself, Stephanos Stavros, 'CitizenshIp and the Protection of Minorities', in Kevin Featherstone and Kostas Ifantis, cds., Greece ill a Changing btrope: Between Bllro/Jean Illtegratioll and Ballwn Disilltegrat/()//?, (Manchester, 1996) 121. P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, 'Greek Political Culture 111 TranSItion: Historical Origins, EvolutIon, Current Trends', in Richard Clogg, cd., Greece ill the 1980s, (London, 1983) 55. At the time that Theroux's hook was published legally registered aliens living in Greece numbered 213,400, in a population of some ten and a quarter million, Athens News Agency /3ulletlll, 29 October 1994. The actual number of foreigners liv111g 111 the country at that time was much hIgher. The Pillars of HerCIIles: A Gralld TOllr of the Mediterraneall, (New York, 1995) 325. Theroux appears to have had an unhappy time in Greece which struck him as 'a cut-price theme park of broken marble, a place where you were harangued in a high-minded way about AnCIent Greek culture while some swarthy little person picked your pocket', 314. XVI!

MINORITIES IN GREECE

9 When Thessaloniki (Salonica) was incorporated into the Greek state in 1912 during the First Balkan War, the largest single element in the population of the city comprised Spanish-speaking Sephardi Jews who had sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Such was the importance of the community during the period of Ottoman rule that Salonica was known as the Jersualem of the Balkans. 10 For these Turcophone Greeks of Asia Minor a whole literature was published in kara11lanlidika, Turkish printed in Greek characters. Printll1g Il1 karaml1nlidika continued in Greece for the Turcophones for a few years after the 1923 Exchange of Populations. The last recorded publication was in Thessaloniki 1!1 1929. Included in the Exchange of Populations were a small number of Turkish-speaking Protestant Greeks. On the Turkish-speaking Greeks of Asia Minor see, inter alia, Richard Clogg, 'A Millet Within a Millet: The Karamanlides', in Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi, eds., Ottoman Greeks in the Age of NatIOnalism: Politics, Ecollomy alld Society ill the Nineteenth Centllry, (Princeton,1999) 115-42. 11 George Mavrogordatos, The Stillborn Republic: Social Coalitions and Party Strategies ill Greece, 1922-1936, (Berkeley, 1983) 226. Chapter 5 of Mavrogordatos's book constitutes an excellent analysis of the situation of minorities in inter-war Greece. 12 On the Greek minority in Albania see, illter alia, Basil Kondis and Eleftheria Manda, eds, The Greek Mil/ority ill Albania: A Doculllentary Record (1921-1993), (Thessaloniki, 1994) and V. Kondis, Ellillis11loS tiS Voreiou Ipeirou /wi EllilloallJalli/;:.es shheseis: engrapha apo to Istori/w Arhheio tOil ' \Ypourgeiou /:xoteriholl, (Athens, 1997). ( 13 jOn the Greek minority in Turkey see Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority ,~. .~/ of Istallblll and Greeh-Tllrhish Relations 1918-1974, (Athens, 1992) and I-Iuman Rights Watch/Helsinki, Denying Human Rights and Ethnic Identity: The Gree/;,s of Tllrlwy, (Athens 1992). The report of the New York-based Human Rights Watch/Helsinki organisation paints a stark picture of the situation of the Greek minority in Turkey during the early 1990s: The Greek community in Turkey is dwindling, elderly and frightened. Its population has declined from about 110,000 at the time of the signing of the Lausanne Treaty in 1923 to about 2,500 today. Its fear stems from an appalling history of pogroms and expulsions suffered at the hands of the Turkish government. A Helsinki Watch mission visited Turkey in October 1991 and found that the government there continues to violate the human rights of the Greek minority. These acts include harassment by police; restrictions on free expression; discrimination in education involving teachers, books and curriculum; restrictions on religious freedom; limitations on the right to control charitable institutions; and the denial of ethl1lc identity. All of these abuses violate international human rights laws and standards that have been signed or endorsed by the government of Turkey, including the European Convention on I-Iuman Rights and the Paris Charter.

INTRODUCTION

16 The Exchange of Populations signed in January 1923 at Lausanne provided for 'a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory and of Greek nationals of the Moslem rcligion established 111 Greek terntory'. The cnterion for the exchange was religious affiliation and not cthl1lc IdentIty. It is worth noting that III the prelimll1ary discussions leading up to thc exchange, all the partIes to the Lausanne negotiations, the Greeks, the Turks and the BrItish, were agreed that the Turkishspeaklllg Greeks would remain ill silll in Asia MinoL In the event, however, the Turcophone Greeks were included ill the compulsory transfer of populations. 17 Prosorilll DllI/ohratil::1 [(YIJC/'I1ISI. Idryti/::I Praxi hili D/ilggelllla pros tOil Eflillilw Lao, (No place of publication, December 1947). In 1949 thIS (lirectorate was headed by Stavros Kotseff, Te) [(oll1l1/()ltlllstilw [(o/l/mll tis Efladas, E/)isillla [(eill/eml, VI 1945-1949, (Athens, 19H7) 509. 18 Evangelos Kofos, NatlOllalislll alld Commlt/llsm ill MLlced()lIia, Cfhessaloniki, 1964) 177. The importance of the Slav-Macedolllans to the communist cause is further demonstrated by the establishment early In 1944 of the SlavMacedonian NatIonal Front (SNOF) whIch led to the estahlishment of Slavspeaking units fighting alongside ELAS, the fight1l1g force of the communist-controlled National Liberation Front (EAM), to the clisquiet of rank-ancl-file members of EAM/ELAS who were alarmed at the separatist tendencies that were soon manifested. During the period of the CIvil war SNOF was reconstituted as NOF. A principal objective of NOF was secunng 'national equality' and the recognition of 'the national rights of our people" i.c. ("he SlavMacedonians, Progral/ll/la /;:.ai /wtastatilw tOil Lai/wapcfe/iI)efOti/w Meto/lou tOil S/auolllahedoI1011 (N.O.E), (January 1948) 2. 19 On the Macedonian quest"\on as an issue in the affaIrs of ("he Balkan communist partIes durll1g the imer-war period see Kofos, op. cit., 66-94 and Alekos Papapanagiotou, II) Ma/.:.edonilw zitil/1a lwi to Val/wllilw /(OIl1I11OlIllISti/.:O hhlillla 1918-1939, (Athens, 1992). 20 Some of the refugees had been granted permIssIon to return by earlier conservative governments. 21 Robert Kaplan, B<1l/wlI Ghosts: A joumey Throllgh !listory, (London, 1994) 240.lt was repor("ed that Kaplan's book was a principal source of PreSIdent Bill Clinton's knowledge of the complexIties of Balkan politics. 22 Athells New Agellcy Blllletill, 1 February 1995. 23 The Arval1ltes are claImed by Albanian nationalists to number over a million, Alballiall Life, No.2 (1995) IS, far too high a figure. 24 See, for instance, Giorgos Margaritis, 'I skotell1l plevra ron ethnikon ti1l"lamvon: Thesprotial941-44 kal 0\ Tsamides" () ['olitls, 117 (January 1(92) 44-5. 25 Panayote Elie DimItras, 'Minoritcs linguistIqucs en (;rl~cc', in Henn Giordan, cd., Les I/I/l/oritcs ell Ellrope: dmlls de [,h 01/1 lIIe , (Pans, 1992) 306.

14 The first publication of this group was Meiol1otites still Ellada /wi 0 politilws hOSIllOS, Etaireia gia to Dikaiomata ton Meionotiton E.D.M, (Athens, 1992). I S Cited in Christos L. Rozakis, 'The International Protec("ion of Minorities in Greece', in Kevin Featherstone and Kostas Ifantis, eds, Greece ill a Changlllg Ellrope: Between European Integratioll and Ballwll Dlsllltegratioll?, (Manchester, 1996) op. cit., 96.

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XIX

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'Any change in the calendar will cause confusion among the ignorant and introduce a division Illto the Church.' The Emperor Alldrol1ilws II Palaiologos (1.324)

A dispute about thirteen days? On 3 March 1924 Chrysostomos I (Papadopoulos), Archbishop of Athens (1868-1938), despatched a telegram to all the diocesan bishops of the Church of Greece. In this he announced that the Church of Greece, which hitherto had followed the Old Style or Julian Calendar, would now change to the New Style Calendar, which had already been adopted by the Greek civil authorities in February of the previous year. In the words of the Archbishop's telegram: The Church of Greece, in accordance with the decision of the Holy Synod, has accepted the correction of the Julian Calendar as specified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, whereby 1() March in the Church calendar will be reckoned as 23 March ... In this way from the 23rd of the present month of March there will exist one single calendar in Greece for both Church and state. When he issued this fateful telegram, did Archbishop Chrysostomos feel any misgivings? Almost certainly he did. In 1924, the Greek nation and Church were both in a troubled and uneasy situation. The past nine years had proved a divisive and traumatic period, first because of the 'National Schism' (Etlmilws Dihhasmos) between the Royalists and the Venizelists, and then much more because of the military catastrophe in Asia Minor, with its tragic aftermath of institutionalized 'ethnic cleansing'. Inevitably these events had repercussions on church life. Indeed, Chrysostomos had himself

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been appointed Archbishop in March 1923 under disputed circumstances. His predecessor, Archbishop Theoklitos I, had been deposed by the revolutionary government of Plastiras and GOl1atas. Chrysostomos had been elected, not by the total hierarchy of the Greek Church, but by a group of only five bishops, hand-picked by the government; and, of these five, no more than three had voted for Chrysostomos. Although he was a distinguished scholar, who as Archbishop turned out to be a gifted pastor, he was from the start a controversial figure. The revolutionary government that had engineered Chrysostomos's appointment placed him under heavy pressure to introduce the New Calendar in the Church at the earliest possible opportunity. Left to himself, he would almost certainly have preferred to wait. He knew that very little had been done to prepare the parish clergy and the laity for the calendar change, and he was also aware that a number of bishops were unhappy about the alteration, although in the event none of them in 1924 voted directly against it. I-Ie must surely have foreseen difficulties, at any rate in the period immediately following the change. What, however, neither Archbishop Chrysostomos himself nor anyone else in March 1924 can have anticipated was that the introduction of the New Calendar would bring about within Greek Orthodoxy a lasting schism, which seventy-five years later still remains unhealed. As a result of the 1924 calendar change, there exist in Greece toclay substantial numbers of Palaioil1lcrologitai or 'Old Calenclarists' sometimes they are styled Palaiocortoiogitai or 'Old Feasters' -- who have their own bishops, parishes and monasteries that are totally independent of the New Calendar State Church. They call themselves Gllisiol Orthodoxoi Christia11oi, the 'True Orthodox Christians' of the Greek land. Undoubtedly in the past the Old Calendarists constituted the largest religious minority within Greece, and probably they still do so today. They are a minority, we may add, that was for a long time subjected to persecution. Should we dismiss the calendar controversy in twentieth-century Greece as a dispute utterly devoid of genuine religious significance, a misunderstanding that simply concerns technicalities of astronomy and chronology? Surely, it will be said, the thirteen-day discrepancy between the Old Style (Julian) and the New Style (Gregorian) calendars has nothing to do with Christian doctrine or morality. In the words of Metropolitan Anthimos of Alexandroupolis, 'The calendar problem is primarily scientific and in no way spiritual, and so it provides no justification whatsoever to those who make it grounds for schism from their Church.' The Olel Calendarists, he continues, are nothing more than /~hrol1()/atrai, 'time-worshippers'. I The mentality of the Paiaioimcr%gitai, so their opponents maintain, exemplifies in a striking fashion the failure - all too common in the history of Eastern Christendom - to draw a proper distinction between the essential and the incidental, between the unchanging faith and transitory customs that are historically and culturally conditioned. Out of ignorance and superstition,

it is argued, the adherents of the Old Style have elevated the Julian Calendar into a dogma. The Pa/aioimcrologitai, for their part, view matters from a radically different perspective. The calendar controversy, they believe, is very far from being merely a dispute about thirteen days. For the Orthodox Church there is an essential interconnection between doctrine and prayer, between theology and liturgical symbolism; any distortion in the Church's worship will therefore have direct consequences upon the way in which the Orthodox faith is understood and lived. The introduction of the New Calendar in 1924 is to be seen as an unauthorized innovation that has broken the continuity of Holy Tradition and shattered the unity of the Orthodox world. In the words of the chief leader of the Old Calendarist movement from 1935 until his death, Chrysostomos (Kavouridis), formerly Metropolitan of Florina (1870-1955): 'We see the calendar reform as involving the exactness of the norms of Orthodoxy and the age-old practice of the Orthodox Church; and we prefer to remain faithful to the decisions of the seven Ecumenical Councils.' If any alteration in the calendar is to be made, Metropolitan ChrysostoI110S argues, this can be done only by the decision of a Panorthodox Synod, representing the entire Orthodox world, and not by individual Orthodox Churches acting unilaterally.2 We shall not begin to understand the viewpoint of the Palatoimcr%gitai unless we recognize that for them the Julian Calendar possesses a profound symbolical significance. It is to be seen as the touchstone of loyalty to the Orthodox faith in its true and full integrity. 'For the Church', writes Metropolitan ChrysostoI110S of Florina, 'the issue of the calendar is not merely a question of chronology and dating, but it is a question of ecclesiastical unity and concord in matters relating to faith and divine worship .... Every deviation from the Julian Calendar, of whatever kind, introduces confusion and destruction into the whole system of church order and of proper rhythm that governs the expression of Orthodox divine worship." For the Old Calendarists it is no chance coincidence that, four years before the calendar change, the Patriarchate of Constantinople issued in :1920 an encyclical advocating closer unity with Western Christians. The abandonment of the Julian Calendar, according to the Palaiolmcr%gitaI, has been accompanied by a broader abandonment of the Orthodox tradition as a whole through involvement in the ecumel1lcal movement. According to Professor Dimitn Kitsikis of Ottawa, a New Calenclarist sympathetic to the Old Calendarist position, this constitutes 'the essence of the conflict':' The calendar change, writes the Old Calendarist Metropolitan Kyprianos of Oropos and Fili, 'is not simply part of an extensive religious and ecclesiastical reformation, but it is one with ecumenism, which aspires to the assimilation of Orthodox by heretics and the submission of Orthodoxy to the Papacy. \ ... Our adherence to the traditional church calendar IS first and foremost bound up with the struggle against the heresy of ecull1enism.'('

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Such is the Old Calendarist case. Even if the change of calendar was not in itself a direct change of doctrine, it violated the Church's oneness by disrupting its liturgical unity. Moreover, the calendar change was only 'step one' in the rapprochement with the 'heterodox' through involvement in ecumenism; and this is a doctrinal issue, because such involvement has led to a progressive betrayal of the Orthodox faith. Are the Old Calendarists justified in making these claims? And how did the calendar schism originate?

It is no easy task to provide a full and fair account of the Greek Old Calendarist movement. It is a complex story, and only an outline can be attempted here; I am conscious of many omissions. The interpretation of the evidence is frequently disputed, and so any treatment such as the present is likely to provoke the ire of either the New or the Old Calendarists, and possibly of both of them at once. Moreover, there is a dearth of systematic and wellresearched studies on the subject. Most of the existing works are written from a predominantly ecclesiastical perspective, with little demographic or sociological analysis. It is difficult, for example, to obtain information about the number of Old Calenclarists, their geographical distribution within Greece, and their educational and social background.? The calendar has proved a contentious issue from the earliest beginnings of the Christian Church. Already in the 50s of the current era St Paul rebuked the Galatians for 'observing special days, months, seasons and years' (Galatians 4: lO), while a slightly later epistle, possibly not by St Paul, deplores arguments about the calculation of 'annual festivals and new moons' (Colossians 2: 16). Controversies during the second and third centuries concerning the date of Easter were largely resolved by the First Ecumenical Council, assembled at Nicaea in 325. This specified that the Christian Pasch a should be kept on the first Sunday following the first full moon of spring (i.e. the first full moon after the vernal equinox). This means that Easter is a moveable feast, primarily dependent upon the moon, but also involving the solar calendar, since it must invariably follow the equinox. The Nicene Fathers placed the vernal equinox on 21 March. In calculating this date, they relied upon the Julian Calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 Be. Presumably they employed this reckoning because it was the calendar followed by the civil authorities within the Roman Empire, not because they attributed to it any intrinsically sacred character. What interested them was the astronomical fact of the equinox, rather than the accuracy of any particular calendar. The Palaioimerologitai, however, argue that the adoption of the Julian Calendar by the First Ecumenical Council and its subsequent use within the Church has conferred upon it a religious significance which it did not originally possess. H

The Julian Calendar presupposes a year of 365 % days; but this is not strictly accurate, since the actual length of the year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds," and so the Julian year is slightly more than 11 minutes too long. This results in an error of approximately one whole day in every 128 years. In consequence, as the centuries passed, Easter was sometimes no longer being observed by the Church on the date intended by Nicaea, that is to say, on the first Sunday after the full moon following the true astronomical equinox. In eighth-century Northumbria the Venerable Bede realized that something had gone wrong with the Paschal computation, but nothing was done at the time to correct the errors that he had detected. Five centuries later Roger Bacon succeeded in calculating the length of the year with astonishing accuracy - he reckoned it as 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes, which is only a few seconds in excess of the true figure - and in his Opus Maius, sent to Pope Clement IV in 1267, he proposed a thorough revision of the calendar, including the date of Easter. But once more no action was taken. The Byzantines of the Palaeologan era were likewise aware of the inaccuracy of the Julian Calendar. In 1324, exactly 600 years before the adoption of the New Calendar by the Church of Greece, the learned humanist Nikiphoros Gregoras submitted a scheme for calendar reform to the Emperor Andronikos II; but the latter, with a prudence that was certainly prophetic, decided to make no change for fear of causing a schism within the Church. H' When in 1371 the monk Isaakios Argyros made similar proposals for correcting the date of Easter, the canonist Matthaios Vlastaris reacted as Andronikos II had done. 'It is better to make no change', he wrote, 'for any such innovation ... will cause no small conflict within the Church.'11 In the next century Georgios Gemistos Plethon (ca. 1360-1452) suggested a far more radical reformation of the calendar, linked to 1115 secret schemes for a revived paganism; but there was never any prospect that his fantastic notions would actually be adopted. '" By the late sixteenth century the Julian Calendar was in error by a full ten days. The true astronomical equinox now fell not on 21 March but on 11 March according to the Julian reckoning; but the Church, both Eastern and Western, continued to date the equinox to 2l March according to the Julian Calendar. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII eliminated the inaccuracy by introducing the New or Gregorian Calendar named after him. Ten days were omitted from the month of October in that year, so that henceforward the date 21 March once more corresponded to the true equinox. T6 prevent anomalies in the future, the Pope decreed that the century years were only to be leap years when divisible by four hundred (for example, 1600,2000). Thus the clifference between the Julian and the Gregorian Calendars, amounting to ten days in the sixteenth century, was still ten days in the following century. In the eighteenth century it increased to eleven days, in the nineteenth to twelve, and in the twentieth to thirteen. In the twenty-first

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century, since 2000 will be a leap year, the difference will remain at thirteen days. There is a slight inaccuracy in the Gregorian Calendar, which results in an error of one day in approximately every 3,300 years; but this is of course negligible in comparison with the error of one day in every 128 years according to the Julian Calendar. Pope Gregory XIII hoped that the Orthodox East would agree to adopt the New Calendar, and in J 582-83 he made approaches to Patriarch Ieremias II (Tranos) of Constantinople. II These met with no success. Synods held at Constantinople in 1583, 1587 and 1593 rejected the Gregorian Calendar; and when the Greek Orthodox bishop in Venice, Gabriel Severns, attempted to introduce the New Style in his church, he was sharply reprimanded by the Patriarch. Ieremias II's reasons for opposing the Gregorian Calendar were not scientific but religious. He objected to it because, in the first place, when reckoned according to the New Style the Christian Pascha sometimes precedes the Jewish Passovel; and this he believed to be prohibited by the Council of Nicaea. Secondly, he feared that Rome would exploit the introduction of the New Calendar as a means of infiltration and proselytism. Thirdly, and most seriously, he saw the new Papal Calendar as an innovation, sundering what he termed the 'golden chain' of Holy Tradition. 'We preserve the rules concerning Pascha without calling them into question', he wrote, 'and we have an eternal ordinance, to be observed until the glorious coming of Christ.'''' For him continuity of Tradition mattered more than astronomical exactitude. The New Calendar was gradually adopted throughout Western Europe in England not until 1752 - but Greece, along with the other Orthodox countries, continued to follow the Julian Calendar not only in church worship but also in civil affairs. In 1902 Patriarch Ioacheim III of Constantinople sent an encyclical letter to the heads of the other Orthodox Churches, in which with remarkable foresight he raised, among other things, precisely the two issues which have most greatly exercised the Orthodox Church in the twentieth century: reunion with the non-Orthodox denominations and the reform of the calendar. In their replies several Orthodox Churches did not rule out the possibility of adjusting the calendar at some future date, but none of them saw any pressing reason for a change in the immediate present. This is hardly surprising, since the Julian reckoning was still being followed by the civil government in the countries where they were located. Summing up the consensus of the Orthodox Church, Ioacheim wrote in J 904 that any reform of the Julian Calendar was 'premature and quite superfluous at present' .IS Two decades later, following the Great War of 1914-18, the situation throughout the Orthodox world had dramatically changed. The civil authorities in the countries where most Orthodox were living, stich as Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, had now changed or were in process of changing to the Gregorian Calendar. The continued observance

of the Olel Style by the Church created obvious difficulties, particularly where Orthodoxy was still recognized by the government as the national Church. This new state of affairs is reflected in the encyclical issued by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in January] 920, entitled 'Unto the Churches of Christ everywhere', which reopened the questions raised by Ioacheim III in 1902 concerning Christian unity and the calendar, but with a markedly different approach. While Ioacheim had been cautious about inter-Christian rapprochement, insisting that the Orthodox Church is 'the pillar and the ground of truth', the 1920 encyclical boldly proposed the foundation of a 'League of Churches', similar in character to the 'League of Nations' that was in process of foundation. The 1920 encyclical, which serves as a surprisingly complete blueprint for future developments in the Faith and Order Movement and the World Council of Churches, went on to propose eleven ways in which Christians of different communIons could co-operate together. Significantly the first of these was 'by the acceptance of a uniform calendar for the celebration of the great Christian feasts at the same time by all the Churches'. Thus, whereas Ioacheim III had concluded in 1904 that there was no need for any alteration of the calendar, the 1920 encyclical now openly supported the cause of calendar reform. Old Calendarist writers have frequently drawn attention to the connection which the 1920 encyclical established between the changing of the calendar and the promotion of Christian unity. This shows, in their opinion, that from the start plans for the adoption of the New Calendar were closely linked with the pursuit of ecumenism. I (, Three years later the Ecumenical Patriarch Meietios IV (Metaxakis) (1871-1935) decided that the time had come to start carrying into effect the proposals of the 1920 encyclical. He therefore convened a Panorthodox Conference at Constantinople from 10 May to 8 June 1923, with calendar reform as the main item on its agenda. The delegates voted unanimously that both for fixed feasts, such as Christmas and the Annunciation, and for the Paschalion - the tables determining thc date of Easter - the Orthodox Church should henceforward follow the 'Revised Julian Caiendar'. For all practical purposes this is identical with the Gregorian Calendar, for the two coincide exactly until the year 2800. But, conscious as they were of strong anti-Catholic feeling throughout the Orthodox world, the participants at the 1923 meeting were anxIous to make clear that they had not adopted the 'Papal' Gregorian Calendar, but had mcrely emended the Julian reckoning. 17 Unfortunately the Constantinople conference of 1923 proved controversial and divisive. It was convened in haste, at a time of grave political inseClll·ity following the ASIa Minor disaster, when the future cOlltinuance of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul was in serious doubt. Indeed, during the course of the conference, a group of rioters broke into the Phanar on I June and assaulted Patriarch Meletios. Moreover, Meletios hilllself was (to put

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matters mildly) a problematic figure. Forceful and energetic, highly intelligent, dedicated to a programme of wide-ranging reform, he had made many enemies during his stormy years as Archbishop of Athens (1918-20); and his time as Ecumenical Patriarch (1921-23) proved equally tumultuous. I-Ie was widely suspected of being a Freemason, which did little to enhance his reputation among conservative Orthodox. IH Nor was this all. In addition to the revision of the calendar, the 1923 conference proposed other changes which alarmed Orthodox traditionalists. It decided that deacons and priests could delay marrying, if they so wished, until after ordination; that they could be allowed to contract a second marriage after the death of their wife; and that the fasts could be abbreviated. The proposals endorsed at the 1923 conference coincided closely with the programme of the 'Living Church' in Russia, which from] 922 onwards had set itself up in opposition to St Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow. Yet more disquieting was the gravely unrepresentative character of the 1923 conference. While claiming to be 'Panorthodox', it was in fact nothing of the kind. It was attended by delegates from no more than five Orthodox Churches: Constantinople, Serbia, Romania, Cyprus and Greece. Because of personal disagreements with Meletios, the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem refused to send representatives. Bulgaria was not invited, because between 1872 and 1945 it was out of communion with Constantinople. Most seriously of all, conditions of persecution made it impossible for the Church of Russia to send delegates. Tvvo Russian bishops from the dias/Jora did in fact participate, but not as official representatives for the Russian Church; and one of these, Archbishop Anastasy (Gribanovsky), a member of the Russian Exile Synod at Sremski-Karlovci (Serbia), openly expressed reservations about most of the proposals, including the calendar reform, and withdrew before the end of the conference. Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow, on the other hand, although unable to send delegates, was by no means opposed in principle to the introduction of the New Calendar. In 1918 he had allowed the Church of Finland to change to the New Style; and, not long after the Constantinople conference, on 1st October 1923 he issued a decree, proclaiming the adoption of the New Calendar by the Russian Church as a whole. But, because of troubles caused by the reformist 'Living Church' movement, Tikhon never carried this decree into effect. It was the hope of Patriarch Meletios and the other members of the 1923 Constantinople conference that the calendar change, as regards both the Paschalion and the fixed feasts, would be adopted simultaneously by the Orthodox Churches throughout the world. In the event tillS did not happen, and so a confusing situation arose, which regrettably has persisted up to the present day. On 10/23 March 1924 the only churches to introduce the New Style were Constantinople, Greece and Cyprus. Romania changed to the New Calendar in October 1924, Alexandria in 1928 (by this time the Patt'i-

arch of Alexandria was none other than Meletios IMetaxakis I), and Antioch also in 1928. Bulgaria adopted the New Style only inl968. The New Calendar is also followed by Albania, Finland and the Orthodox Church in America (the former Russian 'Metropolia'), except in Alaska, The Patriarchate of Jerusalem, on the other hand, partly out of a deSire not to disturb the status quo in the Holy Places, has continued up to the present to keep the Julian Calendar. So also have the Churches of Russia, Serbia, Georgia and Sinai, together with the Holy Mountain of Athos (here one of the 'ruling' monasteries, Vatopedi, adopted the New Calendar in 1924, but returned to the Old Style in J 975). The Orthodox Church of Poland has wavered between the two calendars: at present it officially follows the Old Calendar, but some parishes use the New Style. In the Orthodox Church of the Czech Republic and Slovakia both calendars are foliowed. I " Here it will be helpful to make a terminological distlllction between 'Orthodox Churches following the Old Calendar' and the 'Old Calendarists'. By 'Orthodox Churches following the Old Calendar' are meant Churches such as Jerusalem, Russia and Serbia. These, although adhering to the Julian reckoning, remain 111 full communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Church of Greece, and the other New Style Orthodox Churches. By 'Old Calendarists' are meant those Orthodox Christians, in Greece and elsewhere, who have broken off all communion, not only with the New Calendar Orthodox Churches, but also with the Orthodox Churches following the Old Calendar, such as Jerusalem, Russia and Serbia, which continue in communion with the New Calendarists. Thus the Orthodox Churches following the Old Calendar form, along with the New Calendar Orthodox Churches, a world-wide Orthodox communion that is single and undivided, whereas the Old Calendarists constitute a distinct and separate movement.!O When in the autumn of 1923 it became clear that the change of calendar was not going to be adopted simultaneously by all the member Churches throughout the Orthodox world, Archbishop Chrysostomos of Athens proposed a compromise, which was accepted by the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece and by the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Let the New Style be introduced, he suggested, solely for fixed feasts such as 25 December (Christmas) and 25 March (Annunciation, the Greek National Day); on the other hand, the Paschal ion, determining the date of Easter, should for the time being be left unchanged, with the vernal equinox (21 March) still reckoned according to the Old Calendar. 'f'his satisfied the Greek civil authorities, who wanted the Church to celebrate Christmas and the Greek National Day at the same tllne as the state, whereas the date of Easter was not a problem for them, because It falls on a Sunday. At the same time, it ensured that Easter, the chief feast of the Christian Year, would continue to be observed on the same date by virtually all Orthodox Churches. This intermediate arrangement - New Style for fixed feasts, Old Style for the Paschal ion - continues

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until now to be followed by all the New Calendar Orthodox Churches, except for the Church of Finland and a few Orthodox parishes in the Western world, which keep Easter on the same date as the West. Like most such compromises, it involves certain irregularities. For example, in New Calendar Churches the fast preceding the Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul (29 June) is abbreviated, and in certain years it disappears altogether. The unrepresentative character of the 1923 Panorthodox Conference, and the mixed r~ception which its decisions received in the Orthodox world at large, paved the way for the future calendar schism in Greece. There is no good reason to doubt the sincerity of Archbishop Chrysostomos, who endeavoured to serve the Church as best he could in a troubled era. But his telegram of 4 March 1924 was to have far-reaching and unhappy consequences.

At first resistance to the introduction of the New Calendar was muted. In 1927 E/;:/disia, the official iournal of the Church of Greece, claimed that the number of those who continued to follow the Old Calendar was 'very few'; they had no more than two or three chapels in Athens, with small groups in five places elsewhere in Greece. 21 But by 1933 the New Calendarist hierarchy had begun to take a more serious view. In a letter to the government dated 14 October, the bishops referred to the Palaioimerologitai as 'a sizeable minority', which constituted 'a threat to national unity'Y A year later, in their declaration of 16 November 1934, they used yet more alarmist language. There was, they said, 'a state of lamentable ecclesiastical anarchy ... an immediate danger of schism and division, not only within the Church but within the nation'.2' For their part, the Old Calendarists claimed to possess by the mid-1930s no less than 800 parartimata or branches. 24 Doubtless some of these were small, comprising perhaps one or two families worshipping in their own homes and served occasionally by itinerant priests. But even authors hostile to the Pa/aioinzerologitai concede that their numbers may have risen at this time to about 300,000.25 If we include, alongside active Old Calendarists, others who sympathized with them but did not break openly with the official New Calendarist Church, then their numbers in the 19305 may well have exceeded a million. Initially no bishop in Greece espoused the Old Calendarist cause. The Pa/aioimer%gitai were at first served largely by priest-monks coming from Athos. The movement, especially before 1935, was overwhelmingly a 'grass roots' phenomenon, dependent upon lay leadership. Most of its supporters, as Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina later pointed out, belonged to the poorer and less-educated strata of society.2(, But it had also some supporters in high places, such as Christos Androutsos, Professor of Dogmatic Theology in Athens University, the historian Pavlos Karolidis, and Manouil

Gedeon, Great Chartophylax of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Outside the Greek world Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky), head of the Russian Exile Synod at Sremski-KarlovCl, was a particularly outspoken opponent of the New Calendar. Two formative events occurred in 1925. First, on 6119 January, the feast of Theophany according to the Julian Calendar, the Pa/atol1l1erologitai went in solemn proceSSIOn to the harbour of Piraeus, to conduct the customary blessing of the waters. From that time onwards this became a regular annual event. Observed with great outward pomp - with banners, brass bands, and children in Greek national costume, followed by hundreds of nuns and thousands of the faithful - the Theophany blessing has come to constitute the chief visible demonstration of the Old Calendarist presence. As the Old Calendarist movement split into rival factions, the service began to be conducted simultaneously at a number of different POlI1ts along the coast. A second formative event, part of the shared memory of all Pa/aioimerologitai, took place during the night preceding the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 14/27 September 1925. A group of Old Calendarists had gathered outside Athens to celebrate an ali-nIght vigil at the chapel of St John the Theologian on the slopes of Mount Hymettus. Shortly before midnight, according to the testimony of witnesses - including members of the police who had been sent to stop the service - a great Cross of light appeared in the sky above the chapel and remained plainly visible for more than an hour. I-Jere, for the Palaioime1'O/ogitai, was striking testimony of divine blessing upon their struggle. Before long the movement began to develop its own martyrology. On the feast of the Archangels, 8/21 November 1927, as the police tried to break lip an Old Calendarist service at Mandra in Attica, a young married woman, Katerina Routis, was badly wounded, dying in hospital seven days later. She is honoured by the Palaiol1l1emlogitai as the New Martyr Katerina. A somewhat different act of violence occurred on 21 May in the same year. As Archbishop Chrysostomos of Athens entered the Church of St Constantine and St Helena in Piraeus, to celebrate the Divine Liturgy for the patronal feast, he was attacked by an Old Calendarist barber, who tried to cut off the Archbishop's long white beard. Chrysostomos's cheek and hand were cut by the barber's scissors, but his beard escaped largely intact. The Old Calendarist leadership was quick to disown this assault, but it served to fix in the mind of the general public the impreSSIon that the Palaioll71erologifi71 were bigoted fanatics. For the first eleven years of their existence the Old Calendarists were hampered by lack of Episcopal leadership, which meant among other things that they could not ordain their own pnests. The situation changed in a spectacular way on 13/26 May 1935 when three bishops - Metropolitan Germanos of Dimitrias, Metropolitan Chrysostomos, formerly of Florina, and Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Zakynthos - announced, before a large

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congregation at the Olel Calendarist Church of the Dormition in central Athens, that they were joining the Palaioimerologitai. If we read between the lines in the various proclamations which the three issued at this time, it was clearly not their intention simply to assume leadership of a separate Old Calendarist movement. They hoped that other bishops in the New Calendarist hierarchy would join them, thereby creating a situation in which Archbishop Chrysostomos of Athens would be deposed or forced to resign:~7 Metropolitan Germanos of Dimitrias would then replace him, and in this way the Greek Church as a whole would return to the Old Style and the calendar schism would be brought to end. What has never been properly clarified is how far the three bishops, before coming out into the open, had consulted the political leaders and obtained at any rate tacit support. The attempted COUIJ d'eglise by the three occurred shortly after the Venizelist defeat in March 1935, at the height of the ensuing Royalist reaction. Did that influence the three in choosing this precise moment to take action? More specifically, did they consult the future dictator Ioannis Metaxas, as was suggested at the time? Whatever the answer to these questions, we would certainly be unjustified in dismissing the Old Calendarist struggle as nothing more than a sieleeffect of the interwar conflict between Royalists and Venizelists. The truth is more complex. While many Palaioimerologitai, being conservative in their general attitude, were likely to be Royalists, this was by no means invariably the case. Venizelos on his side displayed no particular hostility towards the Old Calendarists. In a parliamentary debate on 22 January 1931, for example, he argued that, if the Palaioimerologitai were to found a Church of their own that was clearly distinct from the official New Calendarist Church, then they could be tolerated by the civil authorities. In reality the calendar dispute was always primarily a religious controversy. Political factors, while playing some part, were never decisive. 2s Acting promptly, the three bishops sought to consolidate their position by consecrating four other bishops in the early days of June 1935. But their hopes of support from the hierarchy of the New Calendarist Church of Greece were disappointed; not a single bishop joined them. Nor did they receive any help from the politicians. On 14 June the Spiritual Court of the New Calendarist Church declared all three to be deposed from sacred orders and reduced to the status of lay monks; they were also condemned to confinement for a five-year period in specified monastic houses. The decision of the Court was not unanimous, and several bishops sitting on it would have preferred a milder penalty. One of the three bishops, Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Zakynthos, recognizing that their 'take-over bid' had failed, sought pardon from the New Calendarist church authorities; and after a six-month period under discipline he was restored to his diocese. The other two, Metropolitans Germanos of Dimitrias and Chrysostomos of Florina, were duly conveyed

to their places of exile by the police. But by October 1935 they managed to make their way back to Athens, where they circulated freely in clerical dress. The civil authorities allowed them to continue largely unhampered in their efforts to organize the Old Calendarist movement. The attitude of de facto toleration continued under the Metaxas regime and during the German occupation. So the calendar schism remained unhealed.

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Divisions among the Palaioimer%gitai In 1937 Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina, in what may be regarded as an. eirenic gesture towards the State Church, drew an important distinction: the New Calendarist Church of Greece, he stated, although schismatic 'potentially' (dYllamei) could not yet be regarded as schismatic 'actually' (energeia). Basically this signified that, in the eyes of the Metropolitan and of those Palaioimerologitai who agreed with him, the New Calendarist Church was not as yet altogether deprived of divine grace, not were its sacraments to be considered invalid. While rejecting the New Calendar as an unauthorized innovation and breaking off all communion with those who had adopted it, Metropolitan Chrysostomos did not claim the right to pass judgement on their status. This, he believed, was a matter that could only be settled by a future Pan orthodox Synod. At times Metropolitan Chrysostomos spoke as if he considered that the Old Calendarist movement and the New Calendarist State Church, despite their mutual alienation, were still fellow members of a single all-embracing Church of Greece. He and his followers saw themselves as resisting the calendar change and, as it were, 'walling' themselves off from it. In this context he used the word (mum, 'look out', 'guard' or 'watch': the Old Calendarists formed a group of vigilantes within the Church of Greece, keeping watch over the integrity of the truth which had been compromised by their New Calendarist brethren. But they did not claim to have definitively replaced the New Calendarist hierarchy as the true Church of Greece. Whereas various later leaders of the Palaioimerologitai have styled themselves 'Archbishop of Athens and All Greece', this was something that Metropolitan Chrysostomos never did. The only title that he employed was 'former Metropolitan of Florina'. A much stricter position, however, was adopted by one of the Old Calendarist bishops who had been consecrated in June 1935, Matthaios (Karpadakis) of Vresthena (1861-1950), an ex-Athonite monk who was the founder of two large Old Calendarist monasteries in Attica: one for women at Keratea, established in 1927, and one for men at Kouvara, founded in 1934. Matthaios firmly rejected the dYlla111ei/energeia distinction. In his opinion the New Calendarist Church of Greece was already fully schismatic; it was therefore without the grace of the Holy Spirit, and so all its sacraments, including baptism, were null and void. It should be noted that for its

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part the New Calendarist Church took a similar view concerning Old Calendarist sacraments, which it rejected as invalid. Despite various attempts at reconciliation during 1937-50, a sharp separation developed between Chrysostomos and Matthaios. Shortly after Matthaios's death, during 1950-51 Chrysostomos seemed to adopt the stricter position of his departed colleague, but he then apparently returned to his earlier standpoint. In this way the Pa/aioimer%gitai were split into two rival factions, the more moderate 'Florinites' and the more extreme 'Matthewites'. Initially the 'Florinites' were by far the more numerous. Chrysostomos's main associate during the attempted 'take-over' in May 1935, Metropolitan Germanos of Dimitrias, died in 1944 during the Nazi occupation. Disappointed by the failure of the Old Calendarists to win wider support among the hierarchy of the Church of Greece, Germanos had gradually withdrawn from active involvement in the struggle; and in 1943 he appealed to the Holy Synod of the State Church, asking to be received back and reinstated in his Episcopal orders. No immediate action was taken by the Synod, perhaps because of the difficult situation prevailing in occupied Athens; but after his death the Synod granted him a posthumous pardon, and decreed that at his funeral he should receive the honours customarily given to a deceased hierarch. Doubts have been expressed about the sincerity of Metropolitan Germanos in espousing the Old Calendarist cause in 1935, and it has been suggested that his real motive was personal ambition and the desire to replace Chrysostomos (Papadopoulos) as Archbishop of Athens. This is perhaps unjust. Throughout his ecclesiastical career Germanos had consistently upheld traditionalist views; and, even though he did not vote against the calendar change in 1924, he had certainly begun to express reservations about it by 1928. On the other hand, no serious misgivings have ever been expressed about the sincerity of Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina. Despite many personal privations he remained unwavering in his support of the Old Calendarist cause until his death in 1955. In his writings he always spoke with dignity and restraint, never insulting his opponents; and New Calendarist sources readily acknowledge his genuine nobility of character. A major attack on the Palaioill1er%gitai was launched by government decree on 3 January 1951. Although during 1924-35, in the early years of the movement, they had been subject to sporadic and sometimes violent harassment from the police, this had diminished from 1936 onwards. In 1951, however, the civil authorities - acting under strong pressure from Archbishop Spyridon of Athens - decided that the moment had come to eliminate the Palaioimer%gitai once and for all. The aged Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina was exiled to a remote monastery in Mytilini; Old Calendarist clergy were arrested, their beards cut off and their heads shaved; virtually all their churches were closed; monks and nuns were expelled from their monasteries. Even New Calendarist writers such as the present Arch-

bishop of Athens concede that the Pa/aioimer%gitai were subjected at this time to 'intimidation, not to say terrorism'."" Although driven temporarily underground, the Old Calendarist movement was not destroyed. By the middle of 1952 the government tacitly acknowledged that the use of violence had proved a failure. The persecution was gradually relaxed, and Metropolitan Chrysostomos was allowed to return to Athens. Although the Holy Synod and many of the diocesan bishops went on appealing to the government and the police to use repressive measures, the civil authorities to their creclit showed an increasing reluctance to employ force. Since the early J 970s there have been few instances of arrests or closure of churches, although Old Calendarist clergy continued for a time to encounter bureaucratic obstruction when seeking to open places of worship or when requesting passports for foreign travel. The question naturally arises why, since the Greek constitution allows freedom of worship to what are termecl 'recognized religions', the Pa/aioi11ler%gitai were for so long subjectecl to repression and police harassment. The answer lies in the particular character of the Old Calendarist movement. The Old Calendarists claimed to be, not a sect newly founded in 1924, but nothing else than the 'True Orthodox Christians' of the Greek land. This meant that, from the viewpoint of the New Calendarist State Church, they were not a separate denomination clearly distinct from the Orthodox Church of Greece, but simply a faction within it - an assemblage of rebellious children who refused obedience to the properly appointed ecclesiastical leadership, but over whom the hierarchy of the Church of Greece could still claim canonical authority. In the words of a memorandum addressed by the New Calendarist Holy Synod to the government on 1 March 1980:

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15

The Palaioi111er%gitai in Greece disagree with our Church for reasons that are not doctrinal. In consequence they are neither schismatics nor heterodox; and so they cannot claim the right to a parallel and indepenclent existence as Orthodox Christians alongside the Church of Greece and within the limits allowed by the Constitution .... They have of course the right to leave the Church by their own free choice, in which case they would then be characterized as non-Orthodox. But they will not so much as envisage the possibility of such a course, since they consider on the contrary that they alone are genuine Orthodox.'!) Such is the reasoning which led the New Calendarist church authorities, and for a long time the Greek civil authorities as well, to deny freedom of worship to the Pa/aioimer%gitm. A particularly vexatious disability to which they were subjected concerned the non-recognition of their marriages. Since the State Church regarded their sacraments as invalid, the civil authorities

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refused to register their marriages, with the result that their children were considered illegitimate - a serious social stigma in Greece, at any rate in the past. It was not until 1969 that the state abandoned its negative stance and, despite protests from the New Calendarist Holy Synod, allowed the marriages of the Palaioimerologitai to be officially recorded. Paradoxically this occurred during the otherwise illiberal regime of the Colonels. li On various occasions since the late 1920s, the New Calendarist Church of Greece and the Greek government have suggested a possible solution to the conflict: let the Old Calendarist congregations continue to observe the Julian reckoning, but let them be served by priests appointed by the local (New Calendarist) diocesan bishop. Any such compromise, however, was unacceptable to the Palaioimerologitai. From their point of view it would be a betrayal to submit in this way to the jurisdiction of a New Calendarist bishop and to commemorate his name in the Divine Liturgy. For them to enter into communion with the State Church, a minimum requirement would be that the latter in its entirety should return to the Julian Calendar. It would also be necessary, so most Palaioil11erologitai would add, that the State Church should break off all relations with other Orthodox Churches following the New Calendar. During the late 1940s, with the advancing age of Chrysostomos of Florina and Matthaios of Vresthena, both groups of Palaioimerologitai grew increasingly concerned about the continuation of their episcopate. In 1948, two years before his death, Matthaios proceeded on his own to consecrate four new bishops. According to the rules prevailing in the Orthodox Church, a new bishop must be consecrated by three or at the very least two existing bishops, not by one alone. There have, however, been rare occasions in the past when a consecration performed by a single bishop has been recognized as valid, even if irregular. Yet, bearing in mind the oft-repeated claim of the Old Calendarists to be strictly loyal to the Holy Canons, it is at the very least ironical that Matthaios and his entourage should have acted in this way in open violation of the canonical tradition of the Orthodox Church. Chrysostomos of Florina died in 1955 without consecrating any bishop to succeed him. The main group of Old Calendarists, the 'Florinites', were now left without an episcopate; for all four of the bishops consecrated in June J 935 had by this time died or returned to the State Church. In December 1960 the 'Florinites' therefore sent one of their number, Archimandrite Akakios (Pappas), to America, where he sought Episcopal consecration from the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in New York. This body was the continuation of the Russian Exile Synod that had been resident at Sremski-Karlovci (Serbia) during the interwar period. But the Russian Synod, headed by Metropolitan Anastasy - who as a member of the 1923 Panorthodox Conference in Constantinople had expressed reservations about the calendar change - rcjected the request of

Akakios, on the grounds that they had no authority to interfere in the internal affairs of the Church of Greece, and also because Akakios was personally unknown to thcm. E This, however, was not the end of the story. Later in the same month of December 1960, two bishops belonging to ROCOR, Archbishop Serafim of Chicago and the Romanian Bishop Teofil (Ionescu), in defiance of the decision by the Ncw York Synod, proceeded to consecrate Akakios Pappas at Detroit under conditions of strict secrecy. A bizarre feature in this clandestine consecration was that Bishop Teofil was himself a follower of the New Calendar, a fact of which Akakios was fully awarc. It was not until December ] 969 that ROCOR gave its official approval to the consecration of Akakios; by this time Metropolitan Anastasy was dead. In May 1962 Akakios consecrated three further bishops, with the assistance of another member of ROCOR, Archbishop Leonty of Chile and Peru, who had travelled to Greece for this purpose. When Leonty's action came to the knowledge of the New York Synod, he was severely reprimanded for acting without its approval. In this way the 'Florinites' recovered the episcopate, albeit in a manner that was distinctly questionable. During 1963-94 the 'Florinite' group was headed by Archbishop Avxentios (Pastras). The later years of his lengthy rcign were marked by a series of schisms, with the result that by the 1990s the Old Calendarist movement as a whole had become split into at least eight subdivisions, with each group headed by its own synod of bishops, and with each synod cxcommunicating all thc others. This unhappy fragmentation, along with the undignified polemic that has accompanied it, has greatly impaired the influence of the Palaioimerologitai. In April 1998 the number of rival jurisdictions was slightly diminished, when two Old Calendarist bishops in the United States, Paisios and Vikentios, were received into communion by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. They claim to have twenty parishes, with 30,000 faithful. They have been allowed to retain the Julian Calendar, but the two bishops with their clergy were reordained. Among the existing Old Calendarist jurisdictions, the one which continues most directly the tradition of Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina is the group headed by Metropolitan Kyprianos of Oropos, with its centre at the Monastery of Fili in Attica. Its dependency in North America, under Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna, issues theological publications of solid value. The Fili group, which is affiliated with ROCOR, consistently refuses to condemn the sacraments of the New Calendarists as invalid. By contrast, most if not all of the other Old Calendarist Jurisdictions - although for the greater part tracing their succession from Avxentios (Paw·as), and therefore ultimately from Chrysostomos of Florina - now adhere to the 'Matthewite' standpoint, condemning the sacraments of the 'mainstream' Orthodox Churches as invalid and devoid of sanctifying grace. Thus the 'Matthewite' position, which initially was upheld by no more than a small minority of

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Pa/aioimc1'%gitai, has gradually become the majority view. How numerous are the Old Calendarists in Greece? Spokesmen for the Pa/aioimcr%gitai, both in the 1930s and more recently, have regularly claimed about one million supporters. J ] But a double census, taken in 1969 independently by the civil authorities and by the State Church, suggests that the true figure is much lower. I-Iere are the results (the statistics from the Church of Greece do not include Crete and the Dodecanese).J.I

In both lists the Old Calendarists are concentrated mainly in Athens, Piraeus, Attica and Thessalonica. Old Calendarist sources reject these figures as unduly low, and in this they seem justified. Personally I would accept as not unreasonable the estimate given in the Fili/Etna publication, The Old Calelldar Orthodox Church of Greece: 'they still number in the hundreds of thousands' .J5 At no point in its history has the Old Calendarist movement in Greece possessed any seminary for the training of its clergy. But if the Pa/aioi111er%gitai have few theological centres, they possess numerous monastic houses. Indeed, the most striking feature about the entire movement is the dominant role played within it by monasteries and monastic clergy. What St Theodore the Studite said in ninth-century Byzantium is singularly applicable to the 'True Orthodox Christians' of the twentieth century: 'Monks are the sinews and foundations of the Church'.'" Almost all the Old Calendarist bishops reside in monasteries of which in many cases they are the founders. Particularly impressive is the large number of nuns in the movement of the Pa/aioimerologitai; but it should be remembered that since the 1920s there has been a revival of women's monasticism in the New Calendarist Church as well. Perhaps the Pa/aioimcr%gitai have today (not counting Mount Athos) a total of about 2,000-2,500 monks and nuns, which is roughly equivalent to the number of monastics in the State Church. The Old Calendarist laity have been profoundly influenced by the prevailing spirit of monastic piety. 'The Faithful', states Bishop Amvrosios, a member of the Fili group, 'who are, for the most part, simple and humble persons, are known for their old-fashioned modesty and Christian behaviour, their careful keeping of the regulations of the Church - in particular the fasts, which are now almost totally disregarded by the members of the State

Church - and their love of the Traditions of Holy Orthodoxy.. " Many of these families could be better described as "little monasteries", which explains, in turn, the many monastic vocations'.17 The primary source of this monastic ethos is the Holy Mountain of Athos. In its early years, as noted earlier, the movement was largely dependent on the ministrations of itinerant monk-priests from the Mountain, and but for this support the Old Calendarist cause might never have become firmly established. As regards the present situation within Arhos itself, all the monks follow the Old Style, but of the twenty 'ruling' monasteries only one, Esphigmenou, is 'Old Calendarist' in the strict sense, that is to say, not in communion with the Church of Greece; the remaining monasteries all commemorate the Ecumenical Patriarch during divine worship. Outside the twenty main monasteries, however, there are many smaller hermitages which refuse all ecclesiastical communion with the New Calendarists. Writing in 1982, Archbishop Christodoulos reckoned these 'zealot' monks, as they are known, to number about 300-400, out of an overall total of 1,146 monks on the Holy Moul1tain. 1H The Greek Old Calendarist movement also has supporters outside Greece itself. They are to be found in Cyprus and in most parts of the Greek diaspora: for example, in the United States (especially in the New York district of Astoria), in Canada (with large communities in Toronto and Montreal), in Australia, in Britain (here the number is exceedingly small) and elsewhere in Western Europe. In addition, there are non-Greek Old Calendarist groups in Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Russia and Kenya. Many members of the State Church of Greece, on emIgrating to North America, are attracted to Old Calendarist parishes, not solely or primarily because of the calendar, but because they find in the churches of the Palaioimer%grtai the Orthodox piety with which they are familiar in the Mother Country. In churches of the New Calendarist Greek Archdiocese, they are often bewildered by what they encounter: pews, fitted carpets, organs, mixed choirs dressed in coloured robes, clean-shaven clergy wearing suits and clerical collars. In the Old Calendarist churches, on the other hand, they discover a more congenial atmosphere: no pews but only stalls around the walls, perhaps no electric light but only beeswax candles and olive oil lamps, Byzantine chanting, clergy in rasol1 and IwlY111ll1afchiol1. Let us not be too quick to dismiss these features as no more than 'cultural'. In the traditional Orthodox world view outward objects and gestures possess an inner and symbolical value, and every liturgical action finds its place within an all-embracing whole in which nothing is purely incidental. Deserving of particular mention, among the Old Calendarists in North America, is the important monastic centre at Boston, Massachusetts, consisting of Holy Transfiguration Monastery for men, and Holy Nativity Convent for women. These belong very definitely to the 'Matthewite' persuasion. Holy Transfiguration Monastery has

18

19

Laity Clergy Churches and chapels Monasteries and hermitages Monks Nuns

Govcrnmcnt ccnslls

Church of Grcecc census

57,229 222

30,110

269 43 180 324

243

207 107 146 1,152

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issued, among other publications, several volumes of liturgical translations and a fine edition of St Isaac the Syrian.],) What future have the Palaioimerologitai? It is tempting to dismiss them as a survival from the past, doomed to gradual extinction. Their significance, it might be argued, belongs to the Greek world of the 1920s and 1930s. In that disturbed era - with the struggle between the Royalists and Venizelists, with the Asia Minor disaster and the collapse of the 'Great Idea', and with the many other changes in Greek society following the first world war - conservative Greek Orthodox clung in their bewilderment to the Julian Calendar, regarding it as a guarantee of continuity in a time of change; they saw it as symbolizing all the values in the traditional way of life which seemed to them under threat. The calendar fulfilled the same symbolic role, though to a lesser degree, in the late 1940s, another troubled time in Greek national life. But does the Old Calendar have the same power as a symbol in the late 1990s? What significance have the Paiaioimerologitai today, weakened as they are by internal divisions, within a Greece that is part of the European Union? Such a conclusion, however, may be premature. Following the collapse of Communism in 1988-89, there has emerged throughout Eastern Europe a growing conservatism within the Orthodox Church. This trend is especially evident within the Church of Russia. At several leading monasteries, for example, under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow - which is of course in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the other New Calendarist Churches - visiting clergy who follow the New Style are no longer invited to concelebrate and may even be refused communion. Conservative tendencies are also gaining strength within the Church of Greece and, still more, among the Orthodox in North America, whether Greek or non-Greek. Although at present marginalized, the Greek Pa/aioimer%gitai - and their allies in Russia, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia - may still have a part to play on the Orthodox world of the twenty-first century.

Notes 1 Anthimos D. Roussas, To Palaioilllerologiakon (Athens, 1974),14-15 . 2 Akriuis thesis tou imerologialwu zitimatos (Athens, 1950), 11-12. 3 To Proton Panelladikoll Synedriol1 tOil o/Jadoll tOll IoulimlOu Eortologiou, (Athens, 1947) 16,44. 4 The Old Calendarists and the Rise of Religiolls COllseruatisl1l /11 Greece, translated by Novice Patrick and Bishop Chrysostomos of Etna (Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, Etna, CA, 1995), 14; for the original French text of this article, see Cahiers d'hudes surla Mediterranee orientale et Ie mOllde tllrcoiralliell, XVII (] 994), 17-51. 5 In Bishop Chrysostomos, Bishop Auxentios and Bishop Ambrose, The Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Greece (4th ed.: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, Etna, California, 1994), 103. This is the most balanced Old Calendarist treatment of the subject available in English.

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6 'Schism' or 'Walling-Of!,? A Pastoral EIJistle, supplement to the periodical Orthodox TraditlOlI, XV, 4 (1998) 15. 7 The most thorough existing study, written from a New Calendarist viewpoint, is the 460-page doctoral dissertation by Christodoulos K. Paraskevaldis (now Archbishop of Athens), Istoriki kai Iwnollil::.i theOl'isis tOll PalalOl11lerologitilwlI zitimatos kata te tll1 genesl11 kai till exelixin aftoll en Elladi (Athens, 1982), which is closely based on the archives of the Holy Synod at Athens. For Old Calendarist accounts in English, consult Bishop Chrysostomos and others, The Old Calelldar Orthodox Church of Greece, (see note 5); and The Struggle against ECllmenism: The History of the True Orthodox Church of Greece from .1924 to .1994 (The Holy Orthodox Church in North America, Boston, Mass., 1998). These represent respectively the 'Flonnite' and the 'Matthewite' standpoints. In Greek, consult also: Stavros Karamitsos-Gamvroulias, I ago ilia ell to kipo tis Gethsimani (Athens, 1961); A. Panotis, in Th risk eftiki Iwi lthiki EllkykIOIJaideia, I (Athens, 1962), 817-27; and Antonios M. Pa padopoulos, I Ekklisia tis Ellados enanti thematol1 1Janorthodoxoll endiapherontos fwta ton eilwston aiona (Thessaloniki, 1975): 39-67 (the first of these is Old Calendarist, the second and third New Calendarist). There is a wealth of information in It'cnce Doens, 'Les Palaiolmcrologltes en Grece et leurs monasteres', !reI/ikon, XLIV, 4 (1971), 548-65; XLV, 1 (1972),51-74. The serious enquirer needs also to read the numerous writings of Archbishop Chrysostomos of Athens and of Metropolitan Chrysostomos, formerly of Florina: the main titles are listed in the very extensive bibliography of Paraskevaidis, TheOl'isis. 8 Compare the title (which speaks for itself) of the work by Kallistos Makris, Old Calendarist Bishop of Corinth, The God-Ins/Jired Orthodox ./lIlian Calendar us. the Paise Gregorian Papal Calendar (Slovo Publishing Co., Chicago, 1971). 9 That is the length 111 AD 2000; the year has slowed down by ten seconds since AD 1.

10 Nikiphoros Gregoras, History, VII, 13 (Bonn edition, 372). 11 Vlastaris, 'On the Holy Pascha', Alphabetical Treatise XVI, 7, in G. A. Rallis and M. Potlis, SYlltagma tOil theion IWI /Croll kanol1on, VI (Athens, 1859) 424. 12 See C. M. Woodhouse, George Gell1istos P1etholl: The Last of the Hellenes (Oxford, 1986), 352-3. 13 See V. Peri, Due date: un 1ll1ica Pasq1la. Le cmgml della l110derna disparitil litllrgica in 1111 IIna trattatiua eCIIlllenica tra Roma e COllstal1tillo/Joli (1582-84) (Milan, 1967). Compare G. V. Coyne, M. A. Hosk1l1 and O. Pedersen, eds., Gregorian Reform of the Calendm: Proceedings of the Vatican Conference to Commemorate its 400th AllIliuersary, 1582-1982 (Vatican City, ] 983), espeCially 228-32, 261-2. 14 Paraskevaidis, Theorisis, 20, note 21. 15 Ioacheim III's 1902 encyclical, and his further letter of 1904 commenting on the responses from the other Orthodox Churches, can be found 111 Constantin G. Patelos, The Orthodox Chllrch ill the Ecumenical Mouemel/t: Documents mid Statements 1902-.1975 (World Council of Churches, Geneva, 1978),27-39. For the answer of the Church of Russia, see Athelstan Riley (ed.), 13irhbeck and the Russian Church, (Anglican and Eastern Association, London/New York 1917) 247-57 (with W .J. Birkbeck's comments, 258-67). 16 The full text of the 1920 encyclical is given in Patelos, The Orthodox Church in the ECllmenical Mouemellt, 40-3. 17 For the proceedings of the 1923 Conference, see Pralailw hm A/Jophaseis tou en /(ollstalltll1()ufJOlel Pal1orthodoxou SYlledrioll (10 Maroll-8 /01lI1ioIl1923) (Constantinople, 1923); on the calendar, see 6-7, 13-14, 17-24,36-40,50-77,

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21 22 23 24

80-84,89,129-31,169-71,189,199-208,211-15. The minutes are frank and vivid, with many fascinating details. The Masonic connections of Meletios IV were confirmed by Athenagoras II (Kokkinakis), Archbishop of Thy ate ira and Great Britain during 1963-79, who was serving under Meletios as a deacon in Alexandria at the time of the latter's death III 1935. I was present at a diocesan clergy meeting in London on 7 November 1978, at which Athenagoras described how he had been an unwilling witness of the Masonic funeral given to Meletios. Compare Kitsikis, The Old Calendarists and the Rise of Religious Conservatism ill Greece, 16-17, ctting evidence from the Masonic Bulletin of the Grand Lodge of Greecc. It is sometimes alleged that Archbishop Chrysostomos (Papadopoulos) of Athens was also a Freemason, but I know of no specific evidence to prove this. The case of Serbia during the interwar period shows that, while doubtless inconvenient, it is by no means impossible for Church and state to coexist with different calendars, even when Orthodoxy constitutes the national Church. Might not Greece in 1923--4 have followed the same policy as Serbia? In practice, however, the line of demarcation is sometimes blurred. For example, the Old Calendarist group headed by Metropolitan Kyprianos of Oropos and Fili is affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR); clergy of ROCOR concelebrate with clergy of the Patnarchate of Jerusalem and the Church of Serbia; Jerusalem and Serbia are in full communion with the New Calendarist Orthodox Churches. Such instances of 'mediate' communion are relatively frequent in church history; a notable example is the fourth-century Melitian Schism at Antioch. Ekklisia, V (1927) 21. Ekk/isia, XI (1933) 320-2. El
OLD CALENDARISTS

1980 (in El
103. 25 This is given as an absolute maximum by Metropolitan Ioacheim of Dimitrias, To Palaioill1erologiakOlI Zitima en El/adi (2 parts: Volos/Athens, 1948-52), part 26 27

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II, ] 7. But elsewhere he suggests that the Old Calendarists were never more than 50-60,000 (part 1,8), or at the most 100,000 (part II, 15). Akrivis thesis tou imer%giakou zitimatos, 75-76. In statements to the press made during May 1935, Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina mentioned by name nine other bishops who, he claimed, had promised to join the three (Paraskevaidis, Theorisls, 237, note 395). A somewhat different political matter also calls for mcntion. The Slav Christians in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were, as already noted, still following the Old Calendar. The Greek government was alarmed that, as a result of Old Calendarist propaganda, the Slav-speaking minority in Northern Greece would establish closer links with the Slavs across the border who kept the Old Style; in this way the calendar dispute would strengthen Slav separatist movements on Greek soil. This possibility is mentioned by Metropolitan Chrysostomos (Kavouridis), who had served as Bishop of Pelagonia (Bitola) during] 911-18 and of Florina during 1926-32, and who was therefore well informed about the situation in these regions: see his comments in Ala-ivis thesis tou illlerologia/wlI zitimatos, 53. He also mentions how Slav-speaking Orthodox in Greek territory would cross into Yugoslavia to keep church festivals according to the Old Calendar: see Pragmateia !Jeri tIS allothell ek/Jolitistikis apostolis tis E.llados !wi tall artion tis kataptoseos aftis (Mytilini, 1951), 113-14. Paraskevaidis, Them·isis, 304, note 601. Memorandum of the Church of Greece to the Ministry of Education, 1st March

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The exact moment when the Greeks finally shifted their allegiance to Constantinople's patriarch is unclear. Some authors date it from 727 and Emperor Leo Ill's seizure of papal patrimonies in Illyricum. It is preferable, however, to place it closer to 752 and the fall of Ravenna to the Lombards. For the Byzantine Greeks, Italy became like Syria, under foreign and barbarian occupation, which made it impossible for the bishops of both Rome and Antioch to carry out their duties. There was, therefore, no other choice than to look henceforth to the patriarch of Constantinople.'

2 CATHOLICS

CHARLES FRAZEE The Fourth Crusade and the Duchy of the Archipelago

The Catholic community is one of the larger religious minorities in Greece yet it is but a small fraction of the country's population, numbering abou; one-half of one percent of the total. The Catholics are of both the Latin and Eastern rites, although the latter are newcomers, having come to Greece as a result of the exchange of population in the 1920s and are but several thousand people with only two parishes in all of Greece. The Latins have the ~1Uch larger population, principally located on two of the Cycladic Islands, 111 Athens and its suburbs, and in the larger towns where island emigrants have settled in recent years.

The early centuries The origins of the Latin Catholic Church in Greece date from the early thirteenth century. Previous to that time all the population of the Greek peninsula, the Ionian and the Aegean islands belonged to the Eastern church. It should be noted, however, that European Greeks for many centuries were a part of the Roman patriarchate. At Nicaea, when Canon VI set up jurisdictions for Alexandria, less clearly for Antioch, and without mention of Rome, there was a presumption that papal territory included all of the European lands and Latin North Africa.' This ecclesiastical structure was jeopardized once Constantinople became the capital of the Roman Empire and its bishop was elevated to a major position within the Christian hierarchy. First Thrace and then other nearby provinces joined Constantinople as the political boundary between the two parts of the Empire shifted westwards. The popes vainly sought to hold the line by appointing Thessaloniki's archbishop to vicarial status with the right to consecrate bishops, hear disputes, call local synods, and, in general, to supervise the subordinate Balkan churches.l

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While Latins and Greeks, delegations from Rome and Constantinople, passed back and forth over the following centuries, it was only with the foundation of Italian merchant colonies in Constantinople that members of the Latin Church began to take up permanent residence in the East. While properly the Italians from Amalfi, Pisa, and more importantly, Venice and Genoa, could have attended the Byzantine Churches of the imperial capital, they preferred to bring their own clergy with them, and to build Latin churches in their sections of the city. Relations between Latins and Greeks were often strained, for Westerners were a privileged elite, and bore the onus of representing foreign interests in the Byzantine capital. The status of these Constantinopolitan colonies was a fragile one. However, the arrival of the Venetians and Franks of the Fourth Crusade established a much more permanent footing for Latin Christians in the capital and its lands. A direct result of the Fourth Crusade was the foundation of the first permanent Latin churches on what is now the territory of the nation of Greece:' In the spring of 1205 a noble adventurer from Venice, Marco Sanudo, with a small fleet of ships cruised into the Aegean. His goal was to carve out an empire for himself and his friends, to create a thalassocracy based on the island of Naxos. During the negotiations carried on between the Venetians and the Crusaders whIch divided the Byzantine Empire between them, Tinos was assigned to the Latin Emperor, Andros to Venice, but the other islands seemed so unimportant that they were omitted from the partition. This permitted Sanudo and captains from several other prominent Venetian families, the Ghisis and the Dandolos, with the blessing of the Venetian Doge and the Latin Emperor, to create an independent state in the Aegean. Sanudo met only token resistance when he occupied Naxos and proceeded to build a fortified palace, his castro, on the site of the ancient city. The castro was fortified with a wall which circled the acropolis of the town. Next to the palace Sanudo or his successor built a cathedral for his Venetian aides and the first Latl11 hierarch, his name unknown, arrived to take up residence on the island. The Naxian archbishop shared jurisdiction over Greece since he had colleagues on the mainland, in Athens, Corinth, Patras, Thebes and Thes25

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saloniki. Moreovel; Pope Innocent III, who had accommodated himself to the Latin conquest, went about creating additional Latin bishoprics throughout the Aegean. The Cycladic islands of Andros, Santorini, Milos, Syros, Kea, Kythnos, and Tinos also received Latin bishoprics.' The Greek bishops on the islands and the mainland found themselves forced into exile. Their cathedrals and revenues were now as a consequence attached to the Latin Church. On the other hand, Greek parish priests and monks were left in place so long as they agreed to recognize the Latin bishops as their superiors and were willing to commemorate the Pope of Rome and the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople in the diptychs of the Liturgy. The Latins dealt with the Greeks through their representative, the /Jrotopapas." Nothing of the Catholic Church on mainland Greece remained after the Ottoman conquest. Western Christians either died in battle or fled the country, leaving no one to continue the heritage of the Latin principalities of the Middle Ages. In 1385 the Venetians settled on Corfu, establishing a Catholic presence in the Ionian Islands which expanded over the years to include Kephallonia, Zakynthos, Kythera and finally, in 1684, Leukas. As was usual in Venetian lands only Latin bishops were permitted to function and Greek parish clergy and monks had to accept the Catholics as their superiors. Nominally they became Byzantine-rite Catholics so long as Venice was the master of the islands. Venetian rule on Corfu was patterned on that of the mother city, complete with a Libro d'Om that listed the island aristocrats, both Greek and Latin. The Italian immigrants who settled in the Ionian islands were obviously Latins, and over the centuries, a handful of Greek families joined the Catholic church.' The Latins of Sanudo's territories, the Duchy of the Archipelago, were always few in number. While accurate figures for the Middle Ages are impossible to determine, it is likely that the Catholics of Naxos may have reached 500, one-tenth of the total population. On the smaller islands the numbers were even less. A few families from the West, some from Spain, France, or Dalmatia, as well as Italians were found on each of the Cyclades as administrators, landowners, and merchants. On all twenty inhabited Cycladic islands the Latin lords built one or sometimes more castros to fend off their enemies - and enemies they had in abundance: the Byzantine fleet after the Palaiologans regained Constantinople, the Catalans of mainland Greece, the Seljuk Turks of Anatolia, but more dangerous than all the rest, swarms of pirates of every Mediterranean nationality. Every castro had its Latin church but it proved difficult to find enough clergy to view clerical life in the Cyclades attractive. Even bishoprics went unattended for long periods by their appointees. So long as the Duchy of the Archipelago existed, the number of Catholics appears to have remained constant. Because it was difficult to find women from the West willing to emigrate to the Cyclades, Italian men frequently

took Greek wives and the children were more likely to enrol in the church of their fathers, if for no other reason than the economic and social privileges that came with Latin church memberships.s During the Middle Ages, on two Cycladic islands, the Catholic community found itself in a much more favoured position. On Syros and Tinos the Catholics became a Church of the majority. On Syros the Latin Church seems to have gained its position through conversion. Without sufficient records to document exactly when or how this occurred, a strong possibility exists that the Greek clergy on the island were so few that the several hundred people who lived on Syros in the Middle Ages simply opted to receive the sacraments in the Latin cathedral built atop the hill of Ano Syros. 9 Tinos had a different experience, for this island was not a part of the Duchy of the Archipelago, but had been taken in the thirteenth century by the Ghisi brothers, Andrea and Geremia. In 1379, when the last of their dynasty, Giorgio III, died, he willed the island to Venice. Henceforward the Republic of St. Mark held Tinos and nearby Mykonos, appointing its governors and staffing its civil and military officials. Tinos was fortunate to have a formidable mountain located on it. Here the Ghlsis and later the Venetians constructed a castro and located St. Helena's fort. The Venetian town, the Exombourgo, was walled and beneath it the Greek inhabitants had their residences in the Bourgo. Both Latin and Greek churches shared the mountain. Time after time, when all other islands were struck by enemy fleets and armies, or pirates seeking captives and loot, Exombourgo remained secure. Catholic citizens from all over the Aegean were always assured that they could find a protecting wing in its shadow. Crete received the major share of Westerners who fled their homes in difficult times, but Tinos was not far behind. The Catholic community of Tinos prospered, therefore, since for half a millennium it took in foreign Catholics, the children of mixed marriages who were brought up to be Catholic, and converts from the Greek Church. 10 Syros and Tinos were unique. It was only on those two islands of the Cyclades that Catholics put down strong roots. On all the other islands the natives remained firmly attached to the Greek church and the Latins remained a small minority. The Catholic Church was also represented on Chi os, Rhodes, and Crete, islands that today form part of Greece. The Latin period in Chios begins with the Genoese occupation, which began in the thirteenth century after Michael Palaiologos signed the Treaty of Nymphaion. Soon the Genoese built Latin churches, invited western clergy to settle there and a Latin bishopric was established. Several churches here, and on Santonni, were double churches shared by both Catholics and Orthodox. The stability found on Chios attracted the Franciscans and Dominicans to build convents, which became the largest in the Aegean.1! The Catholics of Rhodes have a history only because of the presence on that island of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John. Once expelled from the Holy Land in 1306, the Knights came to

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Rhodes, making it the centre of their activities in the East. A Catholic archbishop, sponsored by the Knights, made his home on the island so long as it was in Latin hands. After the forces of Sultan Siileyman conquered Rhodes, no more Catholics remained on the island. Finally, the island of Crete, so long a Venetian possession, had a significant population of Western Catholics from the thirteenth century to the conclusion of the Candian War in 1669. The stormy relations between Venice and the native Greeks reflected on the status of the church. Catholics on Crete were equated with foreign rulers and the Western Church made little headway convincing the Greeks of Crete that there was anything to gain by acknowledging the Latin church as a friendly institution. 12

For over a century after the Fall of Constantinople, the Catholic rulers of the Duchy of the Archipelago and the Genoese on Chios were not troubled by the Ottomans. Both island governments paid tribute to the sultans, who, so long as they received these funds, were content to leave them alone. By 1500 most Catholics of Italian origin had become at least partially Hellenized, using the Greek language in their day to day business. During the reign of Siileyman the Magnificent in the early sixteenth century, the political condition of Catholics was to change. The Sultan's admiral Khair ad-Din Barbarossa, frustrated over a failed expedition against Italy and Venetian-held Corfu, took out his vengeance on the smaller Greek islands of the Aegean. The Ottoman fleet attacked Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, taking all who were survivors into slavery. Then Barbarossa laid siege to the castro of Kephalos on Paros. The Parians, some 6,000 of them, shared the same fate as the captives of Aegina. The Duke of Naxos, Giovanni II Crispo, bargained with Barbarossa, and agreed to pay a higher tribute. Therefore the Turkish admiral spared Naxos from pillage. Several years later a delegation from Naxos, complaining over Giacomo IV Crispo's misrule, asked the Sultan to remove him from office. Murad II agreed. He appointed his confidant, Joseph Nasi, to become the Duke of Naxos. This appointment was unique since Nasi was a Jew and never before had a non-Muslim held such a high position in the Ottoman state. Nasi never went to Naxos;but appointed as his deputy, Francesco Coronello, who was a converso, a Catholic of Sephardic Jewish background, to govern his islands. It was a good choice, since Coronello's Catholicism made him more acceptable to the nobility of the islands, if not to the Orthodox. Coronello was anxious to keep the social structure of the archipelago as he found it. As a result on Naxos, Syros, and Santorini the Catholic landowners were not disturbed in their possessions and church life continued as before. Ll In 1566 Genoese rule on Chios came to an end when Piyali Pa~a sailed into the harbour. A Turkish force was sent ashore, and placed tl~e

heads of the more important families under arrest and the army plundered several of the Catholic churches. The bishop and many Franciscan and Dominican friars went into exile, an absence that allowed a Greek metropolitan from the Patriarchate of Constantinople to become the chief representative of Christianity on the island. I .. Catholic fortunes were strengthened at this time thanks to the protection given to the Latins by the French. In 1527 a French ambassador arrived in Constantinople to discuss co-operation with the Ottomans in joint action against their common enemy, the Habsburgs. Over the years the upshot of talks between the French and Ottomans was a treaty, known as the Capitulations of 1569, which promised that France should be in a position to guarantee the safety of Catholics throughout the Ottoman Empire. Often renewed, the Capitulations allowed clergy to serve in Ottoman territories as chaplains to French merchants and diplomats. II Soon French missionaries, Jesuits and Capuchins, arrived in Constantinople and Thessaloniki to take up the positions given them under the Capitulations. The older religious orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, had been content to minister to the known Catholics. For the Jesuits and Capuchins this was not enough. They believed that they should aggressively work among the Greek and Annenian populations of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover they were especially anxious to introduce the reforms mandated at the Council of Trent. ll, The papacy in Rome also hoped to win converts from the Orthodox. In 1576 Pope Gregory XIII opened the Greek College in Rome, attached to St Athanasius' Church, for training priests to work in the Greek missions and in Southern Italy which now held a significant Greek and Albanian population. If not Catholic already, students were expected to convert and subsequently receive ordination in the Byzantine rite. The College had a mixed record. For some students their stay in Rome made them able Catholic missionaries, but for others the experience gave them an abiding hatred for the Latin Church. Some of the latter, on their return to the islands rejoined the Orthodox community and received high positions at the Ecumenical Patriarchate or served as bishops in the hierarchy. Several years later, the founding of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith centralized the administration of the Catholic missions in the East Mediterranean. Henceforth, through this institution the Latin bishops in the Aegean made their reports to Rome. 17 In 1579, upon the death of Joseph Nasi, the Cyclades were incorporated into the regular administration of the Ottomans. Sultan Murad III sent out a bey and a Iwdi to Naxos and to the other larger islands to represent his government. Murad issued an ahd-nameh, an imperial decree that promised the islanders, both Catholic and Orthodox, freedom of religion, a guarantee of their properties, and the right to build new churches and ring bells, both extraordinary exemptions for Christians living in Muslim lands. Island Christians were also exempt from the dev?irme, the child-tribute, which

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The Greek Catholic Church under the Ottomans

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provided recruits for the Janissary Corps and the Sultan's Palace School. 'H After the early seventeenth century the bey of Naxos was usually an absentee. Other Cycladic islands also held few Turkish residents. This period was one of the great ages of piracy in the Aegean. Christian buccaneers liked nothing better than to capture a bey or kadi since they were not only Muslims, but were presumed to be the wealthiest individuals on the islands. After their capture Turkish officials could be sold as slaves in the markets of Malta or some Italian port. On one occasion each year, both Catholics and Orthodox in the Cyclades were reminded that they were a subject people. The fleet of the Kapudan IJa~a sailed into Paros' Bay of Dhrio and awaited the arrival of delegations bringing their tax money. For the rest of the year the islanders were allowed to handle their own internal affairs. Elections were held for officials known as epitrojJOi or syndikoi. These officers headed the /Wil1otita, the community, of each island. Their functions included fiscal, judicial, and administrative decisions. On Naxos there were three communities, one for the Catholics and two for the Orthodox. Each year the men of the Naxian Catholic community gathered at the old ducal chapel of the castro. They carried on their business in Italian rather than Greek, and their elected leader was known as the capi del cittadini. As often as not, elections went in favour of the Coronello family's candidates. Throughout Naxos the Catholic nobles lived during the summer in towers, known as pyrgoi, which were both homes and fortresses. The IJyrgos entrance was always on a second floor so that a ladder that connected to the ground could be retracted in case of danger. The roof was flat and provided a level place to throw down fires, rocks, or burning oil upon unwelcome invaders. The jJyrgoi were difficult to take without a siege, which discouraged the efforts of pirates and rebels. When winter approached the Catholic families moved back to their homes in the castro. Latin nobles filled their days overseeing their crops, tending their herds, and hunting the wild animals that miraculously survived in the back country. Women occupied themselves in managing the household servants, in sewing, and embroidering. Parties and dances were frequent, gambling all pervasive. Each island had its own costume, but all tried to model it on the latest Italian fashions. Both sexes, even in the Aegean climate, believed in wearing multiple layers of clothing, which certainly served a purpose in winter but did little to promote comfort during the hot, dry summers.I'! Despite the ahd-Ilameh, over the years a decline in the Catholic population occurred on most islands of the Cyclades. The Latins on Paros decreased to fifty people; los had even fewer. Siphnos held 100 Catholics in 1600, fifty years later there were none. The numbers on Syros fluctuated. At that time approximately 2,500 Catholics lived on the island, and only 100 Orthodox. Santorini had but 700 Catholics in a population of 10,000."0 At this bleak moment the Catholics received an infusion from two very differ-

ent sources. One was from western pirates settling in the Greek islands. Small communities appeared, and with donations - no questions asked new Catholic chapels were built or old ones repaired. Milos, the principal port of the Aegean, was especially favoured since foreign pirates preferred to winter in its spacious harbour. The other advance for Catholicism came as the result of a shipwreck by two French Jesuits on the island of Naxos. The Archbishop of Naxos (since 1522 Naxos had that honour once the Archbishopric of Rhodes had been eliminated) invited the Jesuits to stay. They were given the ducal chapel for their church. At that time, the Naxos clergy numbered nine secular priests and a single Franciscan Observant. The Jesuits on Naxos, and subsequently on other islands, befriended the Orthodox who welcomed them to preach and teach in their churches. The French missionaries were anxious to raise Catholic consciousness by forming religious confraternities, giving missions, and especially surrounding the Feast of Corpus Christi with pageantry. For a week candlelight processions made their way through the narrow castro streets. Forty I-lours' Devotion was one more practice of personal piety introduced at the prompting of the Jesuits." ' In 1587 a Jesuit foundation also opened on Chios, with a school on the site of a former Franciscan church. A few years later French Capuchins also appeared jOining the Dominicans who had long been on Chios. In 1645 one of their members, Alessandro Baldrati, accused of apostasy from Islam, was burned aliveY Syros also had a seventeenth century martyr, Bishop Giovanni-Andrea Carga. In 1617 a Turkish fleet anchored in the Syros harbour, and its admiral accused community leaders of providing Christian pirates with provisions, a charge that probably was true. Carga and 200 others were jailed. The pa?a gave Carga the choice of conversion to Islam or death. The bishop remained constant in his faith and therefore on 18 November 1617 was hanged. Later his body was buried in St. George's Cathedral in Ano Syros." J The death of Carga did not intimidate the Catholics. A visitation later in the century counted 4,000 believers and 170 churches and chapels. The large number of these places of worship was due to a custom that required individual families to build a special chapel for themselves. Bishop Antonio Demarchis could report to Rome that 'the Pope's island remained firm in its loyalty to Rome?' On Santorini the church was in good condition thanks to able bishops and a Jesuit presencc. In Kartharatto Bishop Antonio Demarchis founded a convent of cloistered Dominican nuns, the only Latin community of sisters in all of the Ottoman Empire. L ' After the Candian War, the French became morc active in the eastern Mediterranean and a new Capitulation was agreed upon. This allowed the Catholics of the Aegean to fly the French flag before their churches, a practice that was intended to inform both Muslim and Orthodox of the special relationship between Paris and the Greek Catholics."" However, the conclusion of the Candian War proved a disaster for the Catholics of Crete. When

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bourgo, but the Latin bishop now lived in Xinara at the foot of the mountain. The Catholics were 8,000 in a population of II ,000. L~ Greek Catholics were dealt three serious blows at the end of the eighteenth century. The first was due to the suppression of the Jesuits, which forced the missionaries to go either into exile, losing their properties and churches, or to go underground, which at best put severe limitations on their work. Officially the French Lazansts were to replace them, but there simply were not enough members of this religious order to fill all of the abandoned posts left empty due to the Jesuits' misfortunes. A second setback appeared when, during the course of the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774, a Russian fleet occupied the Cyclades. Albanians in the Tsaritsa's service desecrated many Naxian churches and seized others. Finally the 1789 Revolution meant that subsidies from the government and personnel 110 longer came from their protectors, the French. Greek Catholics were now isolated during the years of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era. It was not until 1815 that the restored Bourbon monarchy once more resumed France's traditIonal role as patron of the Catholics. Soon a new crisis appeared.

the island surrendered after a siege of twenty-five years, the Catholics had all their churches converted into mosques or they were sold to the Orthodox and the Armenians. Venice held on to two small garrisons, at Grabousa and Soudha, served by Capuchlll friars. Many Latin landowners as well as Orthodox converted to Islam in order to hold on to their property."7 Catholic missionaries were also active on the Greek mainland in the seventeenth century. In 1640 two French Jesuits arrived in Athens before moving on to Khalkis in Euboea. The Capuchins followed the Jesuits to Athens, purchasing a house in the Plaka which held the 'Lantern of Demosthenes', in reality the choreographic monument of Lysikrates. One of the Capuchins introduced the tomato to Greece. l " During the Ottoman-Venetian conflict, which In 1687 brought a Venetian army to Athens (and resulted in the bombardment of the Parthenon), the Venetian commander took all the Athenian mosques and handed them over to the Catholics. However, the western army's success was short-lived. In 17] 5 the Ottomans advanced on Navplion and its Latin archbishop, Angelo Maria Carlini, died in the defense of the Palamidis fortress. At the conclusion of this war the last Aegean Catholic bishopric was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, when the Treaty of Passarowitz ceded Tinos to the Turks."'! Chian Catholics were also victimized by the war between Venice and the Ottomans. In 1694 the Venetian fleet put ashore on the island, ousted the Turks, and confiscated the mosques. Its actions were applauded by the 5,000 Catholics of the island, but Orthodox Chians showed no enthusiasm, well aware that a Turkish fleet would soon be coming their way. This in fact happened in the spring of 1695. The Latin bishop, many of his clergy and the leading families of the island boarded the ships of retreating Venetians. Only in 1720 was it possible to restore the Catholic bishopric 011 Chios, but times were turbulent and the restoration of the churches, which had been closed, long delayed. By 1747 the Catholics numbered but 2,000, and only three churches, in addition to the cathedral, were functioning. Due to emigration to Smyrna and Constantinople, the Catholic population continued to decline throughout the eighteenth century.11l During the same period, a French traveller, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, toured the Aegean and made a report of his findings. On most of the small islands he found the Catholics barely hanging on. Two Capuchins were on Crete, one was on Kil11olos. When on Milos the bishop died, he had so many debts that his chalice and vestments had to be sold to pay them. Naxos' Catholics now stood at 350, served by Jesuits, Capuchins, and secular priests. On the positive side, local women had formed a convent of Catholic Ursuline nuns and opened the only girls' school in all of the Ottoman Empire. Syros counted 6,000 lay Catholics, thirteen secular priests, two Capuchins, twenty-seven Franciscans and nineteen Dominicans. There was certainly no dearth of Latin c1ergy.11 Some years later a report on Tinos showed that the Turkish conquest had caused the destruction of Exom-

The revolution of 1821 presented a dilemma for Greek Catholics in the Cyclades. On the one hand there was universal sentiment among all Christians to be done with Muslim rule, yet Catholic islanders had few grievances. The sultan's government was little interested in what the Catholics did, so long as tax monies were promptly delivered. Moreover, if the revolutionaries were successful, the Catholics would find themselves in a nation whose foundations were based upon Orthodoxy and Hellenic nationalism. French protection was likely to disappear and the Catholics would then become a very small minority in a state that was overwhelmingly Orthodox. Throughout the eighteenth century, it appears that relations between Greek Orthodox and Catholics had become more tense. In the Ottoman lands the success of Latin missionaries in setting up churches united with Rome among the Armenians, Syrian Jacobites, and especially the Antlochene Melkites made the clerics of the Ecumenical Patriarchate ever more hostile. Wandering monks charged the Catholics with abundant crimes and in extreme Orthodox circles, the Pope was pictured as the devil incarnate. In 1821 the total Greek Catholic population was approximately 16,000 people, almost all of them living on the two islands of Syros and Tinos. The various Greek revolutionary governments located in the Peloponnese did their best to convince their Latin countrymen and women that they should support the insurrection. Their offiCials visited the islands, promising that complete religious freedom would be guaranteed in any Greek nation state. The delegates also sought to collect monies from the Catholics as well as promises of support.

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In April 1822 Alexandros Mavrokordatos, president of the Provisional Government, dispatched an invitation to Archbishop Andreas Veggetti of Naxos to come to Corinth to discuss the role of the Catholics. Veggetti wrote back that he needed permission from the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and a safe-conduct from Constantinople before he could proceed. In addition to wooing their own island Catholics, other Greek governments that appeared during the conflict sent representatives to Rome seeking papal support, but Pius VII was cautious. Who could be sure that either Greek defeat or victory might not bring down the wrath of the Turks on the remaining Catholic communities of the Ottoman Empire? Pius did show a willingness to accept any refugees from Greece who sought asylum in the Papal States and appropriated funds for their support. lJ Early in the conflict Archbishop Veggetti added to Catholic anxiety when he acted on behalf of a group of Turkish prisoners held on Naxos. He rescued the Turks, placed them in a building owned by the Church and saved their lives by putting them on board a French ship. The Orthodox bishop on Naxos prepared an assault on the Catholic-held castro, but cooler heads prevailed and the attack never materialized. Catholics throughout the islands complained that they were caught in the middle of a conflict not of their making, facing hostility from both the Ottomans and the Greek rebels. H Throughout the Revolution the Latins on both Tinos and Syros flew the French flag before their churches and continued to pay the cizye to Constantinople. Their stance was difficult to maintain. An army of Greek insurgents landed on Syros attempting to require the Catholics to abandon their neutrality. This force made it possible for the landing of hundreds of refugees on Syros, nearly all of them Orthodox, especially after the massacres of Chios and Psara. Gathering at the port of Syros, the exiles put the town of Ermoupolis under construction, soon to become the largest city of the Cyclades and, in fact, in all Greece. The Chie1i1 massacre had taken place in 1822 as a result of a raid on the island's Turks from neighbouring Samos. Once the Samians withdrew, an Ottoman army appeared and clambered ashore. The Orthodox bishop was hanged and his cathedral burned to the ground. The Catholic cathedral also went up in flames. The only safe place of refuge on all of Chios was to be found in the French consul's grounds, where a Capuchin friar sheltered 300 men, women, and children. J ; On Tinos, while the war was in progress, an Orthodox nun received a vision of a hidden icon. Workmen discovered the icon of the Panagia which was universally looked upon as a miracle by the Orthodox population. Needless to say, the icon discovery also became a symbol of God's blessing on the Revolution, and, in time, was placed in a church, the Evangelistria. It is now the most important pilgrimage site in all of Greece. The Catholics of Tinos, because of Mary's intervention, were further placed on the defensive.

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Catholics in the kingdom of Greece There was little enthusiasm among Catholics when they learned that the Great Powers, Great Britain, France, and Russia, meeting in London to draw its boundaries intended to include the Cyclades, but not ChlOs, 111 the new Greek state. A dispatch to Rome from the Catholics on Syros in 1829 lamented: The Greeks have revolted against their sovereign. Three Christian powers have decided to make a portion of the country of (:reece independent and we have learned with deep sorrow that our Island is included in this part. We will be forced to abandon our homeland or to change our religion in order to live with people so intolerant. ](, As a matter of fact, the peace treaty creating the new Greek state provided guarantees for the Catholics, and the expected retaliation by the Orthodox never occurred. As the Revolution progressed, an assembly of Greek insurgents met at Troezen and in early 1827 elected Ioannis Kapodistrias president of Greece. Kapodistrias realized that if the Revolution was to succeed it must ~ecure the diplomatic support of the British and French as well ~s the RUSSians. As a former joint foreign minister in St. Petersburg, Kapodlstnas knew well that the Paris government would be especially sensitive about the we!fare o~ the Greek Catholics. Therefore, the President did his best to ameliorate mCIdents of dispute between Catholics and officials of the Greek governme.n~. As a result the Catholic community on Syros sent two delegates to partICIpate in the National Assembly of Argos. . The Protocol of London, signed 3 February 1830, launched the Cycl~dlC Greek Catholics, willingly or not, upon a new course. The French Kmg, Charles X, renounced his role of protector over them in return for assurances that the Greek government would recognize their bishops and guarant.ee ~he special status of the Latins of the islands. An instructiOl~ to Kapodlstnas required that Catholics enjoy freedom of worship, ~ossesslon of t!1elr properties, and that Latin bishops should retain all the nghts and J.:rmleges that they held before the conflict. No discrimination against CatholIcs 111 emplot ment or serving in public office was to be permitted. 17 Helping the Catholic cause in Greece was the Powers' decision to invite Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, a German Catholic, to become the ruler of Greece. Kapodistrias had little choice but to accept Leopold's nomination. He wrote him that it.w.auld made a great difference in his acceptance in Greece if Leopold was wdlll1g to .convert to Orthodoxy, 'the religion of the country'. Negotiations wer~ still.m progress when assassins killed Kapodistrias, Leopold refused the kll1gslllp, and conditions in Greece fell into near anarchy.]"

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Again the Powers intervened and one more time their choice fell upon a German Catholic prince, Otto, the young son of the Bavarian king, Ludwig of Wittelsbach. After some delay Otto (the Greeks knew him as Othon), arrived in the country to the great encouragement of the people who had not had a stable government since Kapodistrias' death. The Russian representatives in Greece as well as the stronger Greek nationalists in the government did their best to convince Otto that he should abandon Catholicism for Orthodoxy, but throughout his life he remained a Catholic. If the king would not convert, the political leadership believed that an heir might well be brought up an Orthodox Christian, but such did not happen.]') For the Greek Catholics there must have been some satisfaction in the knowledge that the sovereign shared their faith, although for political reasons the king was always careful not to give the impression he favoured his coreligionists:lO Soon after Otto's arrival the Vatican and the Catholic ambassadors appointed to Athens became active in seeking recognition for Luigi Blanci, the Franciscan bishop of Syros, to be named Apostolic Delegate to Greece. Such an appointment was considered to be one more assurance that the Catholics should not be submerged in the Orthodox sea of the new Greek state. On 22 May 1838, King Otto's government issued a document giving B1anci his title, an office he held until his death in 1851.'" A statistical survey of Greece in J 835 counted 17,648 Latins in the country. Included in this number were 1,850 Bavarian troops who had come with King OttO:'1 Because several hundred Latins now made their home on mainland Greece, B1anci formed a Catholic council for Athens. At its head was the Austrian ambassador, Anton Prokesch-Osten, while its secretary was the Bavarian court chaplain, Andreas Arneth. It was this council which supervised the foundation of the first new Catholic church to be built on the mainland of Greece, dedicated to St Paul the Apostle, in the Piraeus. Its financing was raised by subscription among the nobility in Western Europe, with Ferdinand I, the Austrian Emperor, and his wife Anna Maria Carolina as the major donors. Meanwhile the Bavarian soldiers worshipped in a chapel set up for their use. Dedicated to St. Luke the Evangelist, King Ludwig, Otto's father, was its major patron. Several new parishes also opened outside Athens. In 1840, Navplion received a Catholic house of worship, which served the 300 Catholics who lived in the town and monuments to the Philhellenes who fought for Greece were erected on its walls. Other parishes appeared at Pylos and Patras:1l One of Otto's plans was to construct a Catholic cathedral in Athens. His goal was to place it in a very conspicuous site on one of the city's major streets, between the Academy and the Royal Palace. Prokesch-Osten purchased the property and took charge of obtaining the finances. The king's architect, Leo von Klenze, received the commission to design the church, but many years were to pass before the Cathedral dedicated to St Dionysios the

Areopagite was completed. Louis Napoleon, Emperor of the French, was responsible for much of the money, which finally, in 1865, allowed the church to be dedicated:'" On 2 September 1843 an army colonel led his troops before the Royal Palace, demanding a constitution for Greece. Reluctantly King Otto agreed to the demands and work commenced on the constitution. The final document carried the statement, 'the crown of Greece pertains to the dynasty of King Othon. I-lis successor will profess the Greek Orthodox religion'. In addition the draft outlined, 'the dominant faith in the Kingdom of Greece is the Greek Orthodox religion.' Neither statement was likely to inspire confidence within the Catholic community. The Latin bishops wrote to Pope Gregory XVI and to King Louis Philippe in Pans asking that pressure be put on the Athens government to add a clause on Catholic guarantees. Bishop Blanci asked Rome if a Catholic should take an oath of allegiance to the new constitution as it then stood. Both the French and Austrian ambassador in Athens intervened on the Catholic side so that in their oath to support the constitution, Latins might add the clause, 'provided the rights of the Catholic Church are preserved' :'5 In 1862 a new breed of Greek politicians decided King Otto must go and in a bloodless coup the king was dethroned and went into exile. Officials settled on a candidate from the Danish house of Gli.icksberg, George I, who appeared in Athens a year later. Unlike Otto, George agreed that his children should be brought up in the Orthodox faith. As a result of the British transfer of the Ionian Islands to Greece at this time, the Catholic bishopric of Corfu became part of the nation. In the late nineteenth century Pope Pius IX decided to promote Athens to an archbishopric. On 23 July I il75 Ioannis Marangos was named to that post. There was no official governmental recognition of his appointment at that time, nor until the present, despite the fact that the Latin Archbishop of Athens since that dare has been the major Catholic hierarch in Greece:'6 In 1938, during the Ioannis Metaxas regime which had only recently come to power as the result of a military coup, a wave of nationalism swept the country. There would have been little opposition to the premise that to be Greek is to be Orthodox. The result was legislation that any person or group that wanted to have a place of worship constructed must have two permits: one from the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs and a second from the local Greek Orthodox bishop. This legislation remains in force to this day. After the Second World War the Catholic Church suffered a small decline on Corfu and a major disaster on Rhodes. On both islands many Western Catholics had made their home, taking advantage of Mussolini's plan for a revived Italian presence in the East Mediterranean. When the war ended, most Italians returned to their homeland. Corfu's Catholics declined by 500, but on Rhodes, where in 1946 there had been 13,000 faithful and eleven parishes, in

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1992 the archbishopric was vacant, only three parishes remained, and for the whole year the Catholic community counted but six baptisms. After the war the small Armenian Catholic community in Athens and Piraeus, about 600 people, increased thanks to a new wave of refugees. They worship in two parishes, St Gregory the Illuminator and St Teresa:!?

Byzantine-rite Catholics In 1861 a Latin priest of Syros, Ioannis Hyacinth Marangos, organized a small congregation of Catholics of the Byzantine rite in Constantinople. He also set up a religious order for men, the Congregation of the Most Holy Trinity and another for women, the Congregation of the Holy Family, later secularized on orders from Rome. Four disaffected Orthodox clerics came over to his group, but hostility from the Greek community in Constantinople meant that it remained very small. In 1878 Marangos moved to Athens, and the community's house in Constantinople then had but three occupants. By 1900 the Ottoman capital's Assumptionist parish, served by French missionaries and transformed into a Byzantine-rite church, held between 200 and 300 Greek Catholics. Two other small Ottoman Orthodox communities joined the Catholic Church, while keeping their former rite. One was located at Kavseri in Anatolia, another in Malgara in Thrace. Their priest,' Isaias Papadopoulos, began a school in Malgara and in 1907 was named vicar general for Catholics of the Byzantine rite. Five years later Papadopoulos was consecrated a bishop. In May 1917 the Roman Congregation for the Oriental Churches assumed the direction of the Byzantine-rite Catholics in Greece and Turkey. When, at the conclusion of the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-22, an exchange of populations was made, most of the members of these Byzantine-rite communities moved, one to Athens, the other to Gianitsa, a small town located north and west of Thessaloniki. The Athens group under Bishop George Kalavassi settled on Acharnon Street, obtained funds for building a church, and opened a seminary and student residence. Rome has continued to appoint bishops to follow Kalavassi despite the deep hostility to the Byzantine-rite Catholics found in the country. Since the Second World War a new cathedral has been built in Byzantine style and the offices of the Eastern church diligently kept. A woman's congregation, the Sisters of Pammakaristos, run an orphanage, several student residences and a hospital. The Little Sisters of Jesus, although Western in origin, have identified with these Byzantine-rite Greek Catholics. Priests of this community edit and publish the Catholic newspaper of Greece, Katholi/~i. The presence of a Byzantine-rite Catholic bishop in Athens, united to Rome, is the major obstacle preventing better relations between Rome and the Orthodox church.'!" 38

CATHOLICS

The present Today the Catholics of Greece number approximately 53,000 people. As in the past, the two Cycladic islands of Tinos and Syros remain centres of Catholicism. Syros now holds 7,800 Latins and Tinos approximately 2,600. In addition, several thousand foreign Catholics, many of them refugees from Middle Eastern wars, now make Greece their home. The largest groups of foreign Catholics come from two very different parts of the world: Poles have found work in Greece as construction workers and Filipinos in domestic occupations. Many, particularly the Poles, are in Greece illegally and are not counted as parishioners in the parishes. There has been a major emigration of Catholics, along with the population as a whole, into Athens and its suburbs. Now a majority of Catholics, approximately 36,000, live in the capital region located in the fourteen parishes in the area of Greater Athens. Eleven of them are in the care of secular priests and three are served by religious orders: Capuchins, Jesuits, and Assumptionists. In addition two orders of male religious conduct schools: the Marist Brothers and the Christian Brothers, assisted by personnel drawn from Western Europe. A number of religious orders of sisters teach, care for the aged, or for orphans. They number about eighty individuals. These include the Sisters of St Joseph, the Sisters of Charity, the Ursulines, the Sisters of the Holy Cross, and the Benedictines. There is also a convent of cloistered Carmelites. The ecclesiastical division of the Latin Church falls into six dioceses. Two archbishoprics are located in Athens and Rhodes. Metropolitan sees are found on Corfu and Naxos-Tinos, a bishopric on Syros, and a vicar apostolicate in Thessaloniki. Rhodes and Thessaloniki, with 1,500 in the former city and 2,900 Catholics in the latter, do not have resident hierachs but are served by apostolic administrators under the direction of Athens and Corfu. The Catholics of Corfu number about 3,000 individuals. The bishops work together closely. Documents and policy statements are issued in the name of the Holy Synod of the Catholic Hierarchy of Greece made up of the four resident Latin bishops of the country. The secretariat has its office on Tinos:!9 Catholic parishes are located in Piraeus, Patras, Volos and Larissa. Crete has four churches: Iraklion, Khania, Agios Nikolaos and Rethymnon (the latter two only open in summer). The Cycladic islands of Syros and Tinos have many churches and chapels. Some villages are entirely Catholic, others are shared with the Orthodox. Tinos is exceptional since many of the Catholics here are farmers and make up a rural society, a way of life that has almost disappeared on the other islands. On Naxos and Santorini, while several church properties that date from the Middle Ages are still in the possion of the Catholic church, the severe decline in the population makes the communities barely able to survive. The cathedrals have become parish churches, serving the remnant of Catholics who still make these islands their

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homes. The church on Santorini still holds a Dominican convent of cloistered nuns, but recruits must now be sought from Spain. There are simply not enough vocations from Greek Catholic women. Santorini's church also sponsors a cultural centre in the Ghisi mansion of Thira. Here exhibitions of art and memorabilia of the island's past attract hundreds of visitors, especially in the summer tourist season. Churches are also open during the summer on Paros, Milos, Andros, and Mykonos for vacationers, but no permanent congregations exist. In the Ionian islands, the cathedrals of Corfu and the parish church of Zakynthos share the Catholic population. A visitor to Greece will find both positive and negative features in the current situation. A look at the congregation at Sunday Mass in the churches on Syros and Tinos will reveal a considerable number of empty pews. Like their Orthodox countrymen and women, weekly attendance at the Eucharist does not seem to have a high priority for the current Catholic generation. On the other hand, the major holidays attract large crowds. The changes made by the Second Vatican Council have affected the church. The priest's vestments are modernized and the altars have been turned around so that the celebrant faces the congregation. There is much more of a dialogue between priest and people, with singing and public recitation of prayers, than was found thirty years ago. A major change is the use of the spoken Greek language in all church services creating better understanding of the meaning of the Liturgy. Most adult congregants, both men and women, now communicate weekly. Women also now serve as lectors at Mass, a practice that would have been looked upon as altogether unheard of before the Council. The liturgical changes offer opportunities for lay Greek Catholics to have much more participation in the Liturgy than the Orthodox Greeks, where attendance at the Eucharist is passive and receiving communion, except for young children, considered extraordinary. Catholic organizations are to be found providing social events from childhood to old age. There are youth groups that take students on excursions and to summer camps. Adults and senior citizens have their own activities, religious, cultural and educational. Women especially enjoy bus pilgrimages to the shrines associated with Catholicism in Greece. In 1993, a delegation of young Catholics from Syros traveled to Denver to greet Pope John Paul II. The Orthodox atmosphere of Greece makes it somewhat difficult for Catholics. Especially at election times politicians tend to drape themselves in the robes of Orthodoxy, despite the secular nature of the Greek government. Catholics have long given up proselytization. While in 1938 Metaxas introduced legislation forbidding Catholics to make converts from among the Orthodox, the present constitution has broadened this prohibition to make it contrary to the law to seek converts from any 'recognized religion'. II) Despite their long shared history, Orthodox Greeks still regard Catholics with suspicion believing that even if they do not actively seek converts, their

very presence in Greece must have the unstated purpose of paving the way for conversions. A good example of subtle discrimination occurred in the summer of 1993 when a government decree required candidates for the police force to state their religion. This law brought forth a futile protest from the synod of Catholic bishops. For political reasons, members of the Mitsotakis government in 1993, as well as officials in the New Democracy Party appear to have encouraged attacks on the papacy and the Catholic Church. One New Democracy official claimed that Catholics were, 'Greek according to law, but not according to consciousness' .." Many Greeks believe the Vatican stood behind the Bosnian Muslims and Croatians in the struggle against the Orthodox Serbs. No less a figure than the Minister of National Defence claimed that the Vatican Bank was the major source of funds for the Muslim armies of Bosnia. Vandals sprayed graffiti on the Catholic church in Patras. Responding to this challenge, in November 1994 Nicholas Phoskolos, Latin Archbishop of Athens, felt it necessary to list eleven issues of discrimination agianst the Catholic Church in a memorandum to the Minister of Religion and Education. Phoskolos detailed the following charges. Greek Catholics are regularly discriminated against in the work place, in the army, and often when they seek employment. (A person's religion was at the time listed on Greek identity cards.) Secondly, Catholic students are often humiliated in public schools. The canon law of the Catholic Church is not recognized by the state, and ,110 Catholic church building may be constructed without the permission of the local Orthodox bishop. Catholics want their canon law to provide the guidelines over the monasteries and convents under their jusisdiction and to establish clerical schools and seminaries whcn they see fit. Teachers should be employed in public schools to teach Catholic children with books approved by the bishops. Phoskolos also called for the abrogation of laws 1784 and 1939, which forbid the establishmcnt of a private school that is affiliated with a non-Orthodox institution. He also asked for the right of Catholics to establish welfare agencies and for the state to deny the practice of the Orthodox clergy officiating at mixed marriages to demand that the children be baptized and raised Orthodox. Another demand was for the repeal of laws 590 and 977 that reserve the clerical habit to Orthodox clergy, and he also called for abolition of Article 2 in the penal code that speaks of 'tolerated religions' rather than 'recognized religions'. In addition he requested the correction of Article 12 of law 1363 passed in 1938 that states, 'the entry into the kingdom of Greece of all heads of religions, confessions, and heretical sects who do not have Greek nationality is permitted only by the ministers of Religion and ForeIgn Affairs. Those who violate this law will be expelled without any further formality.' On the first Sunday of Lent in 1995 Phoskolos ordered the reading in all Catholic churches of a pastoral letter entitled 'The Way of the Cross' in

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which he repeated the demand that Catholics enjoy all the fights of Greek citizens. He urged his people to work toward that end after detailing many of the grievances he set forth in his memorandum to the Minister of Religion. Despite all the Archbishop's efforts, the Catholic Church remains without public legal status in Greece, which the law gives only to Orthodox Christians and to Jews. Literature in some publications of the Orthodox press continues to promote polemical articles against Catholics. Many accusations are without foundation. In the present contest between Orthodox and Catholics in Ukraine, the popular press is completely on the side of the Orthodox, applauding the fraudulent synod of 1946 which led to the absorption of the Ukrainian Catholic Church by the Orthodox. The journal Athena claimed that 1,500 churches have been taken by the Catholics in Ukraine, ousting priests and faithful and contending that mobs have killed some of the priests. '2 The Orthodox hierarchy in mainland Greece within the Athens archbishopric is adamantly opposed to any ecumenical discussions with local Catholics. Archbishop Christodoulos let it be known that Pope John Paul II would not be welcome in his jubilee journey to the sacred places of early Christianity. On Crete relations between Catholics and Orthodox are friendly and the Church of Greece has sent delegates to several Catholic-Orthodox colloquia that have met outside the country. Most bishops and practically all Orthodox monks and nuns resent the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomaios's willingness to deal with the Vatican. Archbishop Serapheim of Athens, occasionally lumped Catholics and all other Western religions in the category of heresies. His successor since 1998, Archbishop Christodoulos, has shown himself equally hostile to the Catholic presence in Greece. The Greek government for decades has provided a theologian to teach in the public schools, but until very recently only Orthodox theologians were hired. Even on Syros where 400 Catholic students attended high school, religion classes were monopolized by Orthodox teachers. Catholics were instructors of other subjects in the schools but never taught religion. Only recently has there been change, thanks to continued protests from Bishop Frangiskos Papamanolis. Another difficulty put into the way of Catholics is the control that the Ministry of Education and Worship and the local Orthodox bishops have over church construction. For Catholics to put up a school or church building requires the consent both of the Ministry, the local hierarch, and in fact, if not in law, the tacit permission of the Archbishop of Athens. As expected, the process may take years. It is frustrating for Catholics to note that in Western Europe Catholics offer their churches for Orthodox services, Western governments give recognition to the Orthodox and their clergy, and Catholics welcome Orthodox visitors. Yet in Greece constant obstacles are put in the way of Catholic activity. When the Catholics compromise, such as agreeing to the Orthodox church calendar so that the Orthodox and Catholic Easter coincide and refusing to allow communion in the hand

because of Orthodox sensibilities, there is no reciprocity on tbe part of their fellow Christians. 13 Problems are especially acute in the realm of education. Recent legislation has prohibited schools to be located on church property. Whatever the government's motivation for such a law, the result has been to force Catholic schools either to move or to change their constitutions so as to be recognized as private, not Catholic, schools. ,"

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The future A problem currently exists for the Catholic church to recruit candidates for priesthood. For the first time in history there are no students in Rome's Greek College and but a handful are students in other West European seminaries. For the present the church 11<1s enough priests, but the future does not look promising, although, except for Poland, the same state of affairs exists throughout Europe. Probably the most serious of all future problems will result from the frequency of mixed marriages. Statistics now show four out of five Catholics choosing Orthodox spouses. This is especially critical in the metropolitan climate of the Athens region. Because it is so much easier for the whole family to belong to the Orthodox church, a husband or wife may very well give up his or her religion, especially in towns where there is no Catholic church. For the past eight centuries Catholics have shared in the history of the Greek people in the East Mediterranean. This experience has often been positive and at other times, admittedly, events have turned sour. As a minority, the Catholics have often felt threatened and without doubt in the past depended too much on political protection and financial support from the West. This dependence has made tbeir countrymen and women consider them to be foreigners, despite their long residence in the country and the excellent ethnic credentials of the majority of Cycladic Catholics. The Catholic church of Greece can take pride in its years of service to its communicants. It has brought them superior educational opportunities, contacts with the western world denied the Orthodox, and a spirit of universal community which has kept them from a narrow nationalism, which identifies Christianity with a particular people or place. In the future, it may be that Greece's participation in the European Union will provide a model for Orthodox and Catholics to imitate living in harmony within the Christian ecumene. It would be a tragedy for the Christian world, if Catholicism, for almost eight hundred years a part of Greek life, should disappear in the twenty-first century.

Notes Johannes ManSI, eel., SacrOrIlm cOllci/ortlm l10va ct alll/Jlissimil col/cclio, (Florence and Venice, 1759-98) II 670-\.

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CHARLES FRAZEE

CATHOLICS

2 Pope Damaslls to Anysills of Thessaloniki, Rome, 386 in Philip Jaffe, ed., Regesta fJO/ftificum tomanorum, (Leipzig, 1885) I 41. Subsequently other Popes renewed Thessaloniki's privileges. See also Louis Petit, 'Les eveques de Thessalonique', Echos d'Orient, IV (1901) 140-5. 3 V. Grumel, 'L'annexion de !'IIIyricum oriental, de la Sicile et de la Calabre au patriarcat de Constantinople. Le temoinage de Theophane Ie Chronographe', Recherches de science religieIlse, XL (1952) 191-200. The problem is how to interpret Theophanes. Should patrimonies include bishoprics? See Theophanes, Chrollicle, I-I. Turtledove, trans., (Philadelphia, 1982) 100-1. 4 Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1521, (Philadelphia, 1976-84) I 36-42; Charles Frazee, 'The Catholic Church 111 Constantinople, 1204-1453', 13allwn Stl/dies, XIX (J 978) 33-49. 5 Giorgio Fedalto, La Chiesa Latina ill Oriente, (Rome, 1973-78) II 163; Charles and Kathleen Frazee, The Island Princes ol Greece, (Amsterdam, 1988) 21-3. 6 The churches of Ayios Mamas on Naxos and the Panagia tis Gonias on Santorini were two cathedral properties transferred to the Lat1l1s. Western bishops preferred to build their own cathedrals in Greece. See also A. Stella, 'Chiesa e stato nelle rclazioni dei Nunzi Pontifici a Venezia', Stlldi e Test;, CCXXXIX (1964) 307-8. 7 On the VenetIan occupation of Corfu and Ionian Islands, see John J. Norwich, A History of Venice, (New York, 1982) 260-1; Frederic C. Lane, Venice, A Maritime Re/JUblic, (Baltimore, 1973) 198, and A. Foss, The IOlliall Islallds, (London, 1969). Corfu had Western clergy since the time of the Norman invasion of Robert Guiscard in 1147. 8 The Santorini castros were at Skaros, loa, Pyrgos, Akrotiri and Emborio. See Ioanl1ls Dclendas, Oi Katholikoi tis Salltoril1ls, (Athens, 1949) 36-8; Michael Danezis, Salllorilli, (Athens, 1971) 149. 9 Different views on the origins the Catholics of Syros exist. Emile Kolodny 111 'Oi Katholikoi ton Kykladon" Tilliaka Analekta, I (1979) 5-11, believes them to be of foreign origin. This is disputed by Antonios Sigalas in '01 Ellinikoi katalogoi ton Katholikon tis Syrou', Kykladika, I (1956) 241-290 and in 'I nomi e cognomi veneto-italiani nel'isola di Sira', Studi 13yzantllli e Neo Ellenici, VIII (1921) 194-200. The latest publication on Syros is the volume by Markos Roussos Milidonis, Syra Sacra, (Athens, 1993). 10 On the history of Tinos see G.1. Dorizas, I 1I1esaioniki Tillos. (Athens, 1976) 41-55 and Charles Frazee 'Tinos: Venetian Outpost of the Aegean', Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, VII (1991) 133-43. The best account of Cycladic history during the early part of the Tourkokratia is to be found 111 B. J. Slot, Archipelaglls tllrhatlls. Les Cyclades entre colollisatioll lati/le et oCCll/Jation ottolllane, 1SOO-I718, (Istanbul, 1982) I 59-63. 11 The history of Chios is told by Phiiip Argenti, The Occllpatioll of Chios by the Gel10ese and their Admmistratioll of the Is/alld; 1346-1566, (Cambridge, 1958). 12 The history of Rhodes under the Knights may be followed in Ernie Bradford, The Shield and the Sword: The Kllights ol St. Jolm. jemsalem, Rhodes, and Malta, (New York, 1973) 140-75 and for Crete, see Lane, Venice, 43, 75-6. 13 For the last days of the Naxian dukes, seee B. .J. Slot, 'I tourkiki kataktisis ton Kykladon, 1537-38', KYl1lo/ialw, VII (1978) 62-4; Robert Sauger (Saulger) Histoire nouvelle des anciens dllcs et mitres sotlverains de I'Archi/Je/, (Paris, 1699), 292-301. For Nasi's career consult P. Grunebaum-Ballin, 'Joseph Naci, duc de Naxos', Etudes jllives, XIII (1968) 82ff. 14 Argenti, OCc/II}ation, I 364-8. 15 .J. de Testa, Recl/eil des traites de la Porte ottol11ane avec les puissances etrallgeres, (Paris, 1864-94) I 91-6.

16 Pietro Pirri, ed., 'Lo Stato della Chiesa Ortodossa di Constantinopoli e Ie sue tendenze verso Roma 1!1 una Memoria del P. Guilio Mancinelli, S. 1.' in Miscellanea Pietro Pumaslom-Biondi, (Rome, 1947) I 79-104; Rocco da Cesinale Cocchla, Storia delle missioni del Cappuccmi, (Paris, 1867) I 55-69. In 1744 the JesUIts built the church of St. LOlliS in Thessaloniki. See Apostolos Vacalopoulos, A History of Thessalonihi, "[ E Carney, trans., (Thessalonilo, 1972) 993-4. The baptismal register of the Catholic parish in Thessaloniki has been published by Yves-Jean Dymon, 'To mitrocin vaptiseon tis Katholikis Ekkleslas Thessaionilm, 1702-1727', Mahedonika, XI (1971) 38-68. 17 P. De Meester, Le College Pontilical grec de Rome, (Rome, 1910); Raphael de Martinis, Juris pontilicii de Propaganda Pide. pars !}rima, (Rome, 1888-97) I 1-3; Alphons Mulders, Missiollsgeschichte, (Regensburg, 1960) 263-74. 18 The text of the ahd-nallleh is to be found in Abbe Pegues, I-listoire et /}hen0111elleS du volcan et des iles vo/calllqlles de Santorill, (Paris, 1842) 609-13. 19 For the life on the islands, sec Slot, Archipelagus, 25-30. There IS a great amount of travel literature on the islands, beginning with Cristoforo Buondelmonti's Libel' inslliaru/I/ Archipe/agi. He journeyed about 1415. Other important works are Deshayes de Courmenin, Voyage du Levant fait par C01l1111C11I(/ement dl/ Roy en 1621, (Paris, 1645); Olfert Dapper, DescrilJtio/1 exacte des Isles de I'Archipel, (Amsterdam, 17(2) and Antoine Des Barres, L'estat present de I'Archlpel, (Paris, 1(78). On the commUl1ltles, see E. Koukkou, Of /winotik.oi thesll10i stis Kyklades /::.ata tin TOllrkohratiall, (Athens, 1980). 20 Georg Hofmann, Vescovadi Cattolici della Grecia: Naxos, Orfen/alia Christiana Analecta, (Rome, 1938) CXV 34ff; Tinos, Orientalia C/mstICIl1a Allalecta, (Rome,1936), CVII 20ff; Thera, Orientalia Christialla Analecta, (Rome, 1941) CXXX 54-5. See also Agamemnon Tselikas, Martyrres apo tl Santori/ll, 1573-1819, (Athens, 1985). 21 V. Laurent, cd., 'Relations de ce qui s'est passe en Ia residence des peres de la Compagnie de Jesus etablie a Naxie Ie 26 septembre de I'annee 1627', Echos d'Oriellt, XXXIII (1934) 218-26, 354-75; XXXIV (1935) 97-105, 179-204, 350-67,472-80. 22 P. Argenti, The Religio1ls MinOrIties of ChIOS, Jews and l\O/l/(/// Catholics, (Cambridge, 1970) 225-7. 23 Sophronius Petndes, 'Le Venerable Jean-Andre Carga, eveque latll1 de Syra', ReVile de 1'0rient Chretiell, V (1900),407-44; Georg Hofmann, Syros, Orrentalia Christiana Allalecta, (Rome, 1937) CXII 9-23. 24 Visite I, 538-9, Archlvo della S. Congregazione di Propaganda, quoted in Georg Hofmann, 'La Chiesa Cattolica in Grecia, 1600-1830', OrIentalia Christiana Periodica, II (1936) 405. 2S Hofmann, Thera, 10-11. 26 The Capitulations of 1673, signed by Marquis de NOll1tel and Mehmed IV, provided in Article II, that 'Bishops who depend on France and other regions that profess the religion of the Franks, of whatever nation or place, so long as they act in that capacity, shall not be troubled in the exercise of their duties WIthin the boundanes of our empire where they have lived for a long time'. Quoted in Basile I-IOlnsy, Les CapitlllatlOns et la protectioll des chretlells all Proche-Orient all XVI. XVlI. XVlII si£k/es, (Paris, 1956), 252; Cesar Fa 111111 , I-/isto/re de la rillalite et dll protectorat des eglises chretfellnes ell Onellt, (Paris, 18S3) 24-40. 27 Ubaldo Mannucci, 'Contributl docul11entarii per Ie storia della distruzlOne degli episcopati latini 111 Oriente nel secoli XVI, XVII', BessaricJIle, XXX (1914) 97-101. 28 Auguste Carayon, Relatiolls illedites des 1111SSIOns de la C0111/HIKlIle de Jesus Constantinople et dalls Ie tepallt all XVIII siecle, (Paris, 1894) 123-38;

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45

a

CHARLES FRAZEE

29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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48

49

Clemente da Tcrzorio, Le lI1issiOili dei Minoti CaIJ/mccilli, Slll1tO storico, (Rome, 1913-38) IV 366. Hofmann, La Chiesa Cattolica, II 176-7. Philip Argenti, The Occupatioll of ClJ/os by the Venetralls, I ("J..!, (London, 1935) gIves a full description of this event. See also Abbe Orsc, Girauel anel Saint-Aroman, Actes des a/Jotres 111odemes, 011 l11issiOlls catholiques: voyages des missionaires dalls tOlltes les pm·tis du l11o/lde, (Paris, 1852) II 144; Charles Frazee, Catholics ami Sultans, (Cambridge, 1983) 174-6. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, RelatioIT d'll11 voyage du Levant, (Paris, 1717) II 22-4,165. Hofmann, Tinos, 21-23; Carayon, Missioll des .Jesuites, 65-6. Georg Hofmann, Das Papsttull1 ulld del' Griechische Freiheitskam/Jf. Orientalia Christiana Allalecta, (Rome. 1952) CXXXVI 72-8,192-4; Spyndon Trikoupis, [storia tis ellinikis e/Janastaseos, (London, 1853-57) I 184. Robert Walsh, A R~side11ce ill COllstallti11ople, (Loncion, 1836) 42-3. Philip Argenti, ed., The Massacres of Chios described 111 COllfem{Jorary Diplomatic [{eports, (London, 1932) 82-4; Hofmann, Chios, 29-30. Quoted in COIIITiere de Snlyme, 22 March 1829. Demetrios Sabkhas, I nomihi thesis tis [(atholilm Eh/~lisras ell ti Elli/1i/~i Epilerateia, (Athens, 1978) 55-6; E. A. Betant, ed., Correspolldence du Comte .f. Capodistrias./mJsidelTt de la Grecc, (Geneva, 1838) IV 421. Betant, Correspondence, IVI 0, 79. Stamatios Laskans, Diplomatilei istoria tis F-llados. 1821-1914, (Athens, 1947) 42ff; S. Laskaris, I [(atholihl Eldelisia e/1 Elladi, (Athens, 1924) 2ff. Otto's marriage remained childless throughout his life. Georg Hofmann, 'Papa Gregorio XVI e la Grecia', in Gregorio XVI, Miscellanea commemorative, (Rome, 1949) II 137-40. See also I. Petrou, ElcHisia l:.at fJOlitilei still Ellada, 17S0-1809, (Thessaloniki, 1990). Archivo della S. Congregazione di Propaganda, Congressi, 39, Archipelago. 'Apostoliki epitropeia Ellados', quoted in Evgenios Dalezios, 0 ell Athil1ais l:wthedrilws lIa05 tOll Agioll Diol1ysioll tOil Areo/JagitoTl, 1865-1965, (Athens, 1965) 17-19. Dalezios, [(athedril:.os 1I00S, 43-108. Hofmann, Papa Gregorio, II 145-54. Successors to Marangos as Catholic Archbishops of Athens have been: Joseph Zaphinos (1892-95), Gaitanos Deangelis (1895-1900), Antonios Delenda (1900-11), Louis Petit (1912-26), Ioannis-Vaptistis Phillippousis (1927-47), Markos Sigalas (1947-50), Markos Makrionitis (1953-59), Venediktos Printezis (1959-1972), Nikoiaos Phoskoios (1973- ). AlIl1uario pe)1fti(icio, 1946, (Rome, 1947)151, 274; idem., 1992, 55, 463. On the Armenian Catholics of Greece, see Jean Mecerian, 'Un tableau de la diaspora armenienne', Proche Oriellf C/mJtlell, XI (1961) 63 and A. Angelopoulos, 'Population distribution of Greece today according to language, national consciousness and religion', Balhilll Studies, XX (1979) 126. The Decree on Ecumenism issued by the Second Vatican Council says, speakll1g of the Orthodox Churches, 'in each of these churches, the Church of God is built up and grows in stature'. Uniatism, the formation of Catholic Churches of former Orthodox, is no longer considered viable as a means of creating a united Christian Church, Oriente Catto/ico: cemu stenia e statlstiche, (Rome, 1962) 124-5; Sotirios Varnaldis, 'L'ecciesiologie de l'uniatisme dans la creation des exarchats de Constantinople et d'Athcnes', /relliholl, LXV (1982) 400-22. Tourist Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Athens, The Catholic Church ill Greece, Athens, n.d.

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50 A commentary on the 1975 constitution is provided in Sabkhas, I lIomihi thesis, 82-4. 51 Katholilci, Athens, 14 September 1993. 52 Athelia, (January, 1993) 24. 53 The Orthodox Synod of Greece strongly protested a request by the Papal Nuncio to Greece that the Catholic Archbishop receive the title 'Metropolitan of Continental Greece'. Archbishop Serapheim of Athens called It totally unacceptable, 'one more step in the general plan against Orthodoxy', See Vasilios !vlakrides, 'Orthodoxy as a conditio sll1e qua non: reitglons and state polItIcs 111 modern Greece from a soclo-historical perspective', Osilarchliche Studien, XL (1991) 281-305. 54 Salakhas, I nOll1ihi thesis, 211-12.

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EVANGELICALS

3 EVANGELICALS

JOHN 0. IATRIDES

For the overwhelming majority of Greeks, for whom national self-awareness is fully synonymous with the Eastern Orthodox faith, the existence in their midst of religious minorities totalling less than 3 per cent of the population is hardly a cause of serious concern. To be sure, periodically the Moslems of Greek Thrace are viewed as the tool of an aggressive Turkey, while Greek Catholic clergy might be accused of serving the Vatican's global aims. However, in both these instances it is the foreign patron rather than the Greek client group who is perceived as constituting a national threat. With the virtual destruction of the Greek Jews, other religious communities in the country are too small, isolated and inconsequential to trouble the public at large. Indeed, were it not for the determination of the Greek Orthodox Church to root out 'heresy' and 'proselytization', religious freedom would not be an issue in Greece. Yet the prevailing influence of the Orthodox Church (formally the Church of Greece) over state institutions and society often reduces religious minorities to the status of second class citizens or worse. And although the Protestants of Greece are not the primary target of intolerance, they nevertheless feel its effects, at least in part because of wide-spread ignorance and confusion concerning their identity and beliefs. In the words of one foreign Protestant official, 'religious liberty in Greece would seem to be theoretical rather than practical'. 1 On 23 September 1983 the Archbishop of Athens and all Greece launched a new 'anti-heresy campaign' with a circular addressed to all Orthodox parishes and to the country's armed forces, warning them of 'provocative proselytizing activity by agents of multinational and Protestant organizations, societies and Eastern religions'. Naming first the Jehovah's Witnesses, the circular included among the 'heresies of protestant origin' the following: 'Adventists, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, Free Evangelical Churches, Presbyterians, etc.'. Also listed were 'all kinds of "initiation rites"

48

organizations, especially of Hindu origin, parapsychology, mediums an~1 magic'. Within seven days of the circular's date its recipients were to submit to the Archbishop'S office information on all such groups 'as well as on how vou are confronting the problem'.2 Thus, in the eyes of the highest Orthodox ;uthorities, universally recognized Protestant denominations were lumped together as heresies with the Jehovah's Witnesses, Hare Krishna, magic and parapsychology, and local priests and their support groups, as well as the country's military, were urged to take action against them all. As the circular makes deal; one of the most vexing problems faced by mainstream Greek Protestants is the refusal of the Orthodox hierarchy, court rulings notwithstanding, to recognize them as members of long-established, universally known Christian Churches. If the head of the Greek Orthodox Church could invalidate the Protestant Reformation by the stroke of his pen, it is hardly surprising that lower-level clergy and civil servants act accordingly.. Indeed, encouraged by their superiors, but also acting on their own Illltiative, Church officials frequently bring charges before state courts against non-Orthodox groups whose activities they find offensive. Thus in July 198.4 the Metropolitan of Kavala demanded that the police prevent further publ,lc meetings of the organization 'Greek Missionary Union' which had stage~ 1I1 the town square a musical performance titled 'Freedom and Joy'. Accordll1g to the Metropolitan's report to the court authorities, 'the study of the pnnted materials [distributed I and the Igroup'sl method of operation lead to the conclusion that it is a Protestant offshoot, engaged in intense proselytization against Greek society'.J Often the root cause of the problem appears to be the deSire of Orthodox prelates to draw attention to themselves as defenders of the Nation agail~s~ foreign influence. A case in point is that involving the Evangelicals of Katenm whose difficulties with the authorities in the 19605 attracted the attention of the British government because the pastor under attack was a Greek Cypriot and thus a British subject. According to the British diplomat who ll1vestlgated the matter, the Katerini Evangelicals were a model community 'so well organized socially, and the esprit de corps existing among them is so strong, th,~t rarely has anyone of its members been known to have become a publIc burden - other than to his own community - due to ill health, destitution or unemployment'. However, the success of the Church in attractll1g members had aroused the hostility of the local Orthodox prelate who, 'apart from other considerations (the Metropolitan is a grand poseur, a forceful and extremely ambitious personality, ever ready to champion any cause which would help him in the public eye), as a matter of policy M. Barnabas has qUite understandably felt called upon to combat the challenge of the Evangelical Church'. Accordingly, after arranging for the civil authorities to exproprIate the small garden of the Evangelical community, the Metropolitan accused I~S pastor of proselytization and had him declared an 'undesirable', thus preCIpItating his expulsion from the country. The police report, filed at the Metro-

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EVANGELICALS

politan's instigation, included the charge that the pastor had received 'considerable sums of money' from the British consulate in Thessaioniki, some other purpose not being out of the question .. ::' The problem created by the attitude of the Orthodox hierarchy and pliant state agencies is more serious than the size of the religious communities affected would suggest. As the only Eastern Orthodox member of the European Union, Greece can no longer disregard with impunity international scrutiny and ignore mounting charges that it does not provide adequate protection to its religious minorities. Genuine integration into the supremely secular and multicultural Western European community requires the abandonment of outmoded chauvinistic practices which serve no useful purpose and alienate Greece's partners. Resolutions of the European Parliament and decisions of the European Court (concerning the treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses) have already put Greece on notice that its performance on the issue of religious freedom does not measure up to the community's standards.' Moreover, for all its practical significance, adherence to international conventions is not the only issue. Religious intolerance in this instance reveals arbitrary and regressive images of national identity and patriotism and undermines respect for the fundamental rights of all Greek citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation. The basic question is this: Who decides what defines Greekness, and by what criteria? Can a non-Orthodox citizen of Greece, who feels and conducts himself as a Greek, expect to be treated as a full-fledged Greek by the authorities of his own country? This essay deals mostly with the Greek Evangelicals. Other Protestant groups, as well as the Jehovah's Witnesses, are mentioned only in passing, when their experiences in Greece raise questions of broader significance. It should also be stressed that the subject of religious freedom in Greece is something of a moving target. Despite a number of court decisions, the impact of the 1975 constitution's relevant provisions remains unclear. Similarly, the practical effect of European Court rulings on the Greek system is as yet uncertain."

The history of the Greek Evangelicals, whose roots coincide with the nation's liberation from Ottoman rule, is one of sharp contrasts and contradictions, of the occasional acceptance of individuals and wholesale rejection of their religious community. Thus, as a boy in Crete, Eleftherios Venizelos, the charismatic politician who dominated Greek politics during the first third of the twentieth century, was a regular subscriber to the EfJhimeris ton Paidon (Children'S Newspaper) published by the first prominent Greek Evangelical, Mikhalis Kalopothakis, a protege of Petrobeis Mavromikhalis and editor of the journal Astir tis Al1atolis (Star of the East). But the church which Kalopothakis built in Athens and where he preached

for forty years (1871-191]) was the regular target of stone-throwing and noisy disruptions, and he was threatened with bodily harm. In 1895, when his congregation placed on the church facade the sign 'Greek Evangelical Church', the Metropolitan of Athens had the police remove the work 'Greek' on the grounds that it constituted proselytization and possible deception of the innocent passers-by/ The commander of the allied forces in the First World War at the decisive battle of Skra, Colonel (later General) AthanaslOs Kyriakou, was a prominent and devout Evangelical. He was decorated by Greece, Britain and France and was buried with great honours at the prestigious First Cemetery of Athens." But when during the civil war an army private died after taking part in the Grammos campaign against the communist insurgents, the Metropolitan of Alexandroupolis would not allow him to be buried in the public cemetery because he was an Evangelical. After much publicity the young man was laid to rest in a remote corner of the cemetery, away from other graves." And at the very same time when Protestant churches across the United States were raising millions of dollars to rebuild] ,000 Greek Orthodox churches damaged or destroyed in the violence of the 1940s, and to provide priests with cloth for vestments and food for their flock, the Orthodox authorities in Edessa would not allow a tiny Evangelical congregation to occupy the small church it had built.IO Finally, while the international community, with the formal participation of Greece, struggtes to establish norms for the protection of individual human rights everywhere, including religious freedom, there are today Greek judges who rule that to promise a person a place among God's chosen after death constitutes an attempt to convert by 'false and deceptive means' and is therefore illegal." The birth of the Greek Evangelical movement in the early decades of the nineteenth century occurred independently but virtually simultaneously in mainland Greece and in the Greek communities scattered across Asia Minor and Pontos. Especially in Asia Minor it was the very modest by-product of an ambitious if naive design of American and British Protestant missionary societies to bring Christianity to the Moslem masses of the Ottoman Empire. This was to be accomplished through the 'revival' and restoration to its original 'purity and vigour' of the Greek Orthodox faith, the influence of whose followers spanned the Moslem world even as they remained under Ottoman subjugation.'1 Rather than making converts to Protestantism, these Western missionaries hoped to reform, enlighten and invigorate the Eastern Orthodox Church by persuading its members to abandon ritual, mysticism and icon-worship in favour of personalized Christian faith based exclusively on the message of the Gospel. Individual salvation was to be achieved through personal communion with the Creator, through the understanding and acceptance of the Gospel as God's command delivered to man Simply and directly through Christ and his Apostles.

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Origins, pathfinders, adversities

JOHN O. IATRIDES

EVANGELICALS

Such reform and redirection of religiosity required a certain level of literacy and the availability of the Gospel in understandable Greek. Accordingly, the missionaries combined traditional philanthropy with education in the three Rs, so that the individual could read and think for himself, and the translation and distribution of the Old and New Testaments. Using the cosmopolitan port city of Smyrna as their main base of operations, where they established some of the best educational institutions of the Near East, they spread out across the Ottoman Empire establishing schools, orphanages, relief stations, training and certifying teachers of Greek, and distributing Greek editions of the Bible. Although they taught the Bible, they saw their mission as one of enlightenment, not of conversion. They believed that they were helping fellow Christians rediscover and return to what they considered to be the true meaning of Christianity as defined by Christ and recorded by his apostles. Often the graduates of missionary schools would be invited by Greek towns and villages in distant regions of the Ottoman Empire, which had never seen a foreign missionary, to come and operate a Greek school. Most of these young teachers simply taught the three Rs and nothing else; a few also became messengers not of a 'foreign' religion but of a personalized Christian faith based on the Bible and especially the New Testament. They were not aware of any change in their identity as Greeks caused by their particular understanding of the Christian faith. Moreover, their function as 'evangelists' was often unplanned. Thus, in the late 1870s, the village of Semen near the Black Sea, cOl1sisting of some 140 Greek families, hired a teacher (Ioannis Valavanis) for its elementary school. Some time after his arrival the teacher was seen eating eggs and butter on a day of fasting. The matter was reported to the village School Board which appointed two of its members to investigate and recommend appropriate punishment. Asked to explain his conduct, the teacher produced a copy of the New Testament in Greek and read aloud from First Corinthians, VIII/8: 'But meat commendeth us not to God: for neither, if we eat, are we the better; neither, if we eat not, are we the worse.' And from Matthew XVlll: 'Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.' The illiterate but reverent villagers admitted that for the first time in their lives they had actually understood a passage from the Bible. They invited the teacher to read and explain to them the scriptures at regular gatherings. By 1887, over the strong objections of the local Orthodox priests and some villagers, an Evangelical meeting hall was built, which served also as the oneclassroom elementary school of the children of the congregation. A new teacher, with more serious religious training (GeOl'gios Lemonopoulos) came to serve as teacher and pastor. In 1917, in the tragedies spawned by the First World War, when the Turkish authorities destroyed the village, some fifty to sixty families of Evangelicals moved to the nearby town of Kotyora (Ordu),

where an Evangelical community had been in existence since 1880. 11 Although no accurate numbers exist, at the time of the 'Great Disaster', the defeat in 1922 of the Greek armies in Asia Minor, and the ensuing exchange of populations, there were approximately thirty to forty Greek Evangelical churches and many more family-size groups across Asia Minor.14 Needless to say, the Evangelicals of Asia Minor who crossed the Aegean in search of a new home were a numerically insignificant portion of the Greek refugees. Despite their spiritual separation from the Orthodox Church, and the hostility they often encountered as a result, they regarded themselves as purely Greek, sharing the grave misfortunes of their compatriots. They did not think of themselves as followers of an international Protestant movement and did not seek preferential treatment from the largely Protestant relief organizations then operating in Greece. Their one appeal to the Greek authorities was to permit them to be resettled together, as religious communities, but this was done in very few cases. Beyond the suburbs of Athens, where many tried to rebuild their lives, others went to Thessaloniki (where a small Evangelical group had been meeting since 1865), Larissa, Volos, Katerini, Edessa, Veria, Komotini, Ioannina, Alexandroupolis; some made it to the islands of Kerkyra, Crete and Andros where they joined small groups of other Evangelicals. In their new locations they established self-supporting, self-governing churches where they survive to this day. The experiences of the Evangelicals who originated on the Greek mainland were basically similar, with the notable difference that certain of their leaders were well-educated and prominent Athenians. The oldest and best known of the Greek Evangelical churches was established in Athens in 1858 by Mikhalis Kalopothakis, (1825-1911), founder and long-time editor of Astir tis Anato/is, the leading Evangelical journal which continues to be published today and is a valuable chronicle of the history of the Greek Evangelicals. Born in Mani in the clan of Petrobeis Mavromikhalis, Kalopothakis attended elementary school in Areopolis (founded by the American missionaries G. W. Leyburn and Samuel Houston) and developed a keen interest in the Bible. He graduated from gymnasium in Athens and earned his medical degree in 1853 at the University of Athens. After brief service as an army doctor he went to New York, attended Columbia University and graduated from Union Theological Seminary. Back in Athens he decided to devote himself to Evangelical work. His motto was 'the nation needs spiritual reform and this reform must be based solely on the Bible. ls Following the Cretan revolt of 1869, he travelled to the United States once again to plead the cause of Hellenism. While still a medical student Kalopothakis had been drawn to the ministry by the prosecution in various Greek courts and conviction on charges of heresy of the prominent American missionary and philhellene

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EVANGELICALS

from Massachusetts Jonas King (1792-1869), whom Kalopothakis had come to know and admire. As he said later, he entered the court as a pious Orthodox but left it as an Evangelical Protestant. I" At first welcomed warmly by the Greek authorities in the closing years of the war of independence, a friend of Kapodistrias and other Greek leaders, King became for a time the Greek government's advisor on educational matters. He founded the Evangelilwl1 Gymnasiol1 (1831), the first secondary school in Athens, which was attended by the sons of many promi~ent Greek families. In 1827 he had urged American leaders and philanthropists to create in Mani or Sparta a college of the quality of his beloved Alma Mater; Amherst College in Massachusetts, and later wished to open a private university in Athens. During 1851-58 he was the American consul in the Greek capital. 17 But, for all his work in education and philanthropy, King was primarily interested in spreading the message of the Bible. Before long, his sermons, religious articles and Bible work attracted the wrath of the Orthodox authorities who charged him with insulting the Virgin Mary and other offences. In the press he was accused of presiding over orgies. IS In 1854 he was convicted of heresy, excommunicated and ordered to be deported, over the strong protests of the American government. Although the deportation order was rescinded by King Otto, he went abroad for several years but returned to Athens where he died two years later. 19 Despite his energetic religious activities, King had not wished formally to establish a church. However, his sermons and Bible lessons attracted a number of Athenians, including Kalopothakis, who was a defence witness at King's trial. 20 It was Kalopothakis who brought together some of King's followers and formed the First Evangelical Church of Athens. In J871 the group built its assembly hall in the (then) open fields across from Hadrian's Arch, below Plaka, where its rebuilt version stands today. That is the building from which in November 1895 the word 'Greek' was removed by the police, to be restored some weeks later by court order/I Kalopothakis's son, Dimitrios, himself a pillar of the First Evangelical Church, graduated from Harvard, taught history at the University of Athens and had a distinguished career as The Times of London's correspondent in Greece. During the turbulent decade of the 1920s he was the General Director of the Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and received many honours and decorations from the Greek and British governments. When he died in July 1946, To Vima praised him as a distinguished journalist and government official and an 'outstanding Greek patriot who had served the interests of Greece'.22 Responding to a newspaper article which had labelled his faith a 'Protestant error', he wrote:

Church. When all the added-on human decrees and traditions, which centuries of error and ignorance have piled on that brilliant edifice erected upon the solid foundation of the Apostles and Prophets have been removed, it will be revealed in all its original apostolic magnificence before a joyous Christendom. May it not be long until that blessed day when the Church of our fathers returns to the simplicity and purity of the apostolic ages. Then, with pious joy, we the Greek Evangelicals will return to its fold ... Ll In short, while benefiting from the work of Western missionaries, the Greek Evangelicals did not descend upon the Hellenic scene riding the coat-tails of powerful foreign churches and religious organizations. They represent a very small but autochthonous movement of genuine Greeks who, through a variety of personal encounters, came to believe that their spiritual well-being and salvation could be assured through direct communication with their Creator, for which the Bible was the only vehicle. However, their reformed faith clashed with the historical and prevailing concept of Greekness, which defines ethnic identity in terms of the Orthodox Church. Reflecting this attitude, Stelios Papathemelis, subsequently Minister of Public Order, in September 1992 characterized the work of TV evangelists as 'anti-Orthodox and therefore anti-Greek propaganda'.24

The Greek Evangelicals today

When all the medieval and Turkish walls and structures were removed from it, the Acropolis of Athens emerged in all its beauty and the splendour of its original form. So also with the Orthodox

Today there are twenty-eight congregations across the country (four are in the Athens-Piraeus metropolitan area) which belong to the General Synod of the Greek Evangelical Church. There are also three churches in the United States and one in Germany. In terms of regular membershIp, including children, the largest is that of Katerini, with about 1,500 persons. That church grew out of the 120 Evangelical refugee families from Asia Minor to whom the authorities grantedl ,650 hectares of land for re-settlement in 1923.2' Otherwise, the larger churches are in Athens and Thessaloniki. Family-size groups and lone Evangelicals, for whom no reliable numbers are available, can be found all across Greece. Statistics on this religious minority are virtually non-existent. The 1928 state census listed 9,003 as 'Protestants', while in the 1951 census (the last to specify religious allegiance) the number was down to 6,859, or 0.1 per cent of the population. A December 1992 Athens press account on religious groups reported 12,000-15,000 'Protestants' (named as the third officially recognized Christian dogma), of whom the main group was said to be the Greek Evangelical Church with 5,000, including children.'" The rest were presumably Protestants of other denominations, including Pentecostals, with the more conservative of whom the Evangelicals maintain polite if distant contact.27 The Pentecostals, among whom beliefs and practices vary widely,

54

55

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are regarded by the Orthodox authorities as a heresy (as are the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons) and a serious threat to the nation because their religious activities are viewed as deliberate efforts to undermine national solidarity among Greeks. According to journalistic sources, about twenty Pentecostal Churches are believed to exist in the Athens area alone." x Their activities are regarded as essentially outside the law. The authors of Greece: religious into/era/Ice and discril1llllatIO/1, published in 1994 by the Brusselsbased organization I-Iuman Rights Without Frontiers, give the figure of 16,000-18,000 Protestants, making no attempt to distinguish between Evangelicals and Pentecostals. Whatever their origins and beliefs, the Jehovah's Witnesses need to be considered separately from the family of Protestant churches. Their doctrine and preaching tactics, not to mention their claim that all the dominant Christian Churches (especially the Catholic) have been expropriated by Satan, set them apart from the main subject of this article. Nevertheless, they need to be mentioned here because, as already suggested, in the Greek setting, they are often confused with the Evangelicals who suffer from this unwelcome association. Moreover, they serve as the lightning rod for the charge of proselytization, from which the Evangelicals have sought to protect themselves with only moderate success. No official figures are available on the Jehovah's Witnesses in Greece but they are clearly more numerous than all the Greek Protestants, from whom they are divided by a wall of mutual rejection. The Witnesses' own figure is about 26,000.",) The status of the Witnesses in Greece is unique because the authorities have not recognized them as a 'known' religion protected under the constitution and penal code. This is despite the fact that in 1975 the Council of State (Symvouiion Epi/nateias) accepted the Jehovah's Witnesses as followers of a 'known' religion and thus entitled to protection under the constitution. Howevel; in 1983 the Supreme Court (Areios Pagos) declared them a heresy, which for all practical purposes they remain in the eyes of church and civil authorities. When questions arise, state authorities defer to the Orthodox Church which consistently regards the Witnesses as a heresy with a hostility that has not mellowed over the years. As a result, state organs serve as instruments of religious intolerance. For example, when in 1989 the Witnesses applied to have their ministers excused from military service (as are ministers of the 'known' religions) the military authoritie·s requested a ruling from the Ministry of Education's Directorate of Religions. The Ministry's response consisted of the deciSIOn of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece which declared that the Witnesses are 'neither a known religion nor in fact a religion but a business with an economic-political purpose'.IO In a court case decided in 1991, in Tripolis, Jehovah's Witnesses brought charges against certain individuals whom they accused of publicly and verbally assaulting them on account of their religious activities. After listening

to a parade of 'experts' in matters of theology, the court dismissed the charges ruling that Jehovah's Witnesses 'in no circumstances can be considered an accepted religion and consequently they do not constitute an object of verbal assault' .1\

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57

Structure, dogma, activities The Evangelical Churches of Asia Minor had adopted the 'congregational' system of self-government under which the entire membership, acting as a democratically-ruled unit, controlled the affairs of the church and selected its minister, whose qualifications consisted of personal llltegrity and faith, and knowledge of the Gospel. The Evangelicals of the Greek state had followed the more structured 'Presbyterian' style, which is based on a hierarchy of authorities; the council of elders (presbyters) and the ministers of the district churches, in turn following guidelines established by a geographically larger general assembly. After the arrival of the refugee churches in Greece a Panhellenic Evangelical Alliance was established (in 1924) which over time developed a governing structure that combines elements of both the Congregational and Presbyterian traditions.]1 In essence, while seeking spiritual unity and mutual support, the Greek Evangelical Churches are independent, self-sustaining ancl self-governing entities. They are not branches of foreign Protestant Churches, they joined the World Council of Churches at its founding in 1948, and they support the Ecumenical Movement.]1 There are today some eighteen to twenty ordained ministers (many of whom graduated from theological semmaries in the Ul1lted Kingdom), scores of lay preachers and evangelists, Bible distributors and some 100 elected elders.l-1 The Greek Evangelicals, who espouse the Nicene Creed (325 AD), celebrate two sacraments: Baptism and Holy Communion. They accept as authentic Gospel only the scriptures of the Old Testament (39 Books) and the New Testament (27 Books) and believe that the Bible alone is 'the real and indisputable canon of faith - containing all the material needed by Christians to form a clear and correct faith'.I' They regard ecclesiastical 'Tradition', including the veneration of rules and ceremonies not traceable to Christ and his Apostles, and of man-made objects such as Icons, to be products of the human mind influenced by regional, political and social trends, individual bias and ignorance. In this they differ from both the Orthodox and Catholic Churches which regard 'Tradition' as divinely inspired and having the same authority as the Books of the Bible.'" In practice the Evangelicals believe that the mission of their church is to propagate and distribute the Gospel as the only vehicle of salvation through which man discovers and communes with his Creator personally and directly. They aspire to convey this message to others chiefly through their daily conduct, by personal example. Great emphasis is placed on teaching the

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Gospel and its meaning to the young through Bible school and appropriate recreation. In this connection, they run several summer camps where some 500 children (and sometimes entire families) combine vacation with religious education and worship. Since the 1980s growing attention has been paid to social problems and modest programmes have been started in the large cities for alcoholics and drug addicts. 17 The Church in Kerkyra has recently combined relief work with religious activity in post-communist Albania. 1s

It is not easy to generalize about the experiences of the Evangelicals as a religious minority in Greece. In part, this is because they do not, as a rule, seek to bring attention to themselves and any problems that they encounter with the authorities often go unreported. Conditions have changed over time and there has been slow but steady improvement in the attitude of secular authorities, at least in principle. It has always been more difficult to be an Evangelical in small towns and villages than in the larger urban centres. Most individual members of the Church, whose social, educational and economic status represents an approximate cross-section of the nation as a whole, are able to lead professional and occupational lives unhindered by their religious affiliation. Their employers and fellow workers, and (in the cities) many of their neighbours as well, are not aware of their religion or are not particularly concerned about it. Parenthetically, the required designation of one's religious affiliation on identity cards has caused much debate in recent years and raises fundamental questions of legal principle. The practice was condemned by the European Parliament as a violation of Article 9 of the European Convention on I-Iuman Rights/" and the issue is likely to emerge as a point of friction between the European Union and Greece in the years aheacl:lO Its practical significance for members of the so-called known religions is probably negligible. However, if as ordinary citizens the Greek Evangelicals are largely unaffected in their daily lives, as practitioners of their faith they certainly suffer the consequences. As already mentioned, the 1975 Constitution (article 13.2) extends protection of freedom of worship to all 'known' religions. But even though the Evangelicals, as Protestants, are accepted as a 'known' religion, their ministers and lay evangelists frequently run afoul of the constitutional banning of 'proselytism'. The original prohibition was intended to defend the dominant Orthodox Church from the loss of its faithful to alien religions. On the other hand, the 1975 Constitution maintains the prohibition of 'proselytism' as protection of the individual right of freedom of religious conscience against attempts at conversion by what the penal code labels 'false means'. This change implies that the banning of proselytism is directed at all religions, and thus is fair and impartial. However, since the meaning of 'false means' is not specified by law, it is left to courts to decide what in fact constitutes

proselytization. Some court deliberations on this issue have been reminiscent of theological debates of the Dark Ages. Among the practices which the Greek courts have declared to be 'false means' are the mailing of books, the 'skillful interpretation' of the Gospel, and the disparity in the level of education between the person preaching and the one being preached to:11 As mentioned above, even the promise of paradise may lead to charges of proselytism. Under these peculiar conditions much of the Evangelicals' religious endeavour can be, and is, challenged as representing attempts at proselytization. More often than not, the instigators of the charges and legal action are the local Orthodox authorities and their lay followers. Under 'compulsory laws' dating back to the Metaxas dictatorship, but which remain in effect today (especially 1363/38 as amended in 1672/39), the erection and operation of a Church building of any denomination require an official licence issued by the 'appropriate recognized authority' and the Ministry of Education and Religions. The application for such a licence must be accompanied by detailed information concerning the religious group involved. The unspecified 'appropriate authority' is in reality the local police and the local Orthodox Church, which almost routinely seek to block the granting of the licence. As recently as 1982, the Panhellenic Evangelical Alliance appealed to the national government to repeal these laws protesting that 'almost in all cases the Orthodox "ecclesiastical authority" has not allowed the building ... and any licence granted finally by the State occurred after a recourse of the interested parties Ito I the Council of State' :12 In its reply, issued two years later, the Ministry of Education and Religions rejected the request arguing that the licensing regulations in question did not violate the Constitution and were in fact intended to assist and protect the non-Orthodox. 43 Beyond the problem of licensing Church buildings the Ministry of Education and Religions regularly requires the Evangelical Churches to submit detailed accounts of their activities. For example, a July 1979 circular demanded the following information 'as soon as possible': exact address of place of worship, telephone 'where we can reach you', full name of current pastor, titles of periodicals or other literature sponsored, names of other organizations, clubs or schools operated by the Church. The circular concluded with the reminder that 'any change in your address or your pastor requires our approval':1-1 On occasion security officials in civilian clothes arrive unannounced to request information about the Church:1' And in the autumn of 1993 the Athens press reported the existence of a classified survey of non-Orthodox Greeks undertaken by the Greek Intelligence Agency (EYP). This contained the names, addresses, telephone numbers and information on personal finances and bank accounts of their pastors, who were apparently under routine surveillance.oj!. Periodically, religious minorities, including the Evangelicals, have been accused of lacking in patriotism. In the 1940s and 1950s one charge fre-

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59

A religious minority: problems and realities

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EVANGELICALS

quently made against Evangelicals was that they had not shown sufficient opposition to 'slavo-communism'. The police authorities in Pieri a once reported that when the area had been under ELAS control the 'Evangelical' heretics had been preaching that communism does not persecute the 'Evangelical Church':'7 Given the Evangelicals' total rejection of communist dogma as an atheist aberration one can only wonder about the motives behind such a report. Finally, there is persistent speculation that Evangelicals, as well as members of other religious minorities including the Catholics, are systematically excluded from sensitive government positions. In December 1992, an Evangelical spokesman in Athens, while denying that serious problems existed between his church and state authorities, added: 'there is unconfirmed information that there continues to remain in force a directive for the exclusion of Evangelicals from certain sectors of public service: the army, police, education'.
commander of ELAS, the wartime, communist-controlled resistance army, in a traffic accident (the government had feared that the communists would use the trial for propaganda purposes):'"

60

6l

Conclusions Greece is today a reasonably stable, democratic society, whose constitution and legal system, in principle, accord the individual citizen protection against religious persecution at the hands of the state authorities. As a 'known' religion, the Greek Evangelicals fare much better than other religious minorities which are not so designated. Yet a fundamental problem persists, symbolizing the gap between theory and practice. Although most Greeks think nothing of it, there is a feature of Greek public life and culture that sets it apart from all western democratic societies. At every state function the place of honour is reserved for the Orthodox clergy who are treated as the sacred symbol of the nation's identity and spirit. At official ceremonies, presidents of the republic, prime ministers, the cabinet, generals and other representatives of the state behave as though supreme authority for all things Greek flows from the institution represented by the person in black robes. The historical explanation for all this is all too well known, as is the service of the Orthodox faith to the preservation of the Greek nation. But the symbolism also perpetuates the notion that Greekness is synonymous with Orthodoxy and that the Church stands above civil authority. And as long as the Orthodox Church continues to regard religious minorities as intruders upon its exclusive preserve, the status of all such minorities, including the Evangelicals, will remain precarious. So long as state organs serve as passive - and at times active - tools of the Orthodox Church, religious minorities in Greece will not receive a full measure of protection of their religious freedoms. So long as the political culture of the country identifies ethnic identity and personal loyalty to the state with a particular Church, religious minorities will continue to be treated as less than genuinely Greek. And when the nation feels II1secure or victimized, inflamed nationalism will retard any progress toward genuine religious freedom. As already suggested, this culture, which subjects ethnic identity to criteria defined by the dominant Church, brings Greece on a collision course with the European Union. If it genuinely supports the content and implications of the Maastricht accords, Greece will have to bring itself into line with its partners on a variety of issues, including freedom of religion. It will have to cultivate a pluralistic society in all respects, including matters of religious faith, and turn the myth of the separation of Church and state into reality. For this to happen, two basic changes are essential. First, the constitutional prohibItion of proselytism must be annulled, making it impossible for the courts to serve as the tools of the dominant Church. The time must finally come when Orthodox authorities will tolerate in Greece the full measure of religious freedom from

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which they themselves benefit in the western world. Given the situation described in these pages, it is truly ironic to have Orthodox prelates declare that their 'task in North America is not limited to serving the immigrant and ethnic communities, but has as its very heart the missionary tas/? of making disciples in the nations of Canada and the United States' .'0 Secondly, the nation's educational curriculum will have to incorporate the simple lesson that although the overwhelming majority of Greeks are Orthodox, one need not be Orthodox to be a good Greek. Such changes are possible, if the political will and leadership exist to bring them about. Howevel; it would be unrealistic to believe that such will and leadership exist in Greece today.

12 Gerasimos Augustinos, "'Enlightened" Christians and the "Oriental" Churches: Protestant missions to the Greeks in Asia Minor, 1820-Ul60', IOllmal of Modem Creel" Stlldies, IV (1986) 1.30. 13 Ioannis Agapidis, Ellini/wi eVClngelilwi Iwil10tites tOil POlltOIl (Thessaloniki, 1948), 9-17. H Agapidis,5. IS Kyriakakis, 11-15. 16 Summarized History of the Evallgelical Chllrch of Greece (Athens, n.d.), 2. 17 Georgios D. Dragas, IOllas Killg (Athens, 1972), 65, 92. 18 Dragas, 90. 19 Dragas, 86-10J. For an account by an American contemporary highly critical of King, see Charles K. Tuckerman, The Creel,s of Today (New York, 1878), 211-27. 20 Dragas, 92. 21 Kyriakakis, 19. 22 Kyriakakis, 29. 23 Kyriakakis, 31. 24 Ei/::(mes,16 September 1992, 18. 25 Creek: Evangelical Chll1'ch of Katerhli (Katerini, n.d.). 26 EleftherotYllia, 20 December 1992. 27 Letter of Revd. Stelios Kaloterakis, 1.3 December 1993, to the author. 28 Kathimerini, 6 November 1991. 29 Creece: Religious Illtolerance and Discrimination, I-Iuman Rights Without Frontiers, VI (1994) 2. 30 Eleftherotypia, 20 December 1992. On a prominent case of a Jehovah's Witness decidecl by the European Court of I-Iuman Rights see Case of Kohhillahis v. Creece (.3/1992/348/421), jlldgeJl/elzt, Strasbourg, 25 May 1993. 31 Eleftherotypia, 20 December 1992. 32 Summarized History, 3; see also Katastatihos Khartis tis F"lhzif;us Evangelihis EH/isias (Thessaloniki, ! 971). 33 Katastatilws Khartis, Art 30, 24. 34 SlImmarized History, .3. 35 I pistis tOil Ellilloll Eval1gelilwl1 (Athens, n.d.) 21. 36 I Ilistis, 21-2. 37 S;mmzarized History, .3-4. 38 Elliniki Evangeliki Ekklisia Kerkyras, Ehthesi allJanilwlI crgoll gia to etos 1991. 39 Loverdos, 'Prosilytismos' 111 Eleftherot)'flia, 20 December 1992. 40 Katholi!?i, 16 November 199.3. 41 Loverdos, 'Prosilytismos'. 42 Panhellenic Evangelical Alliance, letter of 24 August 1982 to the Prime Minister and the Ministers of National Education and Religions, Ministry of the Presidency and Justice, signed by Revd. Stelios Kaloterakis and Revd. Apostolos D. 13liatis. 43 Republic of Greece, Ministry of National Education and Religions, 070.1A.3/110, 11 July 1984. 44 Ministry of National Education and Religions, 070J/A/l637, 9 July 1979, signed by K. Athanasiadis. 4S Free Evangelical Church of Thessaloniki, complaint by Dr Demosthenis Katsarkas to the Directorate of Security, Thessaloniki, 10 June 1991. 46 Kat/Jolihi, 16 November 199.3. 47 Eleftherotypia, 20 December.1992. 48 Ibid. 49 The case, from the mid-1950s, is the author's. SO New Yor/.:. Times, 9 December 1994; emphasis added.

Notes 1 Lt.-Gen. Sir Arthur E Smith, Chairman, The Evangelical Alliance, London, letter of 18 September 1963, to N . .J. A. Cheetham, Southern Department, Foreign Office. ForeIgn Office Records, 169099, CEl781/6. 2 EHlisiastil<.i Alitheia, VII (No. 168) I October 1983. 3 Metropolis of Philippi, Neapolis and Thasos, No. 813, 13 July 1984, report of Metropolitan Prokopios to the Public Prosecutor of Kavala. . 4 Foreign Office Records, 169099, documents CE 1781/4, CEl78 116, CEI781/11. In its report the British. Embassy in Athens dismissed as 'complete rubbish' the claim that the Katerini pastor had received money from the Consulate and concluded: ' ... almost certainly the crux of the matter is that Ithe pastor] has been too energetic in attracting support for his flock and that for this (01; of course, possibly some other reason) he has fallen foul of the local Orthodox hierarchy ... ' Murray to Dodson, 28 August ]963, CEI781/6. 5 Stephanos Stavros, '0 prosilytismos kai to dikaioma sti thriskeftiki eleftheria', Poinilw Khrollika, October 1993, 964-77; Stephanos Stavros, 'The Legal Status of Minorities in Greece Today: The adequacy of their protection in light of current human rights perceptions', paper presented at the Modern Greek Studies Association symposium, San Francisco, .30 October-1 November 199.3. 6 Stavros, '0 prosilytlsmos'. In several cases, followll1g hearings by the European CommIssIon on !-Iuman RIghts, a 'fnendly settlement' was reached between Greek Evangelicals as plaintiffs and the Greek state authorities. See, for example, the cases of Charilaos Polyzos, No. 13271187, decided by the Commission on 13 May 1988, and of Argyris Iordanoglou, No. 13270/87, decided by the CommIssIon on 18 December] 987. 7 M. B. Kyriakakis, Proto/Joreia Iwi proto/Joroi (Athens, 1985), 19. 8 Kyriakakis, .38. 9 Diati IwtafJiezetai i Ellinil<.i Evallgeliki EHlisia (Athens, 1954), 61-2. In Greece, cemeteries belong to the local civil authorities and are not the property of the Orthodox Church. 10 Diati IwtafJiezetai, 13-]4, on the Mylotopos case. The official organ of the Orthodox Church which printed the Archbishop'S circular mentioned above also expressed profound gratitude to the World Council of Churches for the 'very large sum of money' donated to the Church of Greece. Ekldisiastihi Alitheia, VII, No. 169, 16 October 198.3. 11 Andreas N,. Loverdos" 'Prosilytismos: mia clliniki apokleistikotita', Eleftherot)'fJia, 20 Decemt1er 1992. See also IllS Prosilytismos. Cia till antisyntagmatilwtita tes sl,hetikis me ton prosilytismo poillil<.is llo111othcsias (Athens, 1986).

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63

JEWS

4 JEWS STEVEN BOWMAN

There are approximately 5,500 Jews in Greece today.! On the eve of the Second World War they numbered some 75,000. 2 This decimation and its ramifications constitute the single most important factor defining the contemporary identity of Greek Jewry. In order to understand their situation, we have to survey the historical essence of Greek Jews prior to the Second World War. Another section of the paper will delineate the tragic story of the war years, while the post-war emigration of Greek Jews will form the histori~al transition to the modern period. We shall begin, however, with an o~lthne of thecontemporary society to which the following sections will proVide the requIsite background for its understanding. In 1941, over 55,000 Jews lived in Thessaloniki; then locally known as Salonica or Saloniki. Corfu, Ioannina, Luisa, Volos, Tribla and Rhodes had flourishing communities numbering several thousands each. Athens, on the other hand, had fewer than 1,000 Jews. Today over 5,000 Jews live in Athem, a thorough~y Hellenized community that tries not to acknowledge the high number of secularized youth and intermarriages with local nonJewish women. Perhapsl ,000 Jews live in Thessaloniki amidst the homeless ghosts of ~heir parents and siblings. In central Greece, only Luisa supports a Viable httle community of some 400 Jews. Jews are only a memory in Thrace and the Peloponnese. Some Macedonian towns may still have a family or two. Ioannina is in decline while the humble remnants of Corfu and Rhodes are ageing with sad dreams, if not nightmares. When I last visited Euboea some twenty years ago, I was introduced to the baby that brought .the community's census to 101; today it numbers ninety. Crete has nearly chsappeared from Jewish memory. To understand contemporary Greek Jewry one has to comprehend another legacy of the war. In 1946, the Greek government passed a law restonng to the Jewish community the heirless properties of those Jews who

64

had been deported to the death camps of Poland.' That act of a liberated state was the first of any European country to resolve justly the problem of Nazi-confiscated Jewish property; a problem about which Jewish organizations in Britain, the United States and Palestine were much concerned during the war, and occurred for a number of reasons which we cannot explore here. Many homes, however, remained in the hands of wartime squatters and refugees, not to mention collaborators. The surviving remnant of Greek Jewry, some 10,000 out of the pre-war 75,000, set up the major institution that has dominated local Jewish politics to this day: the Central Agency for Relief and Rehabilitation of Greek Jews, known as OPAIE. Its responsibility is to administer the thousands of homes and businesses, public buildings, schools, synagogues, hospitals, graveyards, bank accounts, etc. of the 60,000 who had been despoiled, deported and destroyed. The problems involved in this matter are legion, and the documentation for it has not been critically examined, although much material is available in the archives of the World Jewish Congress now housed at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, in the American Joint Distribution Committee archives in New York City and Jerusalem, and in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. Suffice it for our purposes to note that the burden of administering this property is a heavy one and that the SurVIVorS of the Second World War still hold a tight rein on this organization. The property has become a symbol of power and wealth for this small clique. While undoubtably some good has been done for Greek Jews at large, that is the smaller and by now satellite communities that are daily declining in number, tensions have arisen on three fronts:

I.

2.

3.

The perceived disenfranchisement of the younger generation which has, to a great extent, been ignored by the leadership in Athens and Thessaloniki. The descendants of Greek Jews who immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s or to Israel after 1948. They rightly claim a share in this property of their relatives. Yet only recently has the Greek government allowed a percentage of the realizable Greek assets to be expatriated to Israel. Descendants of Greek Jews in the United States who see the burden and the power of this administration as a corrupting influence on the future of Greek Jewry.

The Jewish community has a wide range of social services that sustain its religious autonomy. These include religious schools in Athens, Thessaloniki and Larisa with significant components of secular Greek subjects in the curriculum, synagogues (partially supported by the state); several museums including the internationally known Jewish Museum of Greece located in Athens, the latter the beneficiary of a government subsidy; a slimmer camp o for children; benevolent societies for oJ'l)hans t ' for marrvin ./ h YOUlln t"I women , 65

STEVEN BOWMAN

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for burial in community graveyards, etc. On the local level the University of Thessaloniki is working with the Jewish community and with a recently established Society for Greek Jewry consisting of local scholars to explore the community's history and culture. In addition to Greek government aid, the American Joint Distribution Committee bas been assisting Greek Jews since 1917. Other American support groups include the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the World Jewish Congress and the American Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece. Israel sends emissaries (shlihim) to organise its programmes, teach Hebrew, and promote tours and emigration. The Central Organization of Jewish communities (KIS) in Athens is the voice through which contemporary Greek Jewry speaks to the government of Greece and to concerned Jews in Israel and the western diasporas of Sephardi and Greek Jews. This facet of the leadership is yet another means of control by which the older generation excludes the younger from the mentaring necessary to succeed to leadership in the future. The legacy of the war which we shall explore later and the age of the leadership together produce extremely conservative and occasionally jingoistic statements and actions by this leadership:' One more point needs to be noted. Greece is officially an Orthodox state which makes Jews and Muslims citizens of a different sort and that in turn obliges the community to maintain a low public profile. At the same time, the legacy of wartime German anti-Jewish propaganda coupled with arch conservative ecclesiastics or radical leftists raises the spectre of antisemitism through an occasional incident.' The obverse of this tension, of course, is a kind of philosemitism that stems from interest in the Bible, business partnerships, social relationships and the presumption that Jews have influence with the media in other countries. On the eve of the Second World War there were still three distinct worlds of Greek Jewry, each with its own layer of polyglot culture and historical experience. These three areas corresponded to 1) the South: the Peloponnese, Attica, and what, in ancient times, was Boeotia; 2) the West: Epiros and Akarnania; and 3) the North: Thrace and Macedonia stretching southward into Central Greece or Sterea Ellada. The islands of the Ionian and Aegean Seas were until the post Second World War period heavily influenced by Italian domination which effectively colonized the urban environment; Corfu and Rhodes respectively exemplify this tradition and Italian is still spoken by the older generation. And finally there was Crete. Subject to Venice and then the Ottomans, it became part of the new kingdom of Greece in the early twentieth century. The wealthy Hellenistic cities surrounding the Aegean attracted a large Jewish diaspora in the Roman period, but Jews may have been living in the area as early as the last days of the First Temple (sixth century BeE). The continuity of the Jewish settlement in the Peloponnese and Attica through the period of Roman domination is certain; however, data from the middle and late Byzantine periods, though scarce, is still suggestive of this continu-

ity. On the eve of the Ottoman conquest of the Peloponnese or Morea, Jews were still to be found from Thebes to Mistra, while during the Tourkokratia, or period of Turkish rule, they were located in all the major centres from Patras to Kalamata and Tripolis to Corinth with smaller settlements in Thebes and Euboea.c' The sketchy and still untold story of the Jews in the South came to an end with the Greek Revolution of the 1820s. Perceived as allies of the Turks, they fell victim to persecution and massacre by the insurgent Greeks. This is the only recorded massacre of Jews in Greece by Greeks and seems to be more a side-effect of the butchering of the Turks of Tripolis, the last Ottoman stronghold in the South where the Jews had taken refuge from the fighting, than a specific action against Jews per se. In general, Jews within the Greek lands and throughout Europe were supporters of the Greek revolt, using their money and their political and public influence in support of the Greek cause. In turn, the success of the Greek War of Independence was to stimulate the incipient stirrings of Jewish nationalism, which later metamorphosed into Zionism. The newly established Kingdom of Greece attracted Jews to its capital Athens both from the Ottoman Empire and from Central Europe, a trend that was to continue until the middle of the twentieth century: Sephardi merchants from Smyrna (Izmir) on the east coast of the Aegean Sea and Volos on the north-west coast as well as Romaniotes from Yanina (Ioannina) in the western Epiros. 7 An Izmirli Sephardi is even credited with the origins of the flea market in the Monastiraki section below the Acropolis which sits at the confluence of the Plaka, the older Byzantine and Ottoman section, and the modern nineteenth century town that grew up around it. The Greek government gave official recognition to the Jewish community in 1889. By this time a second generation of Greek Jews was matriculating from the University of Athens and entering professional life, especially law and journalism. A few Central European Jews came as merchants and professionals to serve the new German King of Greece, Otto of the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty, alongside their Christian compatriots, such as a Jewish dentist (Levi) and a Christian brewer (Fuchs = Fix beer). The best known was Max de Rothschild, a financier who accompanied King Otto. Charles de Rothschild became president of the newly recognized community in 1890 and the leadership henceforth alternated between local Greek Jews and Central European Jews during the twentieth century. A British subject, David Pacifico, became the centre of a cause celebre when his house was sacked by an angry mob in 1847. Britain pressured Greece to compensate him and ultimately sent warships to seize Greek merchant ships 111 Piraeus as indemnity. German Jewish and Christian scholars migrated to Greece to teach in the local university and schools and to excavate the antiquities of the new Kingdom. Perhaps the most famous was Professor Karo whose distinguished career as the head of the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut spanned some

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twenty years (until the mid 1930s). For a variety of political and economic reasons the years between the two world wars would see an influx of Central European Jewish scholars, businessmen and technocrats immigrate to Greece. H By the First Balkan War a small but wealthy and influential community of Athenian Jews led by Ashkenazim (Central European Jews),' was well integrated into the Kingdom of Greece and active in Greek society. Some of them, moreover, were active supporters of the Cretan politician Eleftherios Venezelos, whose post-First World War and interwar political career was to have such a great impact on the Jews of Thessaloniki. He himself maintained close relations with his Jewish colleagues and was described by Moise Caime in 1912 as his friend, a man who liked Jews and respected the Jews of Thessaloniki for their potential value to Greece, 'a superior man who had no race or religious prejudice'.10 Though small in number, the voices of Athenian Jewry were heard as lobbyists for Thessaloniki Jewry in the Greek parliament during the interwar period. 11 The Jews of the West, the Epiros ('peninsula'), have a shorter recorded history than those of either the South or the North. Primarily merchants, they settled on the two major routes that criss-crossed Epiros, the Via Egnatia, built by the Romans to connect the Ionian Sea with Byzantium on the Bosphoros, and the north-south route from Navpaktos (Lepanto), Preveza and Arta in the south through the metropolis of Ioannina into the villages of southern Albania and ultimately to Dyrrachium (Durres or Durrazo), the western emporium of Egnatia. Like the Jews of the South, the Jews of Epiros and Akarnania were Romaniote, that is, Greek-speaking citizens of the Byzantine Empire. They had their own synagogue rite and continued to speak a local patois of Judeo-Greek to the present day. 12 With the collapse of communism in Albania, several hundreds of these north Epirote Jews, who had been trapped there since the 1940s, were successfully repatriated to Israel. The recorded history of Ioannina Jewry begins in the early BOOs (although local legends place Jews there in the ninth or tenth centuries) with two chrysobulla of the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II, one of 1319 promising protection to the Jewish immigrants to the city, and one of 1321 confirming the rights of the Church over some local Jews. Ll To these two groups must be added an unmentioned but implied veteran autonomous community of indeterminate ancestry. In later years immigrants from Corfu and Italy added their contJ'ibutions to the complexity of loannina's Jewish community. Among the latter were the extensive Matsas clan which reputedly introducedl<.asl<.aval cheese as a family monopoly.H Intermarriage with Sephardim from Thessaloniki and Central Greece and the arrival of a few North African Jews added more traditions, but soon all spoke and prayed in a seemingly homogeneous community. The Jewish community lived alongside the Ottoman governors inside the walled Iwstro, a practice repeated throughout the smaller communities of Greece during the Tourlwhratia.

By the end of the nineteenth century there were some 1,500 Jews in Ioannina with an equal number in the other towns of the vilayet of Ioannina. L' The main marketplace was burned in 1869, allegedly by the Turkish governor who wanted to modernize the city.I'TI1lS was a tragedy for the Jews proportionately as disastrous as the great fire of Thessaloniki in 1917 to their co-religionists in that city. Almost half of the Jewish community (840) was left homeless; most of the stores were burned. Three years later a series of riots against the Jews contributed to the decline of the community. With the opening of a highway between loan nina and Preveza, Epirots began to emigrate, including the Jews of ioannina. They left to join their co-religionists in Alexandria, Egypt and also were drawn to the great mecca of the fin de siecle - New York City. Despite the emigrations, there were still some 4,000 Jews in Ioannina according to the bulletins of the Alliance Israelite Universelle of 1904. In the following year 500 Jews emigrated to Bucharest, Alexandria, Istanbul, Jerusalem, and New York. Another 1,000 followed in 1906. The community thus lost its most energetic reservoir and was left with the more conservative and religious element which was to predominate through the next generation. The Jews of western Greece shared with the Jews of southern Greece a Greek-speaking environment. However, the former was still pre-modern in that the Ottomans remained in control until the twentieth century. The latter became a newly established part of a thriving nco-classical civilization which, despite its German kingling, prided itself as a parliamentary democracy. The Jews of Athens, at least those raised and educated in the new environment, considered themselves Greeks of the Israelite persuasion and adopted a secularized veneer in public. Despite the predominance of Orthodox Christianity in Greek society, they did not feel themselves to be outsiders, whereas the Jews of western Greece suffered the vicissitudes of ethnic tensions with the subject Greek Orthodox that occasionally exploded in blood libels against local Jewish communities. The hysteria of these canards, which slowly spread west through the Ottoman Empire beginning with the Damascus Blood Libel of J 840, reached Corfu in 1891, paradoxically twenty-seven years after the island was annexed by the Athens monarchy. The Greek government, like the Ottoman regime that preceded it, extended its formal protection to the Jewish citizens, an attitude and policy that continued throughout the twentieth century. The situation in northern Greece was quite different. The Greek-speaking traditions of the Jews of Macedonia, Thrace, and Central Greece, prominent in Hellenistic times and continuing through the Byzantine period, virtually disappeared with the Ottoman conquests of the fifteenth century. In 1455 Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople (istanbul), ordered the deportation of the Greek-speaking Jewish communities of Thrace, Macedonia, and Central Greece to help repopulate his new capital. All of the tiny Jewish communities along the Via Egnatia from Kastoria to

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Thessaloniki and east to Constantinople as well as south along the Aegean coasts were forcibly removed and identified for the next few centuries as siirgiin, that is, forcibly deported, and hence not free to relocate. In the 1470 census of the capital, the Romaniote Jews numbered some 1,500 families or nearly 10 per cent of the city's population. 17 In the decade following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and during the generation following the forced baptism of the Jews in Portugal in 1498 (many of them Spanish refugees), Sephardim migrated eastwards to the Ottoman Empire and were encouraged to settle in those areas devoid of Jews. I-Ience in the northern tier of Greece, in that string of towns along the Via Egnatia with Thessaloniki as its centre, a transplanted medieval Spal1lsh civilization flourished both commercially and intellectually until the twentieth century. From the fourteenth century onwards, Ashkenazi refugees from Central Europe and through the nineteenth century a flood of Jews from southern Russia, the two major branches of European Jews - Ashkenazim and Sephardim - intermingled in the homeland of the Greek-speaking Romaniotes and produced a vibrant renaissance of Jewish creativity that was intimately linked with the fate and fortune of the Ottoman realm that welcomed them. From Thessaloniki, Sephardi Jews radiated north to Bulgaria and Romania and south to the Land of Israel, both frontier provinces of the Ottomans, but their main settlements ringed the Aegean Sea from Larisa in Central Greece to Izmir in western Turkey. The islands of the Dodecanese, which stretch like a string of pearls off the western coast of Turkey, soon supported colonies of Sephardi Jews; the most important of these was Rhodes. Thessaloniki, nestled in the north-west corner of the Aegean Sea, enjoyed her prosperity as the entrepot of the Balkans. Her Jewish population appeared shortly after the city was founded by Alexander the Great and was well known by New Testament times. From the twelfth century onwards (if not the tenth), sources suggest a continuity of settlement until the Ottoman conquest in 1430 when its Jewish population was deported to Edirne. By the sixteenth century, however, the community was growing and flourishing with a new Jewish element. In the sixteenth century Thessaloniki was the intellectual capital of the Jewish world, while her businessmen and manufactories sustained a textile industry that covered the trade routes of the Ottoman Empire. The Spanish-speaking Jews formed a majority in the city, outnumbering the Greek Christians and the Turkish Muslims. They were able to impose the rhythm of their religious calendar on the pulse of the city. Its scholars and academies supplied leadership to all the Jewish communities of the Balkans, so much so that Thessaloniki was known as the 'Jewish metropolis'. The second period was at the end of the nineteenth century when northern Greece began to westernize. The harbour walls of the new city were removed and replaced by a wide esplanade that provided a lovely fJerifJtero for the citizens of the Jewish quarters that bordered the port. The Jewish population subsequently spread east along the gulf with the older

Roman/Byzantine centre becoming separated from the modern new suburbs by the huge graveyard that had developed over the centuries east of the Byzantine walls. In the new suburbs, a rich secular literature in Judaeo-Spanish blossomed to compete with the Hebrew and Aramaic classics of the older centre that stretched within the remaining walls from the port to the Via Egnatia. At the end of the nineteenth century Jewish Thessaloniki seemed poised for a brilliant future as the capital city of a newly renascent Balkans. History would decree otherwise. Three islands define the borders of the Greek world: Corfu, Crete, and Rhodes.'" Subject to a congeries of rulers during late Byzantine and Ottoman times the predominant foreign influence was Venetian. Indeed, the Jews of Corfu spoke more Italian than Greek; likewise after 1912, the Jews of Rhodes spoke more Italian than Judaeo-Spanish; and, until the eighteenth century, the Jews of Crete constituted part of the urban orbit of a colonizing Venice. The same influence held true for the Jews of Euboea (Negroponte) which was heavily Italianized during the late Byzantine period. This intimacy of the island Jews with the Italians in the port cities of Corfu, Crete, and Rhodes would ill prepare them for the harshness of the German occupation that replaced that of the Italians in September 1943. During the First World War, Venezelos succeeded in making Thessaloniki the capital of his provisional pro-Allied government in contradistinction to the king in Athens who sympathized with the Central Powers. I'! Two events contributed to the crippling of the large and powerful Jewish community of the city. One was the great fire of 1917 which levelled the central portion of the city down to the port destroying homes, businesses, centres of learning, libraries, and commercial institutions. In the wake of this destruction, the Athens government confiscated much of the area as an archaeological site. From this blow the community never recovered. On the eve of their deportation in 1943 over half the Jews were indigent and still living in the temporary housing supplied by American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee funds after the First World War. The exodus of prosperous Sephardi merchants, which had begun at the turn of the twentieth century - many to France - continued and accelerated. The poor remained, subsisting on Greek government and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee subsidies. 20 The second blow followed upon the Greek Catastrophe in Asia Minor in 1922. Venizelos directed a large migration of Asia Minor Greeks to Thessaloniki, a measure which placed tremendous burdens on the infrastructure of the city. In addition, the Jewish community was pressured to Hellenize its school curriculum and to release needed areas to the civil government. In particular, the city demanded more and more of the huge graveyard located just east of the Byzantine walls. Part of this graveyard had been given over to the Ottoman administration for a schoo\. Now the Greeks wished to expancl this school into a university. The question was resolved during the Second World War when the city gained total control of the area. Today, the

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university - centrally located in its prime real estate - occupies nearly all of the area of the former graveyard. Visitors can still see fragments of epitaphs in Hebrew and Judaeo-Spanish built into the walkways and embellishing the gardens of that prestigious institution.!1 This last observation leads us to the agony of the experience of the Jews of Greece during the Second World War, a tragedy that brought to a close 450 years of a glorious Sephardi diaspora and nearly ended 2,500 years of a Jewish presence in Greece. First let me summarize the tragedy and then outline the Jewish contributions to Greece during the war and its aftermath. E The outlines of Greece's agony under the Axis are not widely known. An excellent introduction to this period is now available in Mark Mazower's inside Hitler's Greece (London, J 993), which contains, inter alia, the best summary to date of the Jewish fate under the Axis. More detailed information can be found in the author's articles in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The dearth and death (to paraphrase Thucydides) brought to Greece from the north affected Jews and non-Jews alike, although the Jews received an extra measure of suffering due to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis and the enslavement of the young men of Thessaloniki who were sent out to repair the railroads that the British destroyed during their retreat in 1941. The Bulgarian plot to depopulate Thrace, which it had been allowed to occupy as war spoils for supporting the Axis, resulted in the eviction of some 30,000 Christians, the killing of thousands of others, and the deportation of some 4,000 Jews from Serres, Kavala, Komotini, Xanthi and the island of Thasos. This deportation resulted from a deal made by the Bulgarians with Adolph Eichmann's emissary. Eichmann received the directive to remove the Jews from the Balkans now threatened by the expected Soviet advance. Following Rommel's defeat at EI Alamein and the encirclement of the German army at Stalingrad, Hitler reorganized his defence of the Balkans. It was now time for the Jews to go. Most of those in Yugoslavia were already gone, either under Italian protection, butchered in Croatia, or killed by the Wehrmacht in reprisal executions, or deported to Auschwitz where they were mostly gassed to death. Theodore Danneker was sent to Sofia to organize the removal of the Bulgarian Jews. The Bulgarians agreed to the removal of 20,000 for forced labour in Germany. These would be supplied from Greek Thrace (4,000), Yugoslav and Greek Macedonia (8,()()(}) and the rest from the pre-war kingdom of Bulgaria. The latter were never surrendered. The former, however, were arrested on Passover 1943 and entrained or barged to Vienna whence they were sent to Treblinka, the killing centre built for the Warsaw Ghetto. There were no survivors, although the crates of food they brought for their sustenance alleviated the famine that was decimating the few slave workers in that camp. The latter soon revolted in a mass escape which forced the Germans to close down that killing centre in favour of the megakilling factory in Auschwitz/Birkenau. L !

Since late autumn of 1941 the order for the deportation of the Salonican Jewish community was in the Wehrmacht pipeline ..'·1 The actual process was organized by Eichmann's emissary, Dieter Wisliceny. The Chief Rabbi of Saloniki, Dr Zvi Koretz, who had been hired in the mid 1930s after a rebellion among the younger generation of Jewish leaders who wished to modernize the rabbinate, had been made President of the .!udenrat in December of 1942. He was brought back from a prison in Vienna where he had been interned by the Germans ostensibly for his public support of the Greek government during the Italian bombing attacks on Thessa/oniki.!5 Eichmann's decrees were handed over by Wisliceny to Dr Max Merten, the German civilian liaison with the Greek communities, who, in turn, delivered them to Koretz for promulgation and enforcement. Thus, throughout February] 943, the Niirnburg Laws were introduced into Thessaloniki. By mid-March the deportations began, despite the protests of the representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Greek authorities. (It was not until June that the Germans were able finally to evict the former from his post)."" Within three months the Jews of Greek citizenship, numbering some 48,000, were deported to AuschwitzlBirkenau. In May, another train carried the Jews of Alexandroupolis, Didymoteikhon and Nea Soufli to their deaths. They were later joined by 1,500 Jewish males who had done slave labour near Thebes and other rail stations. Of these deportees over 80 per cent were gassed to death on arrival and cremated. The .Iudellrat and many Jews who held Spanish citizenship were deported to Bergen-Belsen in June where they were held for exchange, either for German detainees from the old German Templar colonies in Palestine or prisoners of war/ 7 With the surrender of Italy in September 1943 the axe began to fall on the Jews of that zone of occupation. Previously, the Italians had refused to co-operate with the demands of the Gestapo and later of Eichmann to persecute and deport the Jews of their occupied zone. This complicated story has been told elsewhere, most recently by Jonathan Steinberg in hiS fascinating study of Italian-German relations entitled All or Nothing (London, 1990). It was not until Passover of 1944 that the Jews of the former Italian zone were deported to Auschwitz/Birkenau. In June, the Jews of Crete mysteriously dis~ppeared. Recent scholarship suspects their ship which also included Italian prisoners of war was sunk by a British submarine; the traditional view is that the Germans were responsible.!" The Jews of Corfu and Rhodes were deported in June and July/August 1944 respectively. In all, some 60,000 Greek Jews were deported. Twelve thousand were selected for slave labour or for usually lethal medical experiments either in Auschwitz or in other camps such as Majdanek and Dachau and a host of less well known camps. Of those deported only 2,000 survived the war to return home to a strife-filled Greece. We will examine the latter's fate after we rehearse the role of Jews in the Greek struggles against the Axis.

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The story of the Jews in Greece during the war years has two aspects: one is the contribution of Greek Jews to the overall efforts both in military and civilian support; the other is the role of non-Greek Jews in Greece during the war years. Greek Jews are extremely proud of their service to Greece during the Second World War, both on the battlefield and in military and civilian support services. The nation honoured them during the Italian campaign in Albania, and Metaxas (dictator of Greece between 1936 and January 1941 ) raised Colonel Frizis of Chalkis to the rank of national hero following his death in battle. The government later tried to protect Jewish war invalids from deportation, a group otherwise covered by the Geneva Conventions, but to no avail. Their prosthetic limbs are prominently displayed in the museum at Auschwitz. After their demobilization, most of the Greek Jews walked home from Albania to their families and their pre-war occupations. Some however went to the mountains along with Cretans and Serbs and others who could not make it home. During the rise and organization of the resistance movement under the aegis of EAM/ELAS (a combined republican, socialist and communist front), more and more Jews found their way into the mountains. 29 Few escaped from the forced labour battalions due to the heavy reprisals against those who remained. Many of the youth who were led to safety returned later to their homes out of familial obligations, a strong Sephardi trait - or were called back by their mothers who went into the hills surrounding Ioannina to reclaim their children. Throughout 1943 and 1944, a minimum of 600 to a maximum of 1,000 Greek Jews out of an estimated 30,000 andartes (guerrillas) fought with the resistance. 1o Many thousands were in support facilities, such as logistics, or acted as translators, nurses, doctors or spies. Others were recruiters for the mountain fighters, while university students helped organize agricultural co-operatives in the villages. Others remained in the cities where they assisted EAM resistance through their educated skills. Too many others served and died anonymously, as Joseph Matsas has recalled recently in his stirring memorial. In all, the story of the Jews in the Greek resistance is still untold, but this is not the forum however to recount many fascinating and heroic tales. That has been done elsewhere." To the Greek Jews in the resistance we should add the following: refugees from Central Europe who were either trapped in Greece or were escaped prisoners of war from the British Expeditionary Force. Many of the latter fought in Yugoslavia as well as in Greece. Their contributions and identities are relatively unknown. '2 The non-Greek Jewish contribution to the war period is generally unknown. To begin with, some 2,500 Palestinian Jews (and some Arabs) were volunteers in the British Expeditionary Force sent to Greece in 1941. These constituted engineer and sapper units since Palestinian Jews, for political reasons, were not allowed in fighting units. Even so a special squad of highly trained Jews was sent on secret missions to Greece during the war.

The British Government felt that only fighting units, as in the First World War, were entitled to claim political spoils upon victory. Needless to say, many of these volunteers during the chaos of the semi-controlled retreat fought with discarded weapons in hand. About J ,500 of these Palestinians were abandoned on the beaches of Kalamata and became prisoners of war: some were sent to Stalags in Germany, others escaped to fight with the andartes and partisans for the duration of the war.ll An interesting point that has yet to enter the literature is the role of two Jewish commanders who fought under the British flag. One was Colonel E. C. W. Myers who was drafted from the Haifa War College to command the special mission to blow up the Gorgopotal1los railway viaduct. 1 ' After the successful completion of this mission, his brief was extended to harness the resistance to the British war effort. From November 1942 to the summer of 1943 he succeeded in forging a union of the National Bands of the resistance, whereupon he was relieved of his command and replaced by C. M. Woodhouse, a young Oxford classicist who followed a more political line. The second was Myers' cousin, General Bernard Freyberg, who commanded the British defence of Crete during the terrible ten days of May 1941. The tragedy of that debacle was that it was more politically motivated than militarily controlled. On the very day that Freyberg was given the command to organize the defence of Crete, he was informed that the Royal Navy would offlift his fighting army to Egypt. At the same time he was fully informed through British intelligence that had cracked the German Enigma Code where and when the Wehrmacht would invade. In hindsight Crete could have been saved and countless Cretan victims avoided. But history does not countenance hindsight especially if one is competing uphill. In that situation only the brave dead are exploited for posterity. This is not the forum to rehearse the follies of British policies during the war. After all, the Allies won, and, in the Aegean, Britain fought alone, but less like a lion than a clever jackal. Nonetheless she fought, occasionally stupidly, to the detriment of her own subjects as well as to the detriment of the indigenous Christian and Jewish Greeks, for example in the abortive campaign to capture the Dodecanese in 1943, and in the process consciously sowed the seeds for the end of her empire. 1) History may well honour her choices more than the survivors. But the historiography of Greece, at least until Mazower's aforementioned study, follows a Thucydidean pattern of Right-Left conflict. v , Within this framework we must conclude our survey with the post-war vicissitudes of the Greek Jewish community which continue to affect its public posture to the present day. These follow two different tracks: one is emigration, the other is restoration. The pattern of emigration was established during the war. Too few Jews escaped from the death warrant issued by Hitler and Himmler and implemented by the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht. Those that did escape were not drawn from the poor masses of Greek Jewry. Rather most of the escapees

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were middle class Jews, many of whom held foreign passports whether Italian, Spanish or various South American ones. 17 The story began in Thessaloniki with the blanket issue to Sephardi Jews of Spanish passports and continued with the open-handed aid of the Italian consulate, the last sympathetic non-German authority extant in the city. Those who made it to the Italian zone succeeded in late 1943 and 1944 in being rescued through a unique Palestinian Jewish-ELAS agreement which paid one gold sovereign for each Jew transported from Euboea to (:e~me in Turkey. From there they were transported via Syria to Gaza refugee cal~ps or to another detention centre in the Sinai desert. From these camps, some were drafted to British or Greek military service, others deserted or defected to the Palestinian Jewish community. In other words they returned to their ancestral homeland for which they later fought and otherwise contributed bravely to its resurrected independence. Not that the trip was easy; too many were betrayed, robbed by unscrupulous Greeks, or sunk in their caiques by German patrol boats. Incidently, a number of Greek politicians, including George Papandreou, and high ranking military officers escaped via this network. According to sources, ELAS was paid one gold sovereign for these as wel!.IN When the Germans evacuated Greece, the civil war which had been festering under the scab of German occupation broke forth in all the fury which was to tear Greece apart for the next five years and poison its politics for the next half century. After the Varkiza Agreement, which concluded the 'second round' of internecine conflict, the Jews who were attached to ELAS units demobilized and returned home along with those who had hid in the mountains. There they found their homes occupied by Greek squatters while their wartime records were prosecuted by Rightist authorities. Many Jews were imprisoned; some others shot. The government recognized the necessity of Jewish participation in ELAS for the express purpose of survival and so exempted them from involvement in the incipient civil war. Yet local authorities continued their purge and many young Jews were drafted into government forces to fight against the Communists. On a number of accounts, then, Jews welcomed the option to leave Greece. Many, who recognized the politics of the anti-Communist campaigns of 1946-49 yet loyally served in them, left for Israel where they could realize an ancestral dream of redemption. Added to these were the handful who returned from the camps. The first survivors from Auschwitz were deemed crazy on account of the incomprehensible stories they told. The average Greek exercises hyperbole as normative discourse. I-Ience the minimal description of the gas chambers and ovens must have seemed as hyperbole to those who stayed in Greece and who themselves had suffered tremendously in the resistance or in hiding. Indeed, the latter even accused the survivors of betraying their families by abancloning them to go to Germany! Such things happened and I only report them to the audience. History cannot perfect a reality based on hindsight. The question is whether the pressure of the civil wal; the psychological loss

of family and home, the hostility of the local population, and the call of the Zionist effort to establish a haven for survivors were sufficient to set in motion a mass exodus of Greek Jews to Palestine afterl94S. True, there were in Greece some LO,OOO Jews, most of whom had come out of hiding or out of the mountains after the German evacuation of Greece. Others consisted of survivors who came back, handful by handful, from the German camps, each with a different set of tragic experiences. But why did half of Greek Jewry leave Greece to migrate illegally and legally in the decade following the end of the Second World War? This brings us to another story of the modern experience of Jews in Israel before the re-establishment of an independent state after nearly 1,900 years of minority status among the nations of the world. I refer here to the ingathering of the exiles, a biblical vision of redemption that was made concrete as a fundamental concept of modern Zionism and has been to the present day a central policy of the State of Israel as well as a priority agenda item of world Jewry. The question facing Jews was what to do with the 100,000 concentration camp survivors and the other 150,000 Jews who came out of hiding among the resistance Of returned from the refuge they had taken in the Soviet cities of Central Asia? It was clear from post-war massacres that they were no longer welcome in eastern Europe. The first stage of the solution was to bring as many Jews· as possible to Palestine both for humanitarian and for practical political reasons. It should be remembered that the British White Paper which had restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine was still in effect until IS May 1948. Thus the Palestinian Jews sent in agents to organize the potential illegal immigrants for flight (brihah as it is called in Hebrew or Aliyah Beth) to Palestine. Groups were organized and brought to the Mediterranean shores of Italy and Greece via snow covered mountain passes. From these ports unseaworthy ships overcrowded with destitute refugees who had suffered both the camps and postliberation persecution challenged the Royal Navy in a contest in which the pen was mightier than the sword. What is of interest to us here is that as these illegal groups approached national borders in eastern and central Europe as well as the Balkans, the participants were told to speak only Hebrew which was subsequently identified by the guides to the guards as Greek(!), since the latter were entitled to free transportation and unfettered border crossings in their capacity as repatriating forced labourers from the Third Reich. Contrary then to the actual figures of forced labour from Greece, the number of returnees to Greece and Italy formally identified as Greeks was clearly beyond any statistical reality. Paradoxically, there was no diplomatic protest from Greece to speak of, if we recall, in comparison, the pressures of the British Government on the Metaxas dictatorship to halt a similar flight of refugees to Palestine via Greece in the years immecliately prior to the war.19 Hence I would suggest that in addition to the local reasons why Greek Jews

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might have been willing to leave Greece after the German evacuation, no less should be taken into consideration the swelling numbers of Yiddish-speaking Jews whose exodus via Greece was efficiently organized by the Palestinian Jewish intelligence services and financed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee:'o The former simply became part of the larger movement to Palestine. As an aside, these organizers entered Greece under cover of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) medical team which consisted of 34 Palestinian Jewish doctors, nurses, and aids:" The team was divided into three groups, each under the banner of the Red Star of David medical symbol (to this day still not formally recognized by the Red Cross): one circulated through the Peloponnese dispensing medicines and giving treatment to the local population; a second remained in Athens to help reorganize the Jewish community and recover orphan children as well as treat medically the local population; and a third established itself at Siderokastro to treat and direct any refugees returning via Bulgaria. This brings us to the close of our historical survey of Greek Jewry, the destruction of the age-old communities, and the exodus of most of the survivors. We can begin, I hope, to understand the politics and concerns of those who are in Greece today struggling with the twin burdens of managing the legacy of the war years and so sustaining an organized community in the face of declining numbers. It is no wonder that pundits of the past generation have prophesied the end of Greek Jewry. As an historian, it has been my task to outline the tremendous changes that have crippled the Greek Jewish community in the twentieth century. What will be tomorrow I leave to their successors to effect and to mine to chronicle. Their brief will have to include the story of Greek-Israeli diplomatic experience and joint economic adventures as well as the ramifications and pressures of the Arab-Israeli dispute on the Greek Jewish community of Athens. But we have to stop somewhere ...

2 A list of all the demographic information then available from the end of the 19th century to 1980 may be found in my essay '.Jews 111 War-Time Greece', Jewish Social St"dies (1986), 46-62. 3 This is an intriguing story that involves local post-war Greek politics and negotiations with the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem based on mutual war-time activities between the Cairo based Greek government-in-exile and the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem and their respective counterparts 111 London. 4 The leadership emerged out of a strong group of Ziol1lsts who spent the war years with the Resistance and who almost slllgie-handedly preserved contacts after the war between Greece and Israel. 5 The Arab-Israeli dispute has been the cause of a number of VIOlent terronst incidents in Athens III the past. On rhe other hand, I recall diSCUSSIOns With Greeks displaced from Egypt who supported Israel as God's rod against Arab xenophobia. In depth studies of Israeli-Greek relations have been noticeably lacklllg from the scholarly literature. 6 There is a dearth of material in western languages on Greek Jewry durll1g the Tourkokratia. The reader of Hebrew is better serVICed. For rhe earlier Byzantine period, the works of./oshua Starr, The.lews ill the ByzCllItinc Elllpire, 64!-1204 (Athens, 1939), and of the author, The Jetus of Byzantilllll, 1204-1453 (Tuscaloosa, 1985), contain the basic documents and orielHation. 7 Sephardim were descendants of the Iberian exiles of 1492 and later Spanlshspeaking migrants to the Ottoman realm. Romaniotes were descendants of the Greek-speaking citizens of Byzantium. 8 This topic is explored more fully in my 'Germans and .Jews in Interwar Greece' (sec note 32 below). 9 Ashkenazim refer to Yiddish-speaking .Jews of northern Europe, the bulk of whom come from Poland. The migration to Greece of Central European Jews followed in the wake of the general migration mentiolled previously. 10 Alliance Israelite Universelle, Grece, IBI Athenes Ill87/1932: letter Caime to Bigart. 11 The otherwise excellent study of George Mavrogordatos, Still!Jol'l1 Repllblic: Social Coalitiolls Cllld Party Strategies in Greece, 1922-1936 (Berkeley, ! 983), is occasionally misleading about the Jewish story. Joseph Nehama wrote extellsive reports on the local situation which are housed in the archive of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris. A censored summary of these appears 111 his multivolume Histoire des ]t/ifs de Saloniqlle. Several of his reports have been published by Aron Rodrigue, III/ages of Sephardi alld Eastel'l1]ewries in Ii'allsition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israelite Ulliverselle, 186()-!939 (Seattle, 1993), 236,241Hf. . 12 Rae Dalven, The Jews of IoanJ1ina, (Philadelphia, 1990), 105-12. 13 Cf. my Jews of Byzantium, 25ff. 14 Family tradition related to me by Dr Michael Matsas. 15 The outline for the following section is indebted to the late Rachel Dalven's The Jews of lOa/milia. 16 Ibid., 31 f. 17 Cf. Jews of Byzalltiul1l,174ff, Ill4, 193. 18 We exclude Cyprus from this discussion since its connection with Greek and Palestinian .Jewish history dates from the period after the Second World War. 19 Cf. Rena Molho, 'The Jewish Community of Salonika and its incorporation into the Greek State 1912-19', Middle Eastern Stlldies, XXIV (1988) 391-403. 20 Cf. author's 'The Great Powers and the Jews: British and French Consuls on Interwar Greek .Jewry" Proceedings of the Tenth World COllgress of lelVish Studies, Division B, II (Jerusalem, 1990) 379-86.

Notes A list forwarded to me by Dr Michael Matsas, whom r wish to thank here for his courtesy and assistance, contains the following current figures: 3,524 1,012 405 128 80 90 11 45 92 35 5,419

Athens Thessaloniki Luisa Volos Trikala Khalkis Karditsa Kerkyra Ioannina Rhod~

Total

I cannot account for the discrepancy of three (5,422 is correct sum).

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STEVEN BOWMAN

2J Cf. .1. Nehama and M. Molho, III Memoriam (Thessaloniki, 1948) and subsequent editions in Hebrew and Greek. The curriculum dispute is outlined in excruciating detail in the Nehama files located in the AIU archives in Pans. 22 A preliminary outline of this tragedy is contained 111 the Ellcyc/o/Jedi<1 o( the Holocaust, s. v.: Greece, Salonika, Athens, Thrace, etc. 23 The Bulgarian story has been oft told although never in connection with the total Balkan picture or wirhin the context of the whole eastern front. The most detailed study in English of the Bulgarian archival matenal is in Frederick B. Chary, The Blllgarial/ Jews alld the FilIal SOll/tlO1I (Pittsburgh, 1972). The lasr contribution of ThracianJewry at Treblinka was recorded by Claude Lanzmann in his film Shoah, 24 Reported to me by Professor Christopher Browning. 25 His son Arie Kot'etz told me that it was because the Germans thought hlIll parr of the MasoniC conspiracy in Greece. 26 The story, based on documents 111 Geneva, is given in my 'Another righteous gentile', Cillcinnati JeWish ReView (Spring 1994); Thetis, III (1996). Cf. JeanClaude Favez, Une mission impossible? Le CICR, les di/JOrtaliolls et Ics camps de concelltration nazis (Lausanne, 1988),253-6. 27 Cf. Encyclopedia o( the Holocallst, s.v., Greece, Salonika, Thrace. 28 Judith Humphrey, 'The Jews of Crete under German occupation 1941-44 : I', BI/lletin o(./Ildaeo-Gree/c Studies, V (1989), 18-26; 'The sinking of the Danae off Crete 111 June 1944', ibid., IX (1991), 19-34. 29 The story is more fully examined in Michael Matsas, The IlIl/sion o( Sa(ety, '(New York, 1997). 30 The lower figure IS the cautious estimate of Joseph Matsas, cf. 'The participation of the Greek Jews in the National Resistance', Iou mal o( the l-Iellelllc Diaspora, XVII (J 991) 55-68. I-Ie died before publishing more detailed figures. Michael Matsas has collected considerable oral data in his The IlIl1sion o/Sa(ety. 31 The issues of Chrollika, the organ of KIS III Athens, often have articles on the Jews in the Resistance. Miriam Novitch collected a number of Resistance memoirs in 19.59, Le passage des barbares, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1967). See previous note. 32 Some of their story from the 1930s is III my 'Germans and Jews in interwar Greece', 111 I. K. I-Iassiotis, ed., TheJewish COI11J1l1l1litles o(Solltheastem Ellrope (ro/ll the Fi(teenth Celltllry to the Elld o( World War II (Thessaloniki, 1997), 75-86; further matenal will appear in my book The Agony of Greek .Jewry. 33 Most of the material on these units is in Hebrew III the form of memoirs. 34 See E. C. W. Myers, Greek l:ntanglelllellt, 2nd ed. (Gloucester, 1985). 3.5 Cf. author's 'Could the Dodekanisi Jews I-lave Been Saved?' Newsletter o( the JeWish Mllseum 0/ Greece, 26 (Winter 1989) 1-2. 36 'Sec Mazower's comments, Inside Hitler's Greece, 427. 37 The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem contain the lists of Jews escaping from Greece to Turkey With their passport affiliation. 38 Cf. Zeev Venia l-Iadan, Agaillst All Odds Istanb1l11942-1945 (Israel, Ministry of Defence, 1992) 63f (in Hebrew). Ehud Avriel, Opell the Gates (New York, J 975) was the first to relate the Papandreou story. 39 See my 'Germans and Jews in Interwar Greece' and in general Bernard Wasserstein, Britain alld the .Jews 0/ Ellro/)c /939-/945 (London,1979). 40 Cf. T~ld Szuic, The Secret Alliance: The Ext raordinary Story 0/ the ResClle o( the Jews since World War II (New York, 1991). Though the book is populat; the author provides a sweeping overview of material that can be substantiated from archival sources; cf. Yehudah Bauel; American Jewry and the Ho/ocallst. The American Jewish Joint Distriblltion COlllmittee, 1939-1945 (Detroit, 1981). 41 The documentation for this story is in the Haganah Archives in Tel Aviv.

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5 MUSLIMS: TURKS, POMAKS AND GYPSIES RONALD MEINARDUS

'I'

For manv Greeks I assume that a workshop on minorities would be a heretical meeting. For we are dealing with what for n:any years has been a,taboo subject not only in public, but also in acaden~lc dehate.1I1 Greece. 1, ,as a voung researcher, remember VIsiting the Greek h)relgn MlI1lstry 111 search of ~fficial data on the Muslim minonty in Thrace. The welcome I receIved was anything but friendly. I remember speaking with someone whom later I found to be the desk officer for minority affairs. I-Ie flatly reJected the notion that there are any minorities at all in Greece, and refused to conc~cle the existence of even a single one. I must add that this receptIon 111 the h)reign Ministry served only to excite my curiosity. . , . , I must confess that - from a Greek (or even phdhellelllc) angle -: I am 111 a more comfortable position than, for instance, AnastaSia Karakasldou. At least the minority I will deal with is officially recogl1lzec~ to be one. On ,the other hand I will elaborate on a subject that from.<1 polltlcaI POll1t of VIew is extremely sensitive .. The g~~1:i()I}_()L~~~M_l:~I~!.11 mll~or~t)'Is part.an4~ I, pal ··ce I of the" overall Gi'eCI<=1'urkish complex - and we all that the cItwo " , ... ' . . ..... I 'know d ' (--col~i1tries have stood on the brink of war I,no~'e t la11 once 111 recent ~ca ~s. i"ItJ1e Greeks (or should I say th~ great maJ?nty of Gr~:~s) ,s~e ,t1~~ .mll1~)~,I~y \ issue mainly as an issue of natIonal secunty, .they pel celve a deal TUl_klsh \ threat in Western Thrace and fear this area mIght one day become a second , _ \ Cyprus, subject to invasion, an~ poss,ible ,:nn~x,atiOl~, .by T~lrk~,YJ Greeks have an unusual relatIOnshIp to their MuslIm l11mollty. One fea ,( (' ture of this relationship is that they do not easily accept cntlcism from nonr Greeks (let alone Turks!) regarding this issue. On the other I;an,d, Gre:l~s themselves are free to criticize their government ~or makll1g mIstakes ~n this field. The Greek public (or, I should say, publIc Opl11l0n as reflected 111 the media) is also highly intolerant of criticism from memhers of the ,1111110rity. Critical statements are usually branded 'provocations' 111 the media. And

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the individuals making the criticism are immediately branded as agents of Turkey. A further feature which is regrettable in a highly democratic Greek society is the absence of any form of public dialogue between Christians and Muslims. It is a common feature to watch TV debates on the problems of Thrace - recorded in an Athens studio - with politicians from Athens and not a single Muslim voice. The structure of my paper is rather simple. I will begin with a short historical background, which is necessary for understanding the present situation. As a journalist by profession my main interest is the present political situation - and on this I shall concentrate. One word as to my sources. The published literature on the Muslim minority in Greece is rather small. Most of the publications are either apologetic of the situation (in which case they are Greek), or they attack the Greek side for alleged discrimination of the minority (in this case they are usually Turkish). Of course I have considered both kinds of sources and have collected information in the course of several trips to Western Thrace, where I had the chance to speak with Greek citizens of Orthodox and Muslim faith.

The historical background of the Greek-Turkish minority issue

MUSLIMS

Cyprus, which at this stage was not an issue in contention between Greece (, and Turkey) were after 1923 the only regions in which ethni~ a.nd political ( boundaries were not Identical.0D three areas became areas of, bilateral con- ) . . c flict at a later stage.J _A{!llain point of conflict from the very beginning was the interpretation of the provisions granting special rights to the respective mlI10nties as defined in some detail in the Lausanne treaty_ In Articles 37 through 44 Turkey agreed to protect the 'non-Moslem minorities' that were excluded from the exchange. These Turkish citizens should enjoy the same rights as the majority. Sp~cial reference is made to religious and educational freedoms. In the treaty there is no listing of Greece's obligations as to its minority. The parties agreed in Article 45 that 'the rights conferred by the provisions of the present section on the non-Moslem mlI10rities in Turkey will be similarly conferred by Greece on the Moslem minority in her territory'.2 In spite of the shortness of this paragraph it is of great importance in the context of Greek-Turkish minority issues, as it sanctions the principle of equal treatment and is thus the legal basis for the 'policy of reclprociJt, the details of which we shall discuss late~: j ,...-~.... .. ...

The Muslim minorities in Greece: structure and development

A main task of the (~;;~Hl;lc'feace Conference (1923) was to settle Greek-Turkish relations~alfeYtl1e Greek military defeat in Asia Minor _ known to Greeks as the Mikrasiasti/d /wtastro/J/;i, the Asia Minor disaster. An important element of the Lausanne settlement is the 'Convention concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations'.l The aim of this Convention was what today would be called 'ethnic cleansing': By the compulsory exchange of 'Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory' the parties aimed at ending the entanglement of the two peoples, thus increasing the national homogeneity of their respective countries. Some 434,000 Moslems, - and some 1,350,000 Greek-Orthodox, mainly from Eastern Thrace and Asia Minor - were affected by the exchange. But the Lausanne Peace accord and the ensuing Exchange of Populations did not lead to a total geographic separation of Greeks and Turks. Although the Turkish side at Lausanne demanded a complete removal of all Greeks from Turkey, three groups were excluded from the compulsory exchange. In Article 2 of the Convention these are mentioned as follows: 'the Greek inhabitants of Constantinople' and 'the Moslem inhabitants of Western Thrace'. Furthermore Article 14 of the main treaty stipulates that the Greek population of the islands Imbros and Tenedos should not be included in the exchange. Thus Istanbul, Western Thrace and Imbros and Tenedos (apart from

It will be noticed that in the Treaty of Lausanne mention is not made of ethnic or national minorities, but of non-Muslim and Muslim minorities. The Kemalist Turkish government insisted on this wording as it 'did not and could not cope with the idea of the existence of national minorities'l withll1 its territories.IBut from the very beginning the populations excluded from the exchange cliHered from the respective majority populations in their 'hostcountries' not only as regards religion. They also differed regarding language: the Greek Orthodox population of Turkey converses in Greek and a majority of the Moslem population of Greece speaks Turkisl:JAt tl1lS point a clarification is important. A second group in the Moslern population in Northern Greece speaks as its mother language not Turkish but a Bulgarian dialect. This 'minority within the minority' are the 'Pomaks', who live on the Southern slopes of the Rhodopi mountains in the Greek-Bulgarian border area. According to one theory promoted in Greece, the Pomaks are descendants of the ancient Thracians, who in a later stage of history turned Slav and then, under Ottoman rule, converted to Islam:t The majority of the Pomaks live in Bulgaria. The exact number of Pomaks in Greece has officially not been published. A figure based on estimates often mentioned is 30,000. In some accounts the numerical strength of the Greek Pomak population is said to be higher.' On the basis of these figures we can assume that approximately one in four Muslim Greeks is a Pomak. A second 'minority within the minority' are the 'Roma' - or Gypsies.

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Whereas the Greek Pomaks are settled mainly in the Xanthi prefecture, the 'Roma' are concentrated in the llamas of Evros, bordering Turkey. Figures for this group vary from 5,000 to 18,000." JAlthough a clear majority of the Muslim minority in Greece is Turkish sJ..J6king (and of Turkish descent) the Inixed nature of the minority, that is the existence of the Pomak and Roma groupings, leads us to speak not of one Turkish minority, as does the_Imkishgovernment (and in recent years ever more frequently does the political leadership of the minority). At the same time, the official Greek position, which reduces the Greek Muslims to a mere religious community and, eX/Jressis verbis, does not accept any ethnic charactel;Iis similarly out of touch with reality. This even more so, as in the mid195Us t~1e Greek government 'officially' recognized the ethnic rather than religious character of the minority, when the governor general' of Thrace !nstructed the local authorities to substitute the word 'TurkIsh' for 'Muslim'. In the context of an analysis of the anything but consistent Greek policy towards the Muslim population we shall explain the reasoning for this semantic change. Here I want to mention that the Greek government had already in 1954 referred to the minority as a 'Turkish minority', thus recognizing - as Alexandris puts it - the 'gradual transformation of a basically religious to a Turkish national minority in Western Thrace? Apart from a small group of Turks in the Dodecanese islands (Rhodes/Kos), estimated at less than 5,000 individuals, Greece's Muslim population lives mainly in Western TllI'ace where, in the Rodopi andXanthi nomoi, the Muslims are in the majority. 'Fortunately perhaps for the Greeks the prefecture bordering on the Turkish frontier is that of Evros which has the smallest number of Muslims.'H From one of the rare official sources on this issue we gather that in the Nomos Evros 7 per cent of the population is presently Muslim." l}here is no doubt that Western Thrace is among the least developed regions in Greece. Both the Christian and the Muslim population are affected by this situation. Traditionally Western Thrace was the area of tobacco growing, with the Muslims playing a leading role, as 90 per cent of them are agriculturalists. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Thracian tobacco industry was affected by a severe crisis and many tol~acco growers lost their income. In this situation many Orthodox Thracians left their homes and emigrated to Western Europe - mainly to Germany, to work there as Gastarbeiter. Many members of the Muslim minority joined them. Today, some 12,000 Muslim Greeks from Thrace are estimated to live in Germany. Many more left Thrace and emi,grated to Tur~(e~, " , A well-founded analysIs of the MuslIm mll10nty Il1 Greece IS complicated by the lack of official data. In 1951, the Greek government published for the last time official data indicating the religious affiliation and the mother tongue of the country's population. In the subsequent censuses of 1961,1971, 1981 and 1991 the respective mother tongue was not registered, but there 84

MUSLIMS

was a question pertaining to the religious affiliation of the population. But these data have not been made public. Therefore regarding the numerical development of the minority we have to rely mainly on estimates. Only very rarely is the official secretiveness (the Athenian newspaper Estia mentions in this regard an official mystiko/Jatheia IO ) broken. In a letter to the Muslim publication Im/Jact International, for instance, the Greek press officer in London in 1982 mentionecl109,000 Muslim Greeks in Thrace. We owe a more precise account to Giannis Kapsis, former deputy foreign minister in the PASOK government in the 1980s. In his book on the Greek-Turkish crisis of March 1987, Kapsis also refers in one chapter to the minority issue. In a highly informative footnote we are told: The racial composition of the minority. The Muslims of Thrace are divided, according to their descent, into three categories: 1. (Muslims) of Turkish origin (Tourkogel1eis): 51,917 or 49.9% of the minority. They are settled mainly in the prefecture of Rodopi. 2. Pomaks: 34,878 or 33.5%. They settled in the prefecture of Xanthi and in the areas of Kechrou and Organi in the prefecture of Rodopi. 3. Gypsies (Tsinganoi): 17,078 or 16.6'Yo spread over all the three prefectures of Western Thrace. All in all 241 ,418 Christians (69.9% of the whole population) and 103,869 Muslims (30.1 %) live in Western Thrace. Most Muslims live in the prefecture of Rodopi. 11 This account of the former Greek minister is remarkable for at least two reasons. The grand total of the respective numbers added amounts to a sum of 103,873 - that is, four individuals more than Kapsis states. But the table is interesting not for the mathematical mistake it contains but for other reasons. For it indicates that the government is in possession of highly specific data as to the population in the area, but simply does not publish these figures. The data given by Kapsis are confirmed by less specific accounts in other publications. The Greek 'Minority Rights Group' mentions 110,000 Muslims in Western Thrace. Of these some 30,000 are Pomaks, some 18,000 Gypsies. l " Other sources refer to clearly higher figures for the minority. It is interesting to note that in the 1990 Human Rights Re!JOrt for Greece compiled for the State Department by the US Embassy in Athens reference is made to the 'Muslim Minority in Western Thrace now comprising some 130,000 Turks, Pomaks and Gypsies'.1J Occasionally even higher numbers are mentioned. In a heated parliamentary debate in January 1991, the then deputy Prime Minister, Athanasios Kanellopoulos, rejected the reproach by Muslim MP Ahmet Faikoglou that there was discrimination in Thrace with the following words: There is a historical truth which you can not ignore. In Polis (Istanbul) there were 130-140,000 Greeks and today there are 85

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3,000. How do you explain this phenomenon? On the other hand in Thrace there were 10,000 Muslims [sic!] and now they have reached 150,000 and we give them assistance for the augmentation of the population. 14

been changed by the systematic policy of Greek governments in settling Christian refugees from Turkey in these areas. [t is recorded that in this process of resettlement great areas of land occupied by Muslims were squatted upon by the Greek newcomers from Anatolia and Eastern Thrace. This land question was a significant issue in Greek-Turkish relations at the time. In the course of the population exchange and the settlement of Greek refugees in the area a significant number of Muslims from Western Thrace left their homes and properties voluntaril),jThat this emigration did not reach dimensions dangerous to the existence of the minority is due mainly to the religiollsconservatism of the Thracian Muslims, who were clearly at odds with what was happening politically and socially in post-Ottoman Turkey: 'an overwhelmingly agricultural community, the Thracian Muslims concentrated on the cultivation of theIr estates and generally shied away from the secular revolution which was taking place, at the time, in Turkey'.'~ This religious conservatism was supported by the presence of anti-Kemalist-forces, who had found refuge in Western Thrace after 1923. The most prominent among them was the last Mufti of Constantinople (the Sey-i.i1islam), the highest spiritual leader in the Ottoman Empire and an outspoken enemy of the Kemalist reforms. It was only in the 1930s that the Greek government bowed to Turkish pressure and expelled the Muslim religious leaders from Western Thrace. This move was of major significance for the further development of the minority:

Although these figures for the Muslim minority in the light of published sources seem distorted, Kanellopoulos rightly refers to the dramatic decline of the Greek comml~nity in TUI:ke~1~! is no exaggeration, to speak in this context of a systematic de-helle11lsatH)n of Istanbul and the Islands of Imbros and Te~ledos (G~k<;:eada and Bozcaada).IBut t1~is i~ nO,t the topic of my paper. ) There IS a detailed account of the effe'ttlve hqllldatlOn of the Greek com1:1Unity in Turkey by Alexis Alexa~dl·is, a development which, is strongly Imked to the course of the Cyprus Issue; which after 1950 started to over( shadow the Greek-Turkish relationship. II The Kanelloupolos statement I quoted is interesting for another reason. rt reflects the popular belief that, while the Greek minority in Istanbul has effet::" , tively been liquidated, the Muslims in Western Thrace are 'growing and f1ourishintj (so Andreas Papandreou in 1982).11; This notion is clearly not confirmed by the existing data. These suggest not a growth in the size of the minority but rather numerical stagnatio;:JBaskin Oran, a Turkish scholar who has conducted intensive field research m Western Thrace, concludes that the birth rate of the Muslim Greeks amounts to 3 per cent annually. Nevertheless, in absolute numbers, there has not been an increase in population; the existing evidence even indicates a slight decrease: 'd'aprcs les estimations faites sur base de ces donnes, Ie nombre de personnes qui auraient emigre en Turquie serait de l'ordre de 250,000'.17 This assessment is supported by Tozun Bahceli: 'although precise figures are not available, the number of Thracian Turks who have emigrated to Turkey now far exceed those currently living in Greece'.'H While the numerical strength of the Muslim minority in Greece in toto remained more or less stable or declined slightly since 1923 there have occurred significant changes as to the ethnic and sociological composition of the said minority. Due to the fact that the emigrants are almost all of Turkish origin (or Muslim Turks), their proportional share in the overall minority has decreased constantly. The main 'beneficiaries' of this development have been the Pomaks. While in the 1920s only one out of ten Muslim Greeks was Siav-speaking, today at least one in four members of the minority is Pomak. In the light of these significant demographic shifts it is understandable that the issue of the Pomaks has become a major bone of contention in the overall minority debate.

l

the expulsion of the M lIslim religious leaders from Western Thrace marked the beginning of a gradual transformation of the Muslim community in Thrace from a religious to a national minority. Thracian Turks with strong sympathies for the nationalist and secular regime in Turkey managed to fill the vacuum created by the ' . 20 , expu 1slon 0 f some,'\ _,'0 re I"IglOUS conservatives.

Before the compulsory Exchange of Populations in the 1920s the Muslims were a clear majority in Western Thrace. This numerical predominance has

It took some twenty years before the government in Athens officially recognized this evolution. In the spring of 1954 the government decreed, that the Muslim community henceforth should be called the 'Turkish minority' and that the word 'Muslim' be dropped: 'according to an order issued by the Prime Minister we ask you to use in the future the terms Turk, Turkish, instead of Moslem for every respective case'.21 The Slav-speaking Pomaks were also affected by this official 'Turkification' of the Muslim community. Greek policy as regards this 'minority within the minority' has been everything but stable over the co~ll~se of time. The Greek treatment of the Pomak minority demonstrates conVlI1Cingly that foreign policy considerations tend to determine policy vis-ii-vis the minorities: For Greece the Second World War brought, among many other hardships, an oppressive Bulgarian occupation of Western Thrace and part of Macedonia. After the war and the outbreak of the Cold War, Greece

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Greek government policies towards the minorities

\ \ {\f)

II"

I

I

I

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i,

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Of course the Greek authorities are well aware of the Turkish interest and the advances towards the Pomak community, the basis for which the Athens government itself had laid in the 1950s as we have seen. They counter this with what may well be called a revisionist strategy: the strengthening of Pomak identity becomes in the 1 970s, and especially in the J980s, a cornerstone of Greek policy in Western Thrace. One aim of this policy seems to be to divide the minority, to alienate the Pomaks from the Turks, thus weak-

ening the potential for a united 'front" led or influenced by Ankara. This strategic aim is clearly expressed in an article by Giannis Kapsis in To ViiI/a: 'after the return of democracy Ito Greece in 19741, and especially after 1982, the racial and culture particularity of the Pomaks was acknowledged and due to a wide and many-sided programme the development of their language and their cultural traditions was strengthened'.lh It is not clear whether the numerous recent publications in Greek on the Pomaks, publications that aim at exactly what Kapsis mentions, are part of this gove;'nment strategy. In these books a general Greek audience for the first time learns about this forgotten minority in the north of the country. It is indeed remarkable to see that in at least two of these publications the authors use clearly racial 'arguments' to stress the idea of the singularity of the Pomaks vis-a-vis the Turks (and their similarities with the Greek people). Mylonas in The Pomahs of TIJrace (1990) quotes the results of medical 'blood tests' conducted in 1969 in Athens: 'in 508 Pomaks living in Thrace it was found that there is not the slightest difference between the Pomaks and the rest of the Greek population'.27 And GianlllS Magkriotis in his book titled P0111al<s or Rodo/Jialls? The Greel< Muslims (also 1990) lists the 'anthropological characteristics' of the Pomaks, such as colour of the eyes, of the hair, shape of the head etc. His conclusions: 'these are the anthropological characteristics of the Indogennanic mountain races, who meet with Greek mountain races in Evrytania, Pindos and elsewhere'.2H More important than these semi-academic publications are efforts on behalf of parts of the Pomak community to set up their own political organizations, apart from the Independents led by Faikoglu and Sadik. But these efforts which were given some attention in the Greek media in 1991,"" have ~ not lec! t~ sigr~ificar;t r.ealign~nents in the camp of the minority. Political.ly, ( ~he Muslim mll1ont~ (1I1c1u~I~1g t.he Pomaks) I: don~lI1ate~ by ti~e na~lOnal1St forces led by SadIiz and brkoglu, as the election I esults of Octobel 1993
88

89

was to become the arena of civil war in which the communist neighbouring countries to the north were considered by the conservative establishment in Athens to be a major security threat. This perception of a communist (cum Slav) threat from the north was predominant until the nllLl-1950s. From then onwards the escalation of the Cyprus issue led to a gradual but steady reorientation of Greek security considerations. An early victim of official Greek 'anti-Bulgarism' were the Pomaks, who live in the frontier region on the Sourthern slopes of the Rhodopi mountains. The Pomaks were considered in the late 1940s by the government of Athens to be potential allies of Sofia (and thus Moscow). The method conceived to neutralize this 'threat' inside Greek frontiers was rather simple: systematic 'Turkification' of the Pomaks. This policy, which was supported the government of Turkey, by now Greece's ally, has not been without effect: 'today we have succeeded in making most POl11aks feel themselves Turks'.12 This account by Magkriotis is clearly supported by numerous more recent statements by minority leaders. In a speech in the Greek Parliament, the former independent member of parliament Ahmet Faikoglu declared in January 1991: 'the Pomaks are pure-blooded Turks. The minority IS Turkish and its religion is Muslim.'l1 Dr Ahmet Sadik, who together with Faikoglu represented the Muslim minority in Parliament from 1990 to 1993, said in an interview: 'no politician can say that the Pomaks are not Turks, because they don't speak Turkish. These people who speak the Pomak language are Turks, just as the Greek-speakers from Albania or Greek Americans are Greeks.'14 These statements by Greek Muslim minority politicians reflect the feelings of a large segment of the Pomak community. Baskin Oran gives one possible explanation: pour plusieurs raisons (les Pomaks et les Gitans n'ont pas d' 'Etatparent', ies Turcs sont en majorite ecrasante, Ia Turquie s'occupe du sort de la minorite, Ie patrimonie culturel des Turcs est incomparablement plus riche, etc.) etre Turc en Thrace occidentale est un element de prestige et appeler un Pomak 'Pomak' et surtout un Gitan 'Gitan', est ressenti comme une insulte. On raconte meme que les Gitans sont plus nationalistes que les Pomaks et que ces derniers sont plus nationalistes que les Turcs. 15

5

l

I I

I

RONALD MEINARDUS

are indications that the military government infringed also on the social and economic rights of the Muslims as a distinct minority. One of the major complaints of the minority concerns the shrinking of ~and ownership:' Several sources reveal efforts by the Greek authorities aiming at reducing the amount of Muslim-owned land. A variety of methods are said to have been applied to reach this goal as of the mid-1960s. Firstly it is reported that the purchase of land by members of the minority was made difficult - or practically prohibited. On the other hand, Christiansare said to have been encouraged (with long-term loans) to purchase land from Muslim farmers. Another complaint heard again and again in this regard pertains to petty discrimination in many spheres of every day life. According to these reports, which in recent years have also been publicized widdy in international I--Iuman Rights reports,'O members of the minority were only rarely granted permission to build houses or to repair existing ones. Another point of com plaint pertains to discriminatory practices as regards the issuing of driving licences, especially for tractors. These infringements in the economic life of the minority may well be seen as a reaction to similar deprivations suffered by the Greek minority in Turkey. It is significant to note that, after 1967, the Greek government for the first time applied the principal of 'reciprocity' in dealing with the minority. In other words, the treatment of the Muslim minority in Greece was dependent on the respective treatment of the Greek minority in Turkey. The principle of 'reciprocity' is manifestly applied in two areas of special interest to the minority: education and the vakil issue. The valu)Ulia - to use the Greek word for Islamic religious endowments - consist mainly of property, endowed to the Muslim community by members of the minority. The prominence of this issue is due to the fact that it is with the income from these properties that many social community programmes and expenses (such as salaries for hodjas, teachers, renovation of buildings etc) are covered. Before the 'Coionels' came to power in Greece the va/
MUSLIMS

Training was founded in Thessaloniki. From then on the minority's teachers were not recruited from Turkey, but were trained in Greece by Greek instructors. The teaching of the Greek language was made compulsory - thus marking a new situation, as before 1967 in one out of three Muslim schools there were no Greek language classes at all." To what extent the Hellenization of minority education - which is a source of much complaint on the part of the minority - is a Greek reaction to the Turkification of the Greek minority'S educational system in Turkey is hard to say. But there are several indications that the military Junta introduced also in the field of education the principle of reciprocity. In this context mention must be made of the Greek-Turkish protocol on educational matters agreed upon in 1968, in which matters of the minority education are dealt with in great detail. In this document there are no less than four references that the respective agreements 'fonctionneront sur une base de reciprocitC' ..14 The text of the above-mentioned agreement is not available in Greek. This is symptomatic, as issues pertaining to minorities are treated with great discretion by the Greek government. There are few publications on the issue, and the publications available in the Greek language are clearly apologetic in nature. In this context, the leaking of an official policy paper in which Greek options and policies in Western Thrace are described rather bluntly can only be called sensational.i,!he document I am referrin~ to is the policy paper agreed upon by the-party leaders Kostas Mltsotal
In a second section the Greek party leaders devise policy proposals for coping with these dangers:

1. Maintenance, if not improvement of present demographic structure. 91

RONALD MEINARDUS

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

Economic development of the region to increase living standard of minority and prevent Greek element from leaving. Settlement of Pontic Greeks in Evros and Rodopi prefectures. Systematic purchase of Muslim farmland and encouragement of Muslim urbanization, in other words, by increase in educational standards and employment in public services and industries outside minority areas. Democratic control of Vakif administration in order to limit influence of the Turkish Consulate in Komotini. Reduction in judicial powers of the Muftis and transfer of these powers to Greek courts. Abolition of 'administrative annoyances' as these have produced the opposite results than those intended and because they are an international embarrassment. Strengthening of the presence of the state. l5

The Conservative government of Kostas Mitsotakis (1990-93) clearly followed the suggestions outlined in the policy paper. This Greek strategy could be described as one of the 'carrot and stick'. On the one hand petty dis. crimination, which has caused a lot of embarrassment to Greece, has been 'aboiished:~t is definitely a success for the Greek government that the recent report b'ythe frequently critical Human Rights group 'Helsinki Watch' is far more benevolent than former reports. In this report 'significant steps to improve conditions for the Turkish minority in Western Thrace' are mentioned. l6 But problems remained. The government continued, to the dismay of minority leaders, its policy of limiting the autonomy of important minority institutions (schools, vakif, muftis). Part and parcel of Greek policy towards the Muslim minority continues to be the denial of its ethnic character. Ahmet Sadik was even sentenced by a Greek court to a prison term for Insisting that he is a Turk.

Notes 1 Text in League of Nations Treaty, Series XXXVI (1925) 78-87. 2 League of Nations Treaty Series, XXVIII (1924) 31-7. 3 H. Gockenjan, 'Die Tiirkei und ihre christlichen Minderheiten', Ost/drchliche Studien, II (1981) 112. 4 F. Ronneberger and G. Mergl, 'Bevolkerungsstruktllr', in K.-D. Grothusen, cd., Griechenlalld, Siidosteuropa I-Ianclbuch, Band 3 (Gottingen, 1980),380. 5 S. Grigoriadis, Ellada-Tourhia-KYIJros: 1930-1979. Mia /Jliri them'isis tOil ellinotourhiholl alltitheseoll: istorihi-ethnihi--stratlOtihi-oi/;:,ollomihi (Athens, 1979),356 mentions 45,000 Pomaks. For further details see also R. Meinarclus, Die Tiirlwi-Politih Griechenlcmds. Del' Zypem-, Agais- rmd Minderhcitenhonfliht aus der Sieht Athens (1967-1982) (Frankfurt, 1985),498. Five thousand are mentioned by F. Dc .long, 'The Muslim MinOrIty in Western Thrace', in G. Ashworth, cd., World Minorities il1 the Eighties (Sudbury, Micldx, 1980),95. The number 18,000 is given in Etaireia gia ta

92

MUSLIMS

Dikaiomata ton Meionotiton, Meiollotites still EUada hal 0 lJOliti/:Ws hoSl1lOs (Athens, 1992),5. . . / /.7,-'A. Alexandris, The Greeh Minority of [staldml and Greeh-Tlfr/ush RelatIOns V 1918-1974 (Athens, 1983), 308. H. J. Psomiades, The Eastern Question: The Last Phase. A Study in Greeh-Turbsh DifJlolllacy (Thessaloniki, 1968), 83. 9 EleftherotY!Jia, 2 March 1990. 'lO Estia (Athens), 19 March 1 9 8 1 . . .) 11 G. Kapsis, Oi treis meres tou Marti. Aporritos fahe/los, (Athens, 1990) 298. 12 Etaireia gia ta dikaiomata ton Meionotlton, op. CIt., 4-5. . 13 1990 Human Rrghts Report - Greece (US Embassy Athens) - Release date: 1st February 1991. 8. 14 I Kathimeril1l, 18 January 1991. 15 See A. Alexandris passim. 16 Anti, 19 March 1982. . , ,. 17 B. Oran, 'La minorite turco-musulmane de la Thrace OccIdentale (Grece) 111 S. Vaner cd., Le differend Greco-Ttlrc (Paris, 1988), 145. . 18 T. Bahceli, Greeh-Ttlrhish Relations since 1955 (Boulder, CO, 1990), 177. 19 A. Alexandris, op. cit., 135. 20 Ibid., 188. . .. General Administration of Thrace. Directory of Intenor, Komotll1l, 28 January 1954, Reg. N. A. 'lO43 cited in K. G. Andreades, The Moslem Millority in Westem Tln'ace (Thessaloniki, 1956). 22 G. Magkriotis, I Thrahi. I istoria hai ta simerina tis provlimata (Athens, 1980), 26-30. 23 I Kathimerini, 15 January 1991. . 24 S. Soltaridis, I Dytil
93

ARMENIANS

6 ARMENIANS

I. K. HASSIOTIS

The, modern history of the Armenian presence in various parts of the Greek penmsula may be divided into two distinct periods. The first is by far the longer and comprises the first four centuries of Ottoman rule. The second begins in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and continues to the present day. Some. aspects of the two periods interweave and overlap, creatmg a r~latIv,e CO!:tlI111Ity between them. This is attested by recurring, though sporadIC, histoncal test~n:ol11es; the uninterrupted genealogical history of some old Armel11an famIlIes; and the fact that the same churches have been use? for suc,h a long period (the church of the Armenian community of Heraklton, for ll1stance, dates from 1669, that of Didymoteichon from 1735 and that of Komotini from 1834).1 All the same, the fragmentary nature of the information relating to the Ottoman period (even from the late eighteenth an? ear!y nll1eteenth centurIes), and particularly the qualitative and quan~ItatJVe differences between the two periods, make it impossible to examll1e them as a single entity; they are so obviously two different historical categories. In this paper I intend to deal exclusively with the Armenians of Greece during the second, modern, period. The arrival of Armenians in modern Greece was due to all sorts of factors, which were more or less the same as those which led to the creation of other centres of the Armenian Diaspora elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. First of all, the permanent presence of isolated individuals in various parts of the Greek world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centunes was a result of the occasional movement of the traditional Armenian merchants and craftsmen between the urban and commercial centres of South-Eastern Europe. But these movements did not lead (at least in our ~a.se) t~ the development of distinct colonies, still less of organized com~nunlt1es. So,. a.ltl:ough Ar~11enian merchants and craftsmen had been living 111 Thessalol11kt smce the eIghteenth century, the city's Armenian community

94

as such did not come into being until the late 1870s and early 1880s, when a few dozen Armenian officials in the Ottoman administration and employees of foreign companies settled with their families in the Macedonian capitaL2 It was then also that another two, more or less permanent, Armenian centres were created at Aiexandroupolis (Dedeagatch) and Loutraki, by an unknown number of Armenian seasonal workers, who had come, chiefly from the area of Mush in Central Asia Minor, to work on the extension of the Thessaloniki-Constantinople railway and the opening of the Corinth Canal respectively.' In the early 1890s, after the dramatic events at Kum Kapi in Constantinople in July 1890, and particularly during and immediately after the widespread Armenian massacres of 1894-6, hundreds of Armenian refugees from Sultan Abdul Hamid II flooded into Greece, mainly to the East Aegean islands. An unknown number of Armenian political fugitives and activists also sought refuge in Athens, Piraeus and Crete during the first decade of the twenticth century and shortly after the Armenian Genocide of 1915: There was likewise a similar wave of immigration to Thessaloniki, directly after the city's occupation by the Greek army in 1912, when some Armcnian prisoners, wounded, and deserters from the Bulgarian and Ottoman armies found, in J 912-13, a temporary (and in some cases a permanent) refuge there. After the 1917 Revolution in Russia, Thessaloniki also became the home of some of the Armenian soldiers from the Russian expeditionary force which had taken part in the Allied operations on the Macedonian Front, as also of Russian refugees who fled to Greece in 1920-1.' However, most of these circumstantial newcomers did not settle penllanently in Greece, but either returned home quite soon or headed for Transcaucasia, Western Europe, and the United States. In terms of numbers and impact, however, the most important wave of Armenian migration to Greece came at the time of the Greece's Asia Minor adventure and, particularly, in 1920-2/' Finally, in recent years a few thousand Armenians have come to Greece from Armenia, the Lebanon and, intermittently, other Near-Eastern countries; but most have been simply passing through, without wishing, or seeking, to stay permanently. Bearing this in mind, then, and also certain landmark events which affected both the demographic development and the general fortunes of the Armenian element in Greece, the period with which we are dealing can be divided into three clearly defined stages. The first began, as we have seen, around 1870-80 and ended with the Asia Minor disaster of the early 1920s. During this period, the first, very small, Armenian communities were formed, though, as their members were scattered, only the more concentrated colonies (chiefly in Thessaloniki, Athens, and Crete) avoided being assimilated. The second stage started with the influx into Greece of tens of thousands of Armenians fleeing from Turkey, and lasted until 1948, when their mass 'repatriation' to Soviet Armenia from the Middle East and Western Europe was completed. Needless 95

I. K. HASSIOTIS

to say, this stage is distinguished by an impressive number and density of Armenian colonies in Greece, as also by the inconsistent nature of these colonies (which, as we shall see, were simultaneously temporary and perIl1anent). The third and final stage, which essentially began after the end of the Greek Civil War and is still going on, is characterized by the Greek Armenian communities' stability in terms of size and, particularly, their soclo-political relations with their Greek environment. The demographic growth of Greece's Armenian colonies in the hundred years of their modern history has frequently experienced major fluctuations. Between 1880 and J 890, for instance, the two best-known Armenian communities, those of Thessaloniki and Athens, almost doubled in size. Thereafter, until the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, their size remained more or less stable, but then increased fourfold by the end of the First World War. However, in absolute terms, these increases did not involve large numbers. Despite the successive waves of Armenian refugees and political fugitives which found their way to Greece, the total size of the established communities was no more than 350-400 by the end of the nineteenth century, rising to 600 at most just after the Balkan Wars,7 and I ,500 by the end of the First World War."

ARMENIANS

This skimpy demographic picture suddenly changed just before, during, and immediately after the Greek debacle in Asia Minor in 1922. During that dramatic period, together with hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees, there came to Greece some 80,000 Armenian refugees, flooding into the country from Eastern Thrace, Cilicia, and above all Ionia." But again, these numbers remained high only briefly, for some of the refugees and most of the orphans were channelled through to other countries (thanks to the Lord Mayor's Fund) almost as soon as they had arrived In Greece. H) So by August 1924, the number of Armenian refugees in the care of the Greek relief services was no more than SS,OOO.I) From 1924 onwards, the reduction of the country's Armenian population was also hastened by the efforts of a special League of Nations committee under Fridtjof Nansen to resettle several thousand Armenian refugees from their host countries, particularly Greece, to the tiny sovietized Republic of Armenia in the USSR. Even before this ambitious programme began (and it was never fully accomplished),'2 the Greek government had made a bilateral agreement with the Soviet Union for the despatch, at Greece's expense, of the first group of Armenians who wanted to emigrate to Soviet Armenia. The agreement was backed by the League of Nations and assisted by two further factors: the re-establishment of Greek-Soviet relations in 1924 and the Soviet Union's strong pressure on Greece to take in a few thousand at least of its Greek nationals, particu larly those from Abkhazia. So between the autumn of 1924, when the first exchange began, and November of 1925, when it ended, some 3,000 Armenians from Greece and a similar number of Greeks from the USSR were 'repatriated'. This somewhat

unusual repatriation was continued for a number of years, and contributed to the further shrinking of Greece's Armenian population. By the end of 1932, after renewed approaches by the League of Nations to the Venizelos government, and a new Greek-Soviet agreement in November 1931, a further 8-10,000 Armenians were conveyed on Greek ships from Piraeus to Batum. Ll As a result of these exoduses, which were accompanied by a constant flow of refugees to the West (chiefly to France), Greece's Armenian population fell to about half of its 1923 level. In September 1927, according to Nansen, the number of Armenians in Greece had dropped to 42,000. Almost a year later, the first census after the Asia Minor disaster recorded only 33,634 individuals whose declared mother tongue was Armenian. l .) Ten years later, in 1938, the total Armenian population living permanently in Greece was estimated at 27,080. 11 This figure did not include some 600 Catholics and 350 Evangelical Protestants, who were not registered because they were not under the jurisdiction of the Armenian Assembly;I(, but it remained more or less stable until the outbreak of the Second World War. In the census of 1940, for instance, 26,827 people declared their mother tongue to be Armenian.'? During the occupation of Greece (1941-4), Armenians contributed a by no means insignificant proportion (in relation to their total numbers) of the victims of the fighting, the privations, and particularly the famine in the large urban centres. Between 1940 and 19462,000 Armenians are estimated to have died.IHFurthermore, as we shall see, some of the Armenians in Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace collaborated with the Bulgarian and German authorities, and left Greece as best they could after liberation. The most dramatic fall in Greece's Armenian population was to occur, however, in 1946-7, immediately after the end of the Second World War and just as the Cold War was beginning and the most crucial stage of the Greek Civil War was under way. It was at this time that there began a broad pan-Armenian movement for the 'repatriation' of the Armenians of the Diaspora to Soviet Armel1la. Known as the nerlwght, this controversial mass immigration involved 102,277 Armenians (9.2 per cent of the total Diaspora) between June 1946 and the end of 1948, and continued sporadically thereafter as weiLl'! It was connected with enterprising policies and diplomatic initiatives on the part of the Soviet Union, which were designed to force Turkey to accept a revision of the Montreux Convention of 1936 that would give the USSR improved access through the Straits to the Aegean, and also to bring about a revision of the Soviet-Kemalist treaties of 192] (signed in Moscow on 16 March and in Kars onl 0 October), by which Turkey had achieved the detachment of the provinces of Ardahan and Kars from the weak Armenian Republic. 20 It was in this climate (which gave many Anl1enians the illusion that the political map of eastern ASia Minor was soon to change and their national cause to be re-examined)"1 that a campaign was launched in Greece to persuade as many Armenians as possible to take part

96

97

I. K. HASSIOTIS

ARMENIANS

in the nerlwght. The most willing and responsive hearers tended to be the

party the Dashnal?tsutilt11 (the most powerful in Greece) refused to accept him. The conflict was repeated, and indeed intensified, later on, in 1956-8, when Varda/Jet Isaak Gazarian from Jerusalem began to contest the Athenian Archdiocese. Eventually, the community persuaded the Greek authorities to deport him; and, on 30 March :t 958, the newly elected ad hoc Assembly appointed Sahak Ayvazian as Armenian Metropolitan of Athens (he still occupies the position today). After a secret vote, the Armenian Greek General Assembly, or Temagan Khorhurt, proceeded on 5 October to bring the Armenian Archdiocese of Athens (and all the Armenians in Greece) under the religious authority of the Patriarch of Cilicia, whose see is in Antelias in Lebanon.27 This procedure (which was repeated in all the Armenian communities of the Middle East and Western Europe) was by no means innocent of ulterior political motives: it was also designed politically to weaken the Armenian Catholicosate in Etchmiadzin, the oldest Apostolic Patriarchate, which was based in the religious centre of Etchmiadzin in the then Soviet Republic of Armenia. It may well be that a further attempt will be made to re-examine the ecclesiastical regime which still prevails in the Armenian communities of Greece and the Diaspora in general, because, now that the Republic of Armenia has gained its independence, the pan-Armenian national role of the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin will need to be reconsidered. Less heated and less significant conflict was provoked in Greece's Annenian communities by the sudden and rather unorthodox creation in 1922 of another Armenian ecclesiastical see, the so-called 'Metropolis of Macedonia and Thrace'. Its establishment (which arose out of the rather arbitrary renaming of the former Armenian Archdiocese of Adrianople and Rodosto) provoked the opposition of some members of the Thessalonian community and, particularly, of the Armenian Archdiocese of Athens, which regarded it as a rival. Eventually, after some hesitation, on 2 July 1931, the Greek authorities ordered the complete dissolution of this singular 'Metropolis'.2H Despite these frictions, Greece's Armenian communities tended to avoid internal conflicts (such as those which arose in the communities of the Greek Diaspora) at least over matters of education and welfare. This may be attributed to the fact that the Armenian National Constitution had made a fairly clear distinction between the domains of the secular and religious representatives of the communities, essentially allocating to the former the responsibility for the running of schools, old people's homes, orphanages and general organizations for the public benefit. It was in this context that Armenian schools in Greece operated, first of all in Thessaloniki in 1887, and latel; after the massive influx of Armenian refugees in 1920-3, in the rest of the country. Most of them were lamentably underdeveloped and short-lived, chiefly owing to the first sudden falls in the size of the communities. In the 1920s, there were at least ten full schools, kindergartens, primary schools, secondary schools, and technical colleges functioning throughout Greece, attended by several

,:,~ary .first-~eneration Armenian refugees, particularly those who were still IIvlI1g 111 social and economic insecurity in proletarian and somewhat marginalized neighbourhoodsY The 'repatriation' of Greece's Armenians was handled by specially constituted committees which were branches of a broader pro-Soviet Armenian Aid Committee, the Hal Ognutiall Komite. So successive shipments from Piraeus and Thessaloniki took some 18000 Armenian emigres to Soviet Armenia, almost two-thirds of Greece's ;otal Armenian population. Eventually, by the time the 'repatriation' campaign was over, and also on account of concurrent, smaller-scale, waves of emigration to the West (chiefly to Canada and South America), the Armenian element in Greece had fallen to about 9,500 souls, if not less.21 This. figure has remained more or less stable, or at least unaffected by fur~hel: wdd. fluctuatIOns, to the present day. Only since the collapse of the SOViet Ul1Ion and the emergence of an independent Republic of Armenia has a wave of Transcauc~sian Greeks migrating to Greece been followed by some 2-3,000 Armel1lans, most of them from war-torn parts of Nagorno Karabagh .. Some of them have come with the intention of settling pennanently (mamly because they are related to residents of Greek extraction or with Greek citizenship). Others are looking for a chance to move on further West. Several thousand (possibly over 4,000) Armenians from the Lebanon Iran, and Iraq are also living in Greece today, either with temporary resi~ dence permits or illegally. '

~he communal organization of the Armenian community on a local and natIOnal level followed a relatively stable course. This was because, from as ~arly as the mid-nineteenth century (1853-63), the Western Armenians, both ~n t~1e ?ttoman state and in the Diaspora, had had their own established II1stltutlOnal framework within a non-Armenian environment. This was the Armenian National Constitution (Sahmanadrut'iun).24 The first documented org~l~ization of ~reek Armenians is recorded in the community in Thessalondo. It began 111 188.4 with the formation of a 'Local Assembly' (Taghagan Khorhurt), whICh II1 turn elected the first six-member executive council (AzI?hain Khorhurt).25 In subsequent years, the communities of Athens and Crete were organized along similar lines. From then onwards, until 1923, all the Armenian communities and Orthodox Apostolic churches in Greece came under the jurisdiction of the 'General Assembly' (Temagan Khorhurt) an~ the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate of Constantinople respectively, wlllch was also charged with selecting and appointing the communities' prel~tes. After the Asia Minor disaster, new circumstances arose, and the Patnarchate of Constantinople's religious jurisdiction over the Armenian communities in Greece was called into question. 26 Confusion followed in 1923, wh~n the Patriarchate of Constantinople sent Ebislwpos Karabet Mazloumwn to oversee the newly established Armenian Archdiocese of Athens, and the many supporters of the steadfastly anti-Soviet Armenian 98

99

I. K. HASSIOTIS

thousand students. 2Y Today there are only one kindergarten, three primary schools, and one secondary school, all in Attica, and one Saturday school in Thessaloniki, with a total attendance of scarcely more than 400 children.]O Apart from the demographic weakness of the communities, the basic reason for this decline is the financial problems which the Greek authorities cause the communities by refusing to regard the Armenian schools as 'minority' institutions. There have been occasions, indeed (in 1936, for instance), when the Armenian schools were in immediate danger of having to close down, precisely because their official legal status was that of 'private', rather than 'minority' educational establishments. l1 The economic and social development of Greece's Armenian communities has fluctuated considerably during various periods of their history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Armenian element in Thessaloniki, for instance, belonged mostly to the relatively prosperous social groups of Christians and Jews who played a leading part in the modernization and Westernization of the Ottoman Empire. They were architects and engineers, senior officials in the railway companies of the East, forest commissioners and agronomists, doctors and pharmacists. There were also merchants and craftsmen, devoted to the traditional Armenian occupation of goldsmithery. The Armenians of Western Thrace, Crete, and Attica were involved in similar occupations,]2 with the exception of the refugees on the islands and the seasonal workers whom I have already mentioned. In the eady twentieth century, the economic and social life of the Armenians of Athens and Piraeus was more or less on a par with that of the Greek members of commercial and business circles, and they controlled a significant part of the economic activity both on the domestic and, even more so, on the foreign markets. ' ] A few years later, after the union of Macedonia with Greece, some of the Thessalonian Armenians who had served in the Ottoman administration elected to move to other urban centres of the Empire. But the merchants and craftsmen, together with a few civil servants, stayed behind to form the original, enduring nucleus of Thessaloniki's Armenian colony;H These characteristics changed radically in the second phase of the history of Greece's Armenians. Whereas the older generations had continued their traditional professions and occupations, the vast majority of the newcomers in 1920-23 followed the same course, up until the 1950s, as the Greek refugees who had settled in the cities. The Greek authorities, for their part, continued for years to regard the Armenian refugees as temporary residents of the country, and so did not settle them in rural areas, but rather in the s~me urban refugee encampments as the Greek refugees.]5 There were exceptIOns, of course, but these sprang from spontaneous initiatives on the part of the Armenians themselves. Those who were able to house themselves (no more than a few hundred families up to the eve of the Second World War) settled in central and rather expensive districts where the members of the

100

ARMENIANS

pre-First WorIdWar Armenian community had also settled in the meantime. But the majority shared the same difficult living conditions as theIr Greek counterparts, in special communal barracks and newly built poor distri~ts on the outskirts of large towns, such as Larissa, Volos (the Nea loma diStrict), Kalamata (the Parapigmata [Barracksl district), and above all in Thessaloniki (in the districts of Kalamaria, Harilaou, Kato Toumba, Ayw Paraskevi, Harmankioi-Eleftheria, and Sykies) and Attica ( in the districts of Dourgouti, Kaisariani, Peristeri, Kokkinia, Ayios Dionyssios, and Lipasma). Some of these districts were given characteristic popular nicknames - Sykies in Thessaloniki was known as 'Armenokhori', for instance, and Dourgouti in Athens as 'Armeneika' - and certain areas of Attica, such as Kokkinia and, particularly, Dourgouti, became almost totally Armenian districts, wit~1 Armenian churches (Orthodox Apostolic, Roman Catholic, and EvangelIcal), schools, markets, coffee-shops, cinemas, sports clubs and political and cultural associations, all staffed and patronised almost exclusively by Armenians. It was from these decaying refugee districts, then, these 'dark and cold communities' (tis slwteines Iwi kJ·yes IJaroil~ies), 'the neighbourhoods of the poor angels' (tis synoi/~ies tOI1 phtol
I. K. HASSIOTIS

national movement, their relations with the 'national centre' (whether sovietized or not), and their efforts to preserve their Armenian identity (or Hayaba!Jbamll/l) in relation to both their Greek environment and the policies of the Greek state. The second embraces the ideological processes taking place withill the body of the communities themselves, generated by the economic and social development of their members. During the first period (until the 1920s, that is), Greece's Armenian communities indirectly participated in the initiatives of the two principal Annenian national political organizations, the radical Hincha/;?, to begin with, and steadfastly since the beginning of the twentieth century the (sometimes purely nominally) social-democratic Dashnalasutiun. In 1890-6, Athens for instance was briefly a centre for Hillchai< activists and a temporary refuge for a few intellectuals and important figures in the Armenian revolutionary movement. 1H In the early twentieth century, many members of the Armenian communities in Attica were accused, by both the Turkish and the Greek authorities, of assisting the traffic of arms and explosives (usually on Greek ships) from Western Europe to Ottoman territory.l" During the same period, the Armenian colony in Thessaloniki probably took no part in any political initiatives, though it was groundlessly accused by The Times of London of having started the great fire which burnt down much of the city in September 1890:10 Nor is there any evidence that it reacted in any way to the GreekBulgarian struggle for Macedonia, despite the indisputable (though extremely limited) co-operation of a few Armenian patriots in irredentist initiatives in Sofia and Athens,''' Again, there is no evidence of the Thessalonian Armenians' attitude to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, nor to the activities of the Socialist Workers' Federation (the Pederaci611), despite the presence of representatives of the Armenian revolutionary parties (albeit of Constantinople) at some of the PederaC16n's major demonstrations in Thessaloniki in 1909:12 It was only after the Adana massacre in ] 909 and the Balkan Wars that Thessaloniki's Armenian population sprang into action, and even then it was to help and succour the victims. After the outbreak of the First World War, all three of Greece's organized Armenian communities (in Thessaloniki, Athens, and Crete) began to take serious political initiatives, first in order to publicize the genocide of 1915 and then, after 1918, to welcome the refugees from Turkey, recruit volunteers, and send arms and ammunition to the TurcoArmenian fronts in the Caucasus and Cilicia:11 These activities were intensified, naturally enough, as the Greeks' and the Armenians' confrontation with their common foe, the Kemalist forces, culminated during the final acts of the concurrent tragedies in Transcaucasia and Asia Minor:'" The Asia Minor disaster brought about dramatic changes not only in the numerical size and social structure of Greece's Armenian colonies, but also, as a direct consequence, in the context of their ideological outlook. The prewar groups of merchants and craftsmen were essentially lost in the mass of 102

ARMENIANS

newly arrived, mostly unskilled workers and underemployed artisans. I,n the end, weighed down by economic and social problems, the vast mal0rIty of the Armenians in Greece found themselves seeking fresh ideological orientations beyond the irredentist, anti-Russian, well-beaten track of the traditional nationalist parties - represented fJar excellence by the pro-Western Dasl111ahtslltiul1. These changes, which were likewise mirrored in the milieu of the Greek refugees, were apparent not so much in the functioning of the communities (whose leadership, for that matter, despite some wavering, has remained to the present day in the hands of the Dasfmah partisans, the Dashl1ahtsagan), as in other spheres: the amalgamation, for instance, of the radical Hillchahists with the Armenian Communist Party, and the pro-Soviet tendencies of the once bourgeois liberal-democratic party Ramgavar Azatagan. This was the climate which typified the great majority of the Armenian ~lewspapers and other publications which were circulating in Greece in the 1920s and early 1930s,'11 The same disaffection led many Armenians to form strong links and collaborate with the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in the inter-war period and during the German occupation, the Resistance, and the events of December 1944, and also to join in the 'repatriation' of 1946-7:'" It is important to note that the Dashnahtsagan, both in Greece and in the rest of the Diaspora, strongly opposed the 'repatriation' (or neri
/. K. HASSIOTIS

ARMENIANS

broad revival in the Armenian element's ideological functions. This revealed itself in two apparently contradictory trends: an emergence on the one hand, from communal introversion, and a pursuit, on the other, of resurgent Hayabahbal1um - the Armenian character of the communities. These trends were not exclusive to the Armenians of Greece; by the mid-1960s they were clearly apparent in most of the colonies of the Diaspora, even the ideologically ossified Armenian communities of the Soviet Union. The reasons for this interesting phenomenon (which has not yet been adequately investigated) must be sought in a number of factors, both social and political: the dynamism, for instance, and the social self-confidence which the third and fourth generations of Diaspora Armenians had acquired in the meantime; the need to check their accelerating assimilation; and the easing, under Khrushchev, of Soviet autocracy, which led to a partial resumption of ideological ties between the Diaspora and Soviet Armenia and the emergence of the hitherto virtually banned history of both the Western and the Eastern Armenians from the time of the First World War (particularly the genocide of 1915 and, to a lesser extent, the Armenian Republic of 1918-20):'" All this helped to diffuse a strong sense of Armenianness from one centre of the Diaspora to another and from one community to another. This is attested by the concurrent, and virtually identical, ceremonies held to commemorate the genocide - a key event on a pat; in my opinion, with the Jewish Holocaust:'" As was to be expected, the active efforts of Greece's Armenians to promote the Armenian cause and the genocide stirred a particularly sympathetic response in the hearts of the Greek public. Of course, the response had been forthcoming on previous occasions and in other circumstances, but chiefly from the highly sensitized social groups made up of refugees from Asia Minor and elsewhere. But after the successive Greek-Turkish crises, and especially after Turkey's invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the Greek-Armenian ra/J/nochemellt became closer and more enduring. so Ultimately, the raplJrochement had no significant results on a practical political level." But the Armenian element's moral standing certainly shot up as far as Greek society was concerned, and the efforts of Armenian community leaders to further their long-standing demands over the running of the Armenian schools met with greater understanding from the Greek administration. The Armenian communities' relations with the Greek authorities during the hundred years or so of their existence in Greece have depended on political factors which were frequently more external than internal. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Greek governments were generally rather wary of the country's Armenians. At first they feared that the Anl1enians' politicai activities (which, as we have seen, were lively in thel890s) might be a source of dangerous friction with Turkey. Later, from the Greek-Turkish War of 1897 until the end of the Balkan Wars, Greek suspicions were aroused by the Armenian revolutionary movements' (particularly the Daslmak:tsutitm's) close ties with the Bulgarians and later with the Young

Turks. It was only lietween the eve of the Balkan Wars (1911) and the end of the First World War that Greek governments (with Venizelos in the lead) started to reconsider the Armenian factor as a possible ally III the rivalry between Turkey and Greece and to look upon the Armenian communities with greater favour. Their attitude was, of course, strengthened by the prevalent notion that the persecution suffered by the Greek element in the Ottoman Empire, in 1913-14, and in 1916-22, and that inflicted upon the Armenians in 1915 were, despite their quantitative differences, but two sides of the same coin. This pro-Armenian climate persisted even after the influx of Armenian refugees into Greece in the early 1920s, with regard to relief, shelter, and questions of isonomy.s2 In 1923 Venizelos offered Hellenic citizenship to all the Armenian refugees en bloc. They were reluctant to accept the gesture, however, being under the illusion that if they retained their Turkish citizenship, or simply stateless or refugee status (with laissez-passer), they might be able one day to recover the property they had left behind in Turkey.51 It was a fateful decision. Subsequent Greek governments almost into the 1960s always regarded the Armenians as temporary refugees rather than as a permanent national minority in Greece, and, entrenched behind this attitude (which the League of Nations itself, moreover, shared with regard to the Armenians), were exceedingly chary of granting citizenship, even to refugees of Greek descent, including Greek refugees from Istanbul, Imbros, and Tenedos in 1955 and 1964. Nonetheless, in 1927, Hellenic citizenship was legally granted, under certain conditions, to the Greek-born children of Armenian (and Circassian) refugees, but then restricted again in 1940 to those who had served in the Greek armed forces. 54 The idyllic relationship between the Armenian refugees and the Greek authorities was tainted long before the question of citizenship acquired any particular importance. The process began as early as 1923 (just before and just after the arduous Greek-Turkish negotiations at Lausanne), when Armenian refugees from Eastern Thrace instigated incidents against Moslem inhabitants of Western Thrace. Clearly fearing dangerous complications in that sensitive area (and it was especially sensitive just then), at the end of 1924 the Papanastassiou government whisked some 5,000 Armenians from Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia off to urban centres in the Peloponnese. The deportation stopped very soon, owing to the reaction of foreign philanthropic missions and Greek organizations. But the sense of insecurity which it aroused henceforth in the Armenians of Thrace and Eastern Macedonia led them to join in the first Armenian 'repatriations' to Soviet Armenia in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the 'repatriation' drive was also boosted by the relatively wiele spread of communism in the poor Armenian districts during the inter-war period; and this also affected the Greek authorities' relations with the Armenian refugee element, particularly under the Pangalos and Metaxas dictatorships.11

104

105

I. K. HASSIOTIS

Distrust of the Armenians was rekindled during the Second World War by the collaboration in 1941-44 of some Armenians with the German and, even worse, with the Bulgarian occupying forces. Contemporary British sources lay emphasis on the indisputable support a few Das/mah cadres gave the Germans through the institutes of the Miinchell A/wdemie in Macedonia and Thrace, though they clearly exaggerate. s" It was not a purely local phenomenon (despite the traditional bonds between Armenians and Bulgarians), but a widespread movement in the Armenian Diaspora in occupied Europe, which began with an approach and open military collaboration by the branch of the ever-powerful Dashl1atsagan with the Germans as thev adv~nced towards the Caucasus. 57 \X'hatever the case may be, after the lil;eratlOn of Macedonia and Thrace, the Greek authorities lost no time in sending any Armenians who had taken Bulgarian citizenship during the OccupatIOn back over the Greek-Bulgarian frontier. Subsequently, while Greece was caught up in the maelstrom of the Cold War and its own Civil War, they encouraged the new Armenian 'repatriation' to the Soviet Union in 1946-47 (urged on also by the Allied missions), in an effort to rid themselves of a heavy, chronic burden of non-Greek refugees and specific groups who had declared either pro-Bulgarian or pro-Communist leanings.'" The situation began to improve appreciably once the aftermath and the attitudes characteristic of the Civil War had gradually subsided, and the
ARMENIANS

eleven unmixed marriages).'')These data certainly cannot be indicative of the situation in Armenian communities all over Greece. Certainly many more of the new Armenian refugees head for Athens, for instance, than for Thessaloniki. But, as I pointed out earlier, these newcomers are, by and large, merely passing through, rather than permanent members of the communities. The falling numbers of Greece's Armenians, allied with the fact that they had become a permanent part of the population of the country as a whole, certainly conduced, from the mid-1960s onwards, to the resolution of some of the legal issues which had been left in abeyance. In 1968, for instance, Greek citizenship was accorded to all refugees who had lived in Greece for more than eight years; and the economic (though not the statutory) status of the Armenian schools was also regularized, so that now, although they are still not recognized as 'minority' schools, they are financed and staffed by the Greek Ministry of Education. The settling of these long-pending questions should not, I think, be linked with political criteria. Indeed, it must be clearly understood that any Greek and Armenian co-operation in some of the moves to have the Armenian genocide recognized has been limited to the academic sphere; and only in the Diaspora (mainly in the United States) has it culminated in a few significant political initiatives. So despite Turkey'S accusations of Greek political, or state, involvement in rallying support for Armenian views, ever since 1974 Greek governments have steadfastly maintained an extremely guarded stance on the Armenian question. Only the Cypriot Parliament has ventured to issue a special resolution on the Armenian genocide; while the Greek Parliament, in contrast, used its own standing orders as a plausible pretext for postponing (until April] 996) the Armenian coml11ul1lty's request that it follow suit. These tactics spring, I think, from the Greek Foreign Ministry'S chronic phobia of such complex issues as the Armenian, or the Kurdish, problem; and they did not change even in the summer of 1987, when the Greek MEPs voted for the famous resolution condemning the Armenian genocide. All the same, the Strasbourg resolution should not be regarded as one of the achievements of Greek diplomacy. It was rather the culmination of long efforts by, chiefly, West European organizations, which, being particularly sensitive to Turkey's human rights violations and the persistent distortion of the historical facts of the genocide, have been fighting for decades for the Armenians' historical and moral vindication, if nothing more. The declaration of Armenia's independence, on 23 September 1991, coupled with the tremendous problems that burdened that tiny republic after the collapse of the USSR, presented a new challenge to the patriotic feelings of the Armenians in Greece, and indeecl in the whole of the Diaspora. The Greek Armenians were significantly quick to offer help in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Leninakan (or Gumri) of December 1988, in the continuing war between Armenians and Azeris over the enclave of

t07

ARMENIANS

I. K. HASSIOTIS

Nagorno-Karabakh (or Artsakh), and the conditions of starvation, energy privation, and the stifling blockade imposed upon the new state by its Transcaucasian neighbours and Turkey. Greece's Armenians have also offered their services in temporarily housing and caring for the hundreds of Anl1enian and Greek-Armenian refugees who have fled to the country in recent years. Their leaders have also managed to speed up the process of forging diplomatic links between Athens and Erevan. This process culminated, on 20 January 1992 and 25 May 1993, in the signing of various Greek-Annenian agreements, covering diplomatic, economic, technical, cultural and educational co-operation. Again on the initiative of the Greek Armenians, this last agreement included a resolution of the chronic problem of their schools in Greece, the running of which is an extra burden still partially borne by the dwindling communities. Under the new circumstances it is obvious that not only the status of the Armenian schools is going to change in Greece: the role itself of the communities is already changing. Hitherto, the absence of an independent national centre has left Greek Armenians free - either through their National Committees or through their historical political parties (chiefly the Dashl1aktsutirm) - to frame their own ideological orientations and their relations with the Greek authorities. After independence, Armenia's first recourse was to the human and economic resources of the Armenian communities abroad to help cover both its financial and many of its current administrative and diplomatic needs. But this did not prevent it from claiming the role hitherto played by the traditional political organizations and committees of the Diaspora in manipulating the communities. Among the Greek Armenians at least, the change in the traditional balance of roles has triggered off disputes over jurisdiction and spheres of competence, which, though low key as yet, may well portend a similar degree of rivalry to that which raged between the a(tokhthol1es and the eterol::,hthones (the 'natives' and the 'outsiders') in the early days of the independent Greek state in the nineteenth century. This is clearly a transitional phase of developing conditions and circumstances, which will require that the Armenians' relations with their national centre and hence with their Greek environment be codified anew. It is thus a period whose state of flux places it outside the historian's field of research.

Notes '1 A. I-I. Magarian, Husl7ilhirk Tmgio yell Ma/wdol1io Hai /wghlltnem (Thessaloniki,I929), 26ff.; 372 ff. d. N. Vafeiadis, ']storia tis Armenilm koinotitos Didymoteikhou kai 0 Byzantinos naos tOll Agiou Georgiou tou Palaiokastritou', Thm/
108

d. K. H Karpat, Ottomml PO/JlIlatioll, 1830-1914: DemogralJ"iC

~lIf8~)ct~

Characteristics, (Madison, 1985) 124-44, 152, ISS, 158, 166, tab Ies.

"

(dOll), 1.10, 1.12, 1.16.A.

. ' 89(1896)' N 0_ 4 I. K. I-lassiotis, 'The Greeks and the Armel1lan Massacres (I c 1, e 1-ie/lellika, IV (1981) 87-88,92,96-109., " ,T 'To 5 HasslOtis and Kassapian, 'The ArmeI11an Colony, 215. Cf. M. Al IanOS, ergOlI tis ellinikis /Jenthalpseos (Athens, 1921,),62: 83. r,' A' ;_ 6 Delegatio11 de la Republiqlle Armerlremle, LArll1ellle e/ la QIILSt/Oi/ ell1le avallt pcndant e/ dcpllis la Guerre (Pans, 1922),49, 70., ('

'1I11CIlI

7 G. Kevorkian, 'Dasn'evyotu dari hunahai ~ag~1Utin het, 1922-1939 , Amelllm Darekirk,IV(1956) 222-9,VIl (1959)2S5-4)3. '_,'~ '., ' ,.' I d· t d A Beylerian Les Gralldes PIllssallccs, I Empllc 8 For some numellca a a . , " , '(1914 1918) Recel/il de

Ottoman et les Armeniens dalls les Archwes l~~'a/1l;atses - , , ' , )', . .'- 198~) 713-76) (Thessalol1ll
300 Crete' 100) , (N J. L: Barto;1, Sto;'Y of Near East Relic{ (191 S-1930): An lI~erfJretat/oll, cw 'Y _I 1930) 161-72' d. Kevorkian, Amemm Darektrk, IV _23-4. 10 p::~)~;C Record Of(ic~, Forcign Office IPRO/~Ol 371/9097/4, No. 534, 5 July 1923, FO 371/10213 No. 775, 8 Julyl924, FO ,?71112324 (1927). 11 I-lassiotis and Kassapian, 'The Armenian ~olony ,216. , 52. f F 12 Fridtiof Nansen, Armenia a11d the Near East (London, 1,928), 23~, . ,c. . C C rbyn 'The Present Position of the Armel1lan Nation, Royal Cenual Als{liln .:0 _T'ollma I, XIX (1932) 600·, ,. J H. Simpson, The Refugee Pro} em Society . 9

(London, 1939),38. " Y _I 198')) l40ff 13 A L Za l'1ntis Greek-SOViet Relatiolls, 1917-1941 (New 01(, --: ' ,:' 1'78ff., '/96-1'97, 269-275; d. I. K. I-Iassiotis, ee\., I E/lmes tiS Rosslas kat tiS Sovletihis Enosis (Thessaloniki, 199?), 317ff. . " . " L _ 14 A. Angclopoulos, 'Population Distnbu~lOn of Greece ~od}y .1~~~I;I~~~) 1~~ guagc, National ConSCiOusness and ReligIOn', Balkan Stu les, , - . 15 Kevorkian, Amenull Darel:trk, VII (1960), 2~1., 'CI " 16 J. Mcccrian, 'Un tableau de la diaspora armel1lenne, Proche Orient 7retlen, XI (1961) 163. "", ' 17 Angelopoulos, 'Population DlstnbutlOn, 127, n.15. , " IS', , D . k'·f. VII 284-7,. Cf K Mcyer LAmle11le et a IIlsse. 18 Kevorkian, Ame/1t/11 me '/1 <, ,.' , , f' I '~/Jle Histoire du secollrs suisse ell faveur des ArmeJliens. ServIce <1l1fJres ( Ull Jet

chretien (Bcrne, 1974), 190ff. , ' ' . . " I. RSS d'A _ 19 C. Mouradian, Timmigration des Armel1lens de la ~)IaSPOl a VCI s .l( 7 -11 ~ " '1946 '196')' ('ahters dll111ol1de r,lIsse et sovle,tlqlle, XX (1979) ,9 . mCl1le, -)-" , '1 T; f M dCf. the same author's 'L'Armcnie sovictique et la Dtaspora ,~es em/)s 0 ,. I'S XLIII (July-Sept 1988) 264-82. d 20 ~.I ~~isband: Tllrhish j;oreign Polic)" 1943-1945: S!/1~~1 State I;lfJh~~I~~YI ~~5 Great Power Polittcs (Princeton, 1973),315-18. Cf.::.. G. XYCIS, Crisis over the Turkish Straits', BallwlI Studies, ] (1960) 65-90. , I C 'I 21 C A'. Vertanes, Armenia Reborn (New York: Armel1lan NatlOn:l . o,un~l: 1947) 109ff., 114, 117-18,172-9 and H. ThorossIa,n, HISf(~~l'e de I AI~nell:e.,et du Je:nle arme,liell, depuis les temps les /Jlus recllies IlIsqu a nos lOUIS (Paus, 19l7), '159-60, 162-5. Cf. I-I. J. Touryantz, Search (or a 1-/ome,land (New Y~rk: 1987), 7ff. For the initially positivc attltudc of the Armel1lan co!on y ~re~c~i PRO/FO 37lf48795/R 16369, 10 Sept. 1945, where m,l appe~1 (~.'~ sp~Cla> 'Committee for the Vindication of the Armel1Ian Rights to the Blltish pIlme minister Clement Attlce is to be found. " ') 22 Cf. Mouradian, 'L'immigratlon des Armel1lcns , 81-8. , , T" 23 For various estimates as to their number consult Jacques Vcrnant, The Re(ugee

t

109

I. K, HASSIOTIS

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

45 46 47 48

49

in the Post-war World (London, 1953), 57-8, 215, Kevorkian, AlIlenuII Darekirh, VII 288ff., and Mouradian, 'L'immigration des ArmenIens', 87. V. Artinian, The Armenian Constitutiollal System ill the at/oman ElIlpire (1839-1863): A Study oOts Histoncal Deve!o!JIIlent (Istanbul, n.d.), 75ff. I--Iassiotis and Kassapian, 'The Armenian Colony', 263-4. Hassiotis and Kassapian, 'The Armenian Colony', 263. Kevorkian, Amel//l/1 Dare/uri::., VII 231ff., 293-6. Kevorkian, AlI1ell/lII Dare/drl::., VII 226-7,260. Cf. Hasslotis and Kassapian, 'The Armelllan Colony', 264, 265, 267. Cf. Kevor/oan, AlI1ellllll Dare/?irh, VII 309, 323ff., 393-4. On the Armenian schools and orphanages of l'vlacedonia and Thrace, see Magarian, Hllsha/::.ir/::., 100ff. For those established 111 Thessaloniki, Hassiotis and Kassa pian, 'The Armenian Colony', 264-6. According to information provided by the curate of the Armenian Archbishopric of Athens, the ReveL Varag Hovsepian, to whom I would like to express once again my gratitude. Kevorkian, Amenun Darehirh, IV, 261. Beylerian, Les Grandes /JUissallces, 714-15. Cf. Kevorkian, Amel11l11 Dare/::.ir/::., IV, 257. Hassiotls and Kassapian, 'The Armenian Colony', 262-3. Cf. Vernant, The Re/ilgee, 210-11. N. Vretakos, 'Oi grimatses tou anthropou' in A. Tzelalian, Armenihi Alltho/ogia (Athens, 1982), 235-6. Mercerian, 'Un tableau', 163. For a literary description of Armenian refugee society in Greece, particularly in Neos Kosmos, see Serko Pelteyan's romantic novel Kesai" SOllh: A Historical Narratille (Athens, 1979). Hassiotis, 'The Greeks and the Armenian Massacres', 92-3, 96-109. Kevorkian, Ament/n Dare/dr/::., VII 262-5. Cf. Hassiotis and Kassaplan, 'The Armenian Colony', 268-9, n. 42. Some slight and vague references to the co-operation of Armenians and Bulgarians in Macedonia are to be found 111 Duncan M. Perry, 'The Macedonian Revolutionary Organization's Armenian Connection', Armenian RellieUJ, XLII (1989) 64-7. For the Armenian connection to the activities of the Greek Ethnihi Etaireia in Macedonia and Crete, see Khan Azat, 'Hal hegapohagani houserits', J 26-32, and Hassiotis, 'The Greeks and the Armenian Massacres' 98-9, 106-7. G. K. Kordatos, /storia tOll Ellil1i/::.ou ergatik:.oll hillimatos (Athens, 1972),243, 245,249. Bcylerian, Les Gralldes PlIissallces, 716. Cf. Hassiotis and Kassapian, 'The Armenian Colony', 223-4. M. Housepian, Smyrna 1922: The Destmction of a City (Kent, Ohio, 1988), 189ff.; I. K. Hassiotis, 'Shared Illusions. Greek-Armenian co-operatIOn 111 Asia Minor and the Caucasus, 1917-1922', in Greece and Great Bntaill dltrlllg World War 1 (Thessaloniki, 1985), 142ff., 162ff., 174-6. Kevorkian, Amell1l11 Darel<.irh, IV 232-44; d. Hassiotis and Kassapian, 'The Armenian Colony', 226-8. Bedros Kokinos (= Hadjik G. Gogayan), HIII/ahai k:.ag/mti batrnutlullits, 1918-1927 (Erevan, 1965), 100ff., 171ff., 238ff. Mouradian, 'L'Armcnie sovictique', 264-5. C. Mouradian, 'Les relations sovicto-turques et la Question Armenienne depuis 1945', Esprit, LXXXVIII (1984), 118-27; R. Grigor Suny, LOO/Wlg To/Vard Ararat: Armenia ill Modern History (Bloomll1gton, 1993), 185-91. Cf. V. N. Dadrian, 'The Convergent Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases

110

ARMENIANS

of Genocide. A reinterpretation of the conccpt of holocaust', H%caust alld Gellocide Studies, III (1988)151-69. . . ' , ' 50 Cf. Armellia-CYPl"lls: Test Clses (or the C()1/sciCl1ce of /JIIIIlil!II/)': l\rnlelllCl 191 S, Cyprus 1974 (Nicosia, 1975). . ' . ., .51 Esat Uras's information on somc Greek-Armel1lan m<1l1lf/es,taO(\)!ls III (Trc(c~e in thel960s are groundless, The Armenialls ill History an( t J(' I ""1('111(/11 _.111'5lioll (Istanbul, 1988), S8ff. " 52 Cf. Barton's assertions in hiS Story of Near l:ast Relle(, 170: before the shifting of peoples (Greece) had settled more than 90,000 who had entered overcrowded Greece. ThiS was !lot from any accldetHal generosity on the part of the Hellenes or because they w~re too weak to close the borders against the flood tide of mixed refugees, for a year later, when the managing director of the Committee was ask?d to supervise the return of civil prisoners from Turkey, the Minister of hll"Clgn Affairs 111 Athens gave definitive mstructions to hring any Armenians W]1O Wished to come and to treat them with the same conSideration as the C.reeks. 53 Some references in Mccerian, 'Un tableau', 163, and Kevorkian, AlI1el1l1l1 Darel::.ir/::., VII 266. 54 Vernant, The Refllgee, 21 0-11. , " 55 Kevorkian, A11Ie11l1ll Darehir/" VII, 228; Kokll1os, HIII/ahar t.:ilp,'J/Itl {;a!lIll1l/ll-

111ts,49-63,171-237...

'

"

," . ' , ; ),,1,

I',

)6 PRO/FO 371/58735: The Brltlsh consul-generalml hessalol1lkl, L. I cC" to liS , 1 Embassy in Athens (R 11177),19 July 1946, with an attached report of the vlC~­ consul in Kavala, Edgar Vedova" dated 18 July. Cf a~:'io Dyran ~lexal~lal~ s apologetic pamphlet, 01 J\rml'1I101 para to pievr011 tOil Lllll1ol1 (Athens, 194,,). 57 Mounldian 'L'Armcnie sovictique', 279-80. , ' . 8 The Armenians fell also under the suspicion of the I-Iellenlc authOrities because 5 of their significant participation in the lI1surgency of December 1944:

Kevorkian,286-7. . fB 59 According to the DOli/til' 111grdlltian a11l/lS1l~ltlClI1 ycl' lIIahral1 (Re~lster () , aptisms, Marriages, Deaths), kept in the Archive of the Armentan (,Oll1ll1Ulllty of Thessaloniki. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Vardapet I~egham Khatcherian, the late superior of Thessaloniki's A,rmenlan Aposroitc Church, for his assistance in my research in the comlllulllty s archives.

111

VLACHS

7 VLACHS

T. J. WINNIFRITH

!n writing about the small but interesting groups of Vlachs or Aroumaniansl Greece It IS almost impossible to avoid discussing similar communities in oth~~' par,ts of the ~alkans. Their past history is almost identical, their present situat~on very chfferent. Under the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires there ,",,:ere obvIously large numbers of Vlachs living in what is now Greece, Albal1Ia, BulgarIa, RomaI1I~~ and what was once Yugoslavia, but there would hav~ beeI: no POll1t 1I1 dIstinguishing different groups, especially since many Vlachs eIther as merchants or transhumant shepherds moved from one country to an(~ther. The growth of nationalism and the establishment of 1~<1tIonal frontIers made such movement less free, although it must be I emembered that the Central Balkans, where most Vlachs lived and still live today, were under Ottoman rule until the First Balkan War of 1912. The B~llkan ars and the First World War were fought over Vlach territory and ~bd much damage to t!1eIr prosperIty, as did the strongly nationalistic poliCl~s. of Bali«~n states after these wars. The Second World War and the Greek CIvIl War dId more damage, and the erection of the Iron Curtain was even worse news for the Vlachs. It prevented communication between one country and anothe.r. COI11,munist regimes, while theoretically prol11oting the brotherl:oo? of man, Il1 fact, especially in Albania, encouraged a fiercely natlOnaltst also favoll"LeoJ a, movement from remote VIllages ' , Ideology . . They , ,' ~o houslI1g estates, 111 larg~ towns, where it was harder to preserve a minorIty culture. The dismantbng of this Iron Curtain has revealed the different ways ~n wh.Ich the Vlachs have survived in each country and the different ways 111 whICh they are now being treated. , It is clear that the nUI:1ber of Vlachs in all countries has decreased. Countll1g Vlachs IS an ~l.nprofitable exercise, as it is hard to know who counts as ~1 Vlach. ,Censu~ hg~lI'es~ue unreliable, and Greece has long since ceased to 1l1c1ude 11l1gUIStiC m1l10ntles 111 Its census. In contrast the Former Yugoslav III

:v

112

Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), both in its past and present state, has conducted such censuses with surprising regularity, and with equally surprising regularity the Vlachs have been numbered at some figure between 6,000 and I O,OOO." The last Greek figure for 1951 was 39,885; it was probably not very respectable to count oneself as a Vlach then, but assimilation has proceeded apace since that time. In the 1970s I visited many Vlach villages with my children, and found old people talking Vlach, people of my generation understanding it, and the children prattling Greek or practising their English. My children are now adults, and gently point that I and the middle aged understanders of Vlach are not getting any younger. In The Nomads of the BalhalZs1 written on the eve of the First World Wal; A . .J. B. Wace and M. S. Thompson calculated that there were half a million Vlachs in total. They based this number on a smaller figure, whIch they had actually miscalculated, given by the great German scholar; Gustav Weigand some thirty years before. They correctly increased Weigand's figure to make allowances for large Vlach families and an improvement in the mortality rates. Both Weigand and Wace and Thompson missed out some groups of Vlachs in Albania and Southern Yugoslavia, and after allowing for the miscalculation 500,000 seems a reasonable figure for 1914. In reducing this figure to 50,000 with 30,000 in Greece I undoubtedly erred on the side of cautIon. I had not visited the surviving communities in Albania where harsh conditions and isolation had oddly helped to preserve Vlach, or Romania, to which many Vlachs from other parts of the Balkans had emigrated, or Australia, America and Canada, where there has been similar emigration, although these perhaps hardly count as Balkan Vlachs. I would now at least double the number of Vlachs in the Balkans to 1OO,()OO although reducing those in Greece to 20,O()O. Numbers are at the moment made more complicated by the presence in Greece of large numbers of Vlachs from Albania on temporary work permits:' Almost any Vlach will pour scorn on the calculations above. This scorn springs partly from pride, partly from confusion as to what constitutes a Vlach. It seems fairest to accept the regular use of the language at home as the best criterIon. Many Greeks have one or two phrases of Vlach, others have one or more Vlach ancestors. The Vlachs are a philoprogenitive race, and Wace and Thompson's half a million Vlachs must have had more than a million descendants. Some of these million must have a vague feeling of Vlach identity in the same way as many Americans and even some English people feel vaguely and sentimentally attached to Ireland. But we cannot really use a feeling of identity or ancestry in a precise way. The Vlachs are a fairly endogamous people, but we all have many ancestors, and, if we carried to its logical conclusion the theory that an ancestor of a particular ethnic group qualified us for membership of that group, we would all be members of a great many groups. In the case of qualifications through a feeling of identity we are handicapped by the fact that most Greek Vlachs think of themselves as Greeks first and Vlachs second. 113

T. J. WINNIFRITH

There is a similar confusion with Vlachs in other countries, although to a lesser extent. Vlachs in Romania tend to be assimilated. The closeness in language helps blur any distinction. There has been a tendency in the past to regard Vlachs as Romanian country cousins, although the present government does allow Vlach newspapers and radio programmes. There are few Vlachs left in Bulgaria. I-Ioxha's regime in Albania, though fiercely nationalist, allowed some rights to the Greek minority, but none to Vlachs. On its collapse, many Vlachs saw the adoption of a Greek identity or a Romanian identity as a means of escaping the country, but there was and is little feeling of being specifically Vlach. In r:YROM, in spite of their small numbers, the Vlachs flourish, with their own television and educational programmes. They have been helped by the presence of other potentially more threatening minorities and by the fact that a so-called Macedonian identity is a recent and somewhat fragile growth. In Shattered Eagles, I recount the storv of a family I met originally in Australia and then in Nizepolje near Bitoh;. Three brothers had emigrated to Australia, all rather oddly bearing different names. One was called Babovic, since he had left before the Second World War when the official language was Serbian. The next was called Babov as he had escaped during the war when this part of Yugoslavia was briefly under Bulgarian control. The third was known as Babovski because by the time of his departure the official language of Nizepolje was Macedonian, although just to confuse the picture some of the villagers speak Albanian. I visited their old mother who had been born under the Ottoman Empire and spoke to me in Greek.' This last fact draws attention to the fact that the Vlach identity in Greece is rather different from that in other countries. Indeed it might seem to lend support to the view, commonly held in Greece, that all Vlachs are Greek, though all Greeks are not Vlach. T() answer this view we must look at Vlach history, although this is shrouded in mystery and clouded by modern politics. Greek scholars like to think of Vlachs as descendants of Roman legionnaires sent to guard mountain passes who married Greek girls and sired the ancestors of the present bilingual Vlachs. Romanian historians and philologists suggest that at some time between the sixth and tenth centuries the ancestors of the Vlachs left their homes north of the Danube and migrated southwards. There i~ no evidence for either theory and an inherent improbability about both o~ them. Children learn languages from their mother, not their father, and, though it would make sense for people north of the Danube to seek richer pastures further south, and indeed countless invaders did so, the rugged Pindus mountains hardly count as rich pasture. Both theories seem like many other theories over disputed lands in the Balkans, Kosovo and Transylvania being obvious examples, to be dictated by a wish to prove that one nation or other has a claim to a piece of land because it got there first. Thus, it is argued, ~here must always have been Greeks in Northern Greece, always Romanians Il1 Romania and Romanians for a fairly long time in the Central Balkans.

JJ4

VLACHS

What little evidence there is shows that the original home of the Vlachs was the Northern Balkans. Inscriptions in Latin as opposed to Greek predominate in this area, and, so long as the Danube frontier held, quite a few Latin speakers like the Emperor Justinian could have been found the~e. The so called Jirecek line demarcating the sphere of Latin from Greek influence lies to the north of most of the areas of Vlach speech today, but when the Danube frontier broke at the beginning of the seventh century Latin speakers would be pushed or push with the invading Slavs further to the South. In the year 586 AD the famous 'torna torna' episode seems to point to Latin speakers in the Byzantine army. The Vlachs then disappear from 11IStory for nearly 400 years. There is an obvious reason for this disappearance. Byzantium lost control of most of the Balkan peninsula, and Byzantine historians were not interested in events in that area, concentrating instead on the capItal and Asia Minor. With the loss of their Latin speaking possessions, knowledge of Latin in the Byzantine Empire vanished, and it is doubtful whether Latin or Vlach would have been recognised if it had been spoken. On the somewhat dubIous evidence of the sixth century writer Johannes Lydus, Greek historians like to think that there remained people in the Empire who were able to speak both Latin and Greek and thus administer the law as magistrat?s, but the first mention of Vlachs suggest that they tended to be outSIde the EmpIre and outside the law. In the year 976, David, the brother of the future Bulgarian Emperor Samuel, was killed by some Vlach oditai at a place between Kastoria and Prespa called Kalai Drues or Fair Oak Trees. The country between Kastor!a and Prespa on the borders of Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece IS today stIll inhabited by a mixture of Greeks, Albanians, Slavs and Vlachs, WIth none of the different ethnic groups being confined to their respective borders any more than the abundant fair oak trees are. The Vlachs are called hoditai suggesting that they had something to do WIth travelling or guarding the roads, as they have done through the centuries. 'Highwaymen' IS an alternative translation and on this occasion, as later with armato/es and klelJhts , the different roles may have been blurred. As Samuel was later to be a thorn in the Byzantine side, it might seem that in 976 the Vlachs were fighting for the Empire, but we must be careful about making too much of this, e~pe­ cially as there is some doubt about Samuel's origin. It would seem pOSSIble that though claimed by Bulgarians as a Bulgarian and Macedonians as a Macedonian, Samuel and his family began life in the Byzantine service, and, most paradoxically of all, might even have been a Vlach. Samuel after a titanic struggle was eventually defeated by the even more formidable Byzantine Emperor Basil II, known as Basil the Bulgarslayer, although again it is a mistake to see his victory as a victory of Greeks agail~st Bulgars. Almost certainly there were Vlachs among the slayers and the slam. With Basil's victory, once again Byzantium ruled the whole of the Balkans

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up to the Danube, and remained in control apart from a few rebellions for almost 200 years until just before the Fourth Crusade of 1204. In the next 250 years before the final fall of Constantinople the political map of the Balkans changed with bewildering variety. In both periods Vlachs are mentioned by Greek and Western historians. We cannot be absolutely sure that all references to Vlachs are to Latin speakers. This is especially true when we are dealing with the so-called Second Bulgarian Empire of the Asenids, regularly described as Vlachs in Byzantine sources. Almost certainly the Asenids ruled over a mixture of Slavs, Vlachs and even Greeks, while among the Vlachs some were more like Romanians and others more like our Vlachs. Our confidence in the ethnic purity of any particular race is not increased by the reference of a Byzantine historian to Bonkoes as a Servalbanitobttlgarovlachos. As a general rule, however, Vlachs get a bad press from con~emp?~'ary historians, and there seems no reason to support any IdentifIcatIOn of Vlachs with Greeks. The Ottoman conquest once again meant that the Balkans were under the rule of a single power: On the whole Ottoman sources are not very intereste? in dis~inguishing one kind of subject role from another, although there are lI1terestmg early records expressly distinguishing Vlachs from Greeks. It is to the seventeenth century that many mountain Vlach settlements date their origin. Although we tend to think of the Ottomans as suppressing liberty and creating cultural stagnation, they did initially bring order and sta?ility and ev~n some degree of prosperity, especially to those Vlachs engaged m trade. It IS, however, at this point that confusion between Vlachs and Greeks begins. In the eighteenth century quite a large number of citizens of the Ottoman Empire spoke Vlach at home, wrote, if they wrote at all, in Greek, and worshipped, as they certainly all did, in Greek as well. If asked th~ rather fa~uous questions 'Who are you?' or 'Where are you from?' they mIght have gIven the name of their village or area (such as Grammosteani if they came from Mount Grammos), and some Vlachs still do this. Thev might have called themselves Turkish subjects or Greeks or Orthodox Chri;tians, as again some Vlachs do to this day." They would have been unlikely to have called themselves Vlachs, and there are few records of them calling themselves Aroumanians. The nineteenth century saw the gradual dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of nationalism. Other races in the Balkan peninsula like the Bulgarians and the Serbs who had originally been in the same position as the Vlachs, with Greek as the language of the church and education were fairly quick to throw off this yoke. Separate church organisations' were established or re-established, schools were organized, and independent states were set up, although a number of Serbs and Bulgars remained under OttOl.nan rule, and the Greeks had a head start in schools set up in what remamed of Ottoman territory: Late starters in the independence stakes were the Albanians and the

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VLACHS

Vlachs. The former lived in a fairly compact area, but were slow to start schools and even to acquire an alphabet. They were also divided between two fairly distinct kinds of language and three religions. Most Albanians were Muslims, and quite keen to remain under Ottoman rule. A backward feudal structure did not encourage unity or independence. Some revolts against the Turks arose as a protest against being handed over to some oth~r state. Nevertheless Albania did gain independence, although many Albamans remained outside Albania, and a few Greeks, Vlachs and Slavs were included in the new state. The Vlachs faced some of these disadvantages and some others. They were almost all Orthodox Christians, but lived mostly in scattered pockets/ They were more progressive, but fewer in number. A joint Vlach-Albanian state was mooted, but not very seriously.R The Vlachs were clearly too far distant from Romania to aspire to unity with that state, although the Romanian state did start Romanian schools. These were never very well-attended and they taught Romanian, not Vlach. Apostol Margarit tried to establish a Vlach Church, but this was hardly a success, and its failure was a handicap in education. It was something of an achievement for the Vlachs to be recognised as a separate millet by the Porte in 1905, although this recognition was probably mainly intended as a divisive tactic to sow dissension between Vlach and Greek. For there can be little doubt that the principal reason why any move for Vlach independence never really got off the ground was that most Vlachs had already cast their lot in with the Greeks. Three years before the Vlachs gained this recognition there had been the Ilinden uprising. It is difficult to find an unbiased account of what happened in this revolt. Krusevo is the largest Vlach centre in FYROM. It is also a shrine to Macedonian nationalism, because it is where the revolt started. Two other places seized by the rebels were Neveska or Nymphaion and Pisoderi, both Vlach villages now in Greece, but occupied not for this reason, but because as mountain villages they commanded strategic points. One of the leaders of the revolt was Pitu Guli, a pure-bred Vlach. Another was Goce Delcev, after whom streets in Skopje and a town in Bulgaria are named. He had a Turkish mother and appears to have been a genuine Robin Hood figure, keen to aid the oppressed of any race against the oppressor. Slav sources suggest that the Greeks played an insignificant if not treacherous part in this revolt. It seems clear that the Vlachs were the chief losers, as it was their houses which were destroyed both by the rebels and the vengeful Turks. Some Vlachs like Pitu Guli were clearly on the side of the rebels, some were on the side of the Turks, and some were neutral. Before and after Ilinden there were a number of different Balkan struggles going on. There were revolts like Ilinden against Ottoman authority in which Vlachs sometimes joined their co-religionists, usually aiding Greeks. On the other hand Vlachs as merchants and herdsmen profited from law and order, and found the boundaries of the newly created independent states

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irksome for their travel and trade; we therefore find them sometimes on the Turkish side. Then there was the struggle between the Bulgarians and the Greeks, usually seen in ecclesiastical terms as a contest between Exarchists and Patriarchists, supporters of the Bulgarian Exarchate or the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Here again the Vlachs generally supported the Greeks, although there are instances of Vlachs joining Exarchist bands. Then around Skopje there was rivalry between Serbs and Bulgars, but there were few Vlachs involved in this struggle. There was also Albania's struggle for independence. Vlachs and Albanians were generally in agreement, sharing the same ambiguous attitude to Turkish civil authority but differently disposed to Greek ecclesiastical control. Orthodox Albanian speakers were in much :he same position as Vlachs with many in the early nineteenth century playIl1g a prominent part in the struggle for Greek independence, but Albania's Muslim majority made a difference. Finally, and least importantly there was a struggle in most Vlach villages between a pro-Romanian and pro-Greek party, with the latter being almost universally and inevitably the larger and more powerful. The Balkan Wars, the First World War and the Greco-Turkish War that followed solved some problems, but created others. There were minor rectifications of frontiers and major exchanges of populations. The disaster in Asia Minor meant that Greece lost its long established enclaves of Greek speakers in Turkey, but gained a much higher proportion of Greeks in Macedonia and Thrace. Greek settlements in Bulgaria near Burgas on the coast and in long standing centres of Hellenism like Nevrokop, now Goce DelC~v, :vere exchanged for some of the Slav speakers with Bulgarian sympathies Il1 Northern Greece, thus ensuring that the proportion of Greeks in Macedonia and Thrace rose from under 50 per cent to over 90 per cent. Some Slavs remained in Macedonia and Thrace, some Turks and Pomaks, Slav-speaking Muslims, in Western Thrace, some Albanians in Epirus. The Greeks and Vlachs remained in Albania, and the largely pro-Gr~ek Vlachs near Bitola remained in Yugoslavia. When they did move or were moved, Vlachs moved in a less regulated way than other ethnic groups. There was some migration in the inter-war period of Vlachs to Romania from Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia and even Bulgaria. Romania also extracted from the governments of Greece and Yugoslavia a promise to keep Romanian-financed scho~ls in their countries. Yugoslavia did not honour this promise, but amazll1gly such schools survived, albeit with iimited success, in some Greek Vlach villages up to the beginning of the Second World War and even beyond the German invasion of Greece. It is still possible to find in the village of Ano Grammatikon a few elderly people speaking pure Romanian." The Second World War was not, howevel; a boon to the Vlachs. Harsh conditions in it and the Greek Civil War which followed it played havoc with the vast herds which had once been the staple source of Vlach wealth. Romania joined the Axis, and there were Italian attempts to court the Vlachs

118

VLACHS

as their Latin cousins. Few Vlachs in Greece actually collaborated with the invaders, but to speak a form of Latin did not seem very patriotic. ProRomanian Vlachs continued to emigrate. In Romania, it was unfortunate that many Vlachs were settled 111 the Dobrudja, and in particular along its southern frontier. This area returned to Bulgaria in the Second World War and remained in Bulgarian hands after it with the result that many Vlachs were forced to move either to Romania or to other parts of Europe or the United States, the destination of previous generations of Vlachs from Romania and also pro-Romanian Vlachs in Greece. Albania settled a l1um,ber of wandering Vlachs in settled homes along its southern b~)l·.cler at a tIme of some confusion, with the Vlachs being caught up in the Civil War and m the expulsion of Muslim Albanians, the so-called Tsams, fr~)[11 Greece. . After the Second World War, Greece faced many polltlcal and economIC problems, but it might have thought that it had solved the Vlach proble~n. Disaffected Vlachs had left the country, the Iron Curta III had cut off Vlachs in other Balkan countries, and with little encouragement for the language it could fairly be left to die of its own accord. lIl There were, of course, villages where Vlachs conspicuously loyal to the Greek state still spoke the language among themselves and allowed their children to speak it, but economIC forces either rendered these villages virtually uninhabitable or brought roads and Greek speakers to them. It did not seem unreasonable to stop recording minority language speakers after the census of 1951 if these languages were so obviously declining. Working in Vlach villages in the 1970s and 1980s, I recorded this decline. But in the late 1980s two things started happening. A number of Vlachs of the pro-Romanian faction had worked their way either directly 01: indirectly via Romania to Western Europe or to the United States, a country famous for its interest in roots and rights. A number of Vlach societies sprang up, Vlach congresses were held, and Vlach periodicals were printed. What was said and written by these societies was sometimes silly and sometimes fairly Sllllster, although of course they were in their way doing their bit to preserve Vlach culture and did provide interesting information about Vlach folklore ~l.nd recent history. Some speculations about the remote past were mor~ fanCIful, and claims that the Vlachs of Greece were an oppressed nation With few nghts suffering as badly as the coloured population of South Africa we!'e clearly absurd. The authors of such claims had little recent knowledge of C,reece. Simultaneously with this renewed interest the Iron Curtall1 collapsed. This was not an unmixed blessing. Inter-ethnic tension suppressed by strong state control and even perha'ps by communist Ideology reared its head all over the Balkans. Yugoslavs tended quickly to divide themselves mto Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Muslims, Albanians and others, while the Hungarian minority in Romania and the Turkish minority in Bulgaria grew restive. Greeks could and probably did congratulate themselves on having solved their minority problems, but such congratulations were 119

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T. J. WINNIFRITH

premature. Minorities became popular, and scholars and journalists began probing Vlach issues, not always very tactfully. The theory that all Vlachs were Greeks took a knock with the arrival of large numbers of Vlachs from Albania speaking little or no Greek. The privileges awarded to Vlachs in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia struck a sensitive nerve, made more sensitive by Greek hostility to the use of the term Macedonian. The Greek response to this issue was a defiant one. Greek Vlach associations were formed. They too held congresses. I have attended such a congress, and, although treated with great courtesy, could not help noticing the phalanx of bishops and generals sitting in the front row and the way in which speaker after speaker used dubious arguments from history, folklore and philology to forge links between Greeks and Vlachs. Historical and linguistic scholarship in Greek universities follows the same lines. All Greek Vlachs and some nonGreek Vlachs use a great many Greek words, the former because they are llsing Greek and Vlach interchangeably, the latter because Greek has been the language of education for 300 years or more. Thus there are no philological grounds for linking Greeks with Vlachs from the earliest times any more than in parallel cases with Greek in Southern Italy and Cypriot in London, where a mixed language merely reflects a long period of contact.11 Towards their Greekless brethren in other Balkan countries Greek Vlachs have adopted a missionary attitude of trying to convert them to the idea that Vlachs are Greeks. In the case of some Albanians they seem to have succeeded, but this is hardly surprising as it is not only Albanian Vlachs who want to find work in Greece. At a meeting of Vlach associations from all over the world in Freiburg during September 1996 the Vlach Greeks were listened to with respect, although their arguments were not greeted with such applause as those from Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). There had been less respect at former congresses. It is possible that with time and more contacts Vlachs in Greece and Vlachs in other countries might come to terms with each other, the former accepting that all Vlachs are not Greeks, the latter that Greek Vlachs are not an oppressed minority yearning for some independent Ruritanian Vlachistan. Such cooperation might lead to more impartial historical and linguistic scholarship, and help the preservation of the Vlach culture and language. In the United Kingdom after centuries of oppression we are now at great pains to foster minority languages like Welsh and Gaelic. An independent Wales and an independent Scotland are of course a possibility, but the Hebrides are unlikely to emerge as a sovereign Gaelic state any more that the inhabitants of the Pindus are likely to create a Vlach nation. And yet throughout the Hebrides and a considerable part of Western Scotland there are Gaelic road signs and an impressive educational and cultural programme in Gaelic. There is also a well established tradition of Gaelic scholarship in Scotland, not designed to prove that the Gaels are really Anglo-Saxons. The satirical analogy is not of course an exact one. Greece has a long tra-

120

, "f I 'N .t1 whether the enemy be " ,d IC" T_ clition of fearing an enemy JI1vaSlon rom t 1e 01 1, Turk, Slav, German or Communist. There IS no threat .to th~ Ul1lte ll1g c\om from St Kilda or Rockall. Encouraging Vlach cultul alldentIty by n~ea.ns 1 of road signs and education in Vlach might seem to be encouragll1g a oJ~n horse in a~ sensitive area, although would it. I:ot be more truthfu: ~1I1C 1I1. t le long run more expedient to act in this conCIlIatory way than oHlel~l~ ~'fe~~ Tifts in the shape of a false view of Vlach history as Identical Wit 1 ,I ee ~ liS ~or~? In appealing for a via media between those who hOI~~ ,fo~' Vlachls~'~I~ 'md those who think Vlachs are somehow Greeker than GI eeks If~m awa ~hat I am likely to offend both parties, but I am not being 0 enslve to

0

common sense or the truth.

Notes , f' II ' tile B'llbns On the whole the Vlachs call themMost n'lmes are mille Ie e S i l l , , . I I · K tselv~s Aroumanians, while others call them Vlachs. I ,11;1 SUC 1 an ot 1e,· O.~lre , I. 'I (Greek) M'lcec!o-Romanian (Romanian) and fSlI1tsar (Yugos lw ~ ),' I ZOV dC l I' "V' lac'11 Ins slightly I)e,'iorative connotatIOnS, and I use It Wit 1more loca names. , " , I , out these connotations, but out ofha~1It. )M' J P.,ttifer cd The New Mace? I have written an arttcle on Vlachs 111 I~YR(. 111. ~ , .,' '" I >f' I' - dO/llan , QllestuJ/1 ,'(LomIon,,'1999) ." C'ensus' figures for Ivlacedonla ,-,111 1e ounc' III I ',1' v'lrious r~ference,books, although all such figuffe l1111st be tt"Cate~ WIVt1I'lccaI1l~t~~~:~i " f'uslOn ' 'Y There was OCC"lSlonaI con 111 ug(,)slw , Igu , res' l1ctween tt ue , ," tl ,." .' ~i1e Timok Valley. In Macedonia there was pressure even 111 1e ) 1\.0I11a11l<1ns 111 , f. f lolincal correctness. 1995 census to declare oneself as Maced011lan 01 reasons o/. J '. J\ \., t f A B W'lce and M S Thompson, The Nomads of Bal 1 " Italy by M. Katsoyiannou and P. Gardller-C~loros 111 M. l,arsoYlanllou, e(., Plurilillguisll1es (PariS, 1992), 84-11 I, 112-3).

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121

F:1rs:~ec~?~'I.;~;~:I~~~:1c:,sl~~':':~~ -i ' ";)l1(

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

Silence fell as the villagers each raised their right hand and repeated after their president:

8 CULTURAL ILLEGITIMACY IN GREECE: THE SLAVOMACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

I promise in front of God, men, and the official authorities of our State, that I will stop speaking the Slavic idiom which gives reason for misunderstanding (/)arexigisi) to the enemies of our country, the Bulgarians, and that I will speak, everywhere and always, the official (episimi) language of our country, Greek, in which the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ is written.

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU After the oath, the village teacher addressed the congregation. He was described by another observer' as a local villager, a 'national worker', a descendant of a Macedonian fighter priest, and a spiritual guide who had inspired his co-villagers to take the Greek language oath. Now he told them:

A case study narrative ,,"he ]

Septemberl9~9

issue of the conservative Athenian newspaper

Sphazra carned an article describing what it called a 'very peculiar' cere1:1Ony tha.t was held in the village of Atrapos (formerly Krapeshtina ) in the ' F,lonna dlstnct on to August of that year. In the words of the aCCOunt 'the sImple populatIOn of the village, in front of God and people, Swore that from n~w on they will stop using the Slavic idiom in their speech and that they wdl speak only the Greek Ianguage'.2 , .A~col~ding to this article, the v~lIagers had become so encumbered by the lI1f1uence of repeated SlaVIC II1vaSlOns that they had borrowed from the language of the ou:siders and had made their own language, albeit one with a strong SlavIC IdIOm.' The 'descent' of the Atrapiotes is described as clearly
122

We have decided, with pride, all together, to stop speaking the foreign idiom which has no relation to our very Greek descent. In this way, we offer honour and gratitude to those Greek co-patriots who gave us our freedom with their blood. Long Live the King! Long Live the Greek State! Long Live our Undefeated Army! Following this, another villager spoke in his own 'simple' words about the importance of the oath. A child then recited a poem, and the Prefect (Nomarch) of Florina closed the ceremony with a patriotic speech and congratulated the people of Atrapos on their decision. After the ceremony, the heroes' monument of the village was crowned with wreaths, and popular songs and dances were performed by the Cultural Association 'Aristotle'.r. Reading this account some thirty years later, the question that has haunted me the most has been, 'Why?' For what reason did the people of Atrapos take this oath? What exactly was this 'otherness', the source of all their 'misunderstandings' with their neighbours? The question of whether the people of Atrapos were obliged to take this oath or did so voluntarily is one that I leave to the polemicists.

Transforming identity, constructing consciousness: nation-building on the Florina frontier The Greel<s a/J{Joillted me president. I (ooled t/Jell/, I am a Bulgarian, and I will die a Bulgariall. (A village /Jresidel1t (rom J(orestia),

At the turn of the century, the Florina area was located in what Evangelos Kofos has called the central zone of Macedonia. H Your! has argued that this so-called 'problematic' central zone of Macedonia was inhabited by three

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ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

THE SLAVO·MACEDONIAN 'NON·MINORITY'

categories of people, classifiable on the basis of their national religious allegiance (or a propensity to show such allegiance).9 There were Ellinizondes, or Orthodox people clearly possessed with Greek leanings; Vou/ganzondes, or .O,rthodox people who were ostensibly indifferent to Bulgarian Exarchist religIOus propaganda but who secretly possessed Bulgarian leanings; and Skhismatikoi, or those with overt Bulgarian leanings who followed the Bulgarian Exarchate that had been established by the Ottoman authorities in 1872 and openly opposed Hellenism. 11l The Greek-speaking element in this zone, was co.ncentrated in urban centres where it participated in the religious, adm~l1Istratlve, social, and education sectors of life, thus presenting to the outsIde world a 'Greek-like' (Ellinophanis) picture of the area." In 1886, the vast majority (78.4 per cent) of the population of the Florina (~istrict (kaza) was aligned with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. By 1900 this fIgure had dropped to barely half (50.9 per cent; see Table 1), suggesting perhaps that Bulgarian propaganda had achieved great success in attracting 27.5 per cent of the Florina population. While Bulgarians considered vernacular language or notions of 'racial descent' to be the indices of national consciousness among the population of this central zone, the Greeks to the south took religious affiliation, participation in the Greek educational system, and kn~wledge and use of Greek as a second language to be the defining charactenstICS. Greek letters, transmitted through religion, education, and language, were considered the 'true civilization of the Orient'. 12 Yet such arguments warrant a more in-depth analysis. Existing documentation, as I will show, makes it apparent that one cannot accept a priori assumptions about the existence of a Greek national heritage and a Greek national consciousness in this region prior to its incorporation into the Greek state. 13 All the more doubtful is the assumption that follows from such premises, namely that the area's inhabitants accepted such concerns as a primordial given and simply followed them as a natural course of action. For example, in his 1925 report on the 'shades' (apokhroseis) of the district's po~ulation, the Prefect of Fiorina observed a continuing 'Bulgarian' presence 111 the area. He concluded that 'the Schismatics have acquired and retained a Bulgarian consciousness. The Patriarchists [on the other hand]

Table I:. Demographic evolution of the Christian population of the Florina kaza. Monastrr sancak, 1883-1900 . Orthodox

Schismatics

Year

Number

%

Number

%

Total

1886 1900

23,730 17.455

78.4 50.9

6,538 16,855

21.6 49.1

30,268 34,310

Source: Vouri (1992) 25

124

live in a psychic world of timidity, but with the hidden longing and everyday wish to shal:w off the Greek yolw' (emphasis in original).14 His words echoed those of his predecessor, written in 1922: The situation with regard to national sentiments cannot be said to be pleasant. The population of the Prefecture which is, in its majority, foreign speaking and from another nation (alloetlmeis; emphasis added), does not look with delight on any kind of improvement in our national matters. IS It is clear that Greek national identity did have a continual presence in Macedonia since the turn of the century, due in no small part to the efforts of Greek educators and priests. But it is equally apparent that Greek national consciousness (or the hegemony of the nation and its implied legitimization) took much longer to develop and achieve deep roots. The mere fact that a portion of the population spoke Greek as a second language at ;he t~rn o~ the century did not not mean that they possessed Greek natIOnal sentIment (phronima) or consciousness either. Rather, identity and consciousness changed over time in response to the material circumstances 111 people's social, economic, and political milieux.

Identity, consciousness, and social collectivities Human beings engage in social life guided by a particular set of assumptions concerning the social collectivities of which they are a part. We hold in our minds certain notions about what those collectivities are, and what our roles are or should be in such a context. In addressing such issues, a distinction must be drawn between identity, on the one hand, and consciousness on the other. Notions of identity (ta{totita) are oriented around normative categories held in the minds of actors in regard to both themselves and to others. These are ideal-type constructions, in Weber's sense of the term, as they d~fine certain types of people and the pattern of behaviour one expects such 111dlVlduals to exhibit. Identity is therefore subjective and autonomous; It changes over time, conditioned by the changing perceptions of actors operating in fluid social fields. More specifically, when considering issues of ethnic identity, one must distinguish between its internal and external characteristics. ,The former include notions of shared descent and a common culture, whIle the latter entail relationships both with other ethnic groups as well as with the state.'" Ethnic groups possess a distinct group identification, but this de~e1ops Ol?ly in conjunction with, and in reaction to, their affiliation with a WIder polItical field, namely that of the state. 17 , Consciousness (syneidisi), on the other hand, is a phenomenon of qUIte a different order. It entails a realization of the dominant structures that govern

125

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

or frame action in the particular social milieu in which individuals live and interact. It develops in response to externally imposed material and ideological conditions. Consciousness does not necessarily mean an understanding of the hegemonic dominance of those structures over one's life, but rather a general awareness of and subscription to imposed definitions of the world in which one lives. Consciousness, therefore, includes a set of values and meanings that help one make sense of and articulate world-views. National consciousness, by extension, provides a set of signs common to the community of the nation, according to which the members of that community conceive of themselves and perceive 'others'. The construction of nations necessarily entails the construction of national consciousness. Both identity and consciousness are constructs created through processes of inclusion and exclusion. IH Since it had been the agents and representatives - both formal and informal - of the Greek state that had encouraged, organized, and promoted the ritual ceremony described at the outset of this chaptel; it is important to understand how such agents perceived the relative degree of 'otherness' manifested by the area's local inhabitants. Let us therefore pause to examine the diverse composition of the area's population in the first half of the twentieth century - as evidenced in the official archives of the Greek state administrators. I'!

The 'national' tapestry of post-i9i3 Florina: a view from the state The statistics provided in the Historical Archive of Macedonia/General Directorate of Macedonia (HAM/GDM) on the national and linguistic composition of forty-nine villages in the Florina region 2°were probably collected by Greek administrative authorities stationed in Florina immediately after the area's incorporation into Greece in 1913. In these statistics, villages and towns were grouped into one of seven categories depending on their perceived national leanings (see Table lI).21 It is significant to note that only three villages were described as solely Greek, but in two of these three the local vernacular was listed as Bulgarian, while in the third it was a Koutsovlach. Only two towns, Florina and Amindeo, the two largest commercial centres in the area, appear to have had a Greek-speaking population, but even here, these were mixed communities of both Greeks and Bulgarians whose inhabitants spoke both languages. 2] Factoring out Turks and focusing only on the Christian population, while 38.6 per cent of Christians were described as 'Greek', none were monolingual in Greek (see Table V). Put another way, there were no monolingual Greek speakers among the Florina population during the period 1911-15. Of those multilinguals who were described as 'Greek' and could speak Greek, 52.8 per cent also spoke Bulgarian, 32.5 per cent also spoke Koutsovlach, and 14.7 per cent also spoke Albanian. On the other hand,

126

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

Table II: National groups inhabiting 49 Florina villages, 1914 (by village)

No. of vii/ages

National groups Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians Greeks, Bulgarians Greeks Greeks, Roumanizondes' Bulgarians, Turks Turks Bulgarians Total

4 11 3 3 3 13 12 49

% 8.2 22.5 6.1 6.1 6.1 26.5 24.5 100.0

Source: HAM/OGM, File no. 53

~ote~omanian propaganda agents had been active among the Vlach populations of the Balkans. The term Roumanizondes was used in these archives In reference to those Vlachs who did not declare themselves 'Greek' (as many tended to do), but were Instead inclined to Romanian national identity.

the overwhelming majority of Christian population (59.4 per cent) w:re described as 'Bulgarians', as many as 70 per cent of whom were monolll1gual in Bulgarian only. These,. acc?rding t? official Gre~k goverI1l~1ent archives, were the political andlmgmstlc re~llt1es that the GI eek ~tate faced when it assumed national control over the Honna regIon 111 191.): " . Ten years later, on 13 January 1925, the o~fice of the Prefect 111 Flonna sent to the General Directorate of Thessalol1li
Table III: National groups inhabiting 49 Florina villages, 1914 (by population)

National group Bulgarian Turk Greeks Roumanizondes Total

No. of people

% of total population

42.1 29.0 27.4 1.5 100.0

20,189 13,860 13,111 695 47,855

Source: HAM/GOM, File no. 53

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ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

Table IV: Language spoken in 49 Florina villages, 1914 Language category spoken Bulgarian Turkish Bulgarian-Greek Koutsovlach-G reek Koutsovlach Albanian-Koutsovlach Greek-Albanian Total

No. of people

Table VI: 'Shades' of the Florina population, 1925

% of total population

23,800 13,860 4,750 2,275 1,370 900 900 47,855

49.7 29.0 9.9 4.8 2.8 1.9 1.9 100.0

Category Schismatics Patriarchists Refugees Vlachophone Greek-leaning Indigenous Greeks Vlachophone Roumanizondes Total

No. of people 28,673 12,628 8,230 3,176 1,862 416 54,985

% of total population 52.1 23.0 15.0 5.8 3.4 0.7 100.0

Source: HAM/GMD, File no. 90, Confidential Letter, Protocol no. 6 Source> HAM/GDM, File no. 53

residual categories of indigenous Greeks (3.4 per cent) and refugees (15 per cent; see Table VI). Perhaps more interesting than the numbers provided in this document is the discussion of the categories of 'Schismatics' (Shhismatilwi) and 'PatI'iarchists' (Patriarhhilwi). The report's author maintained that the vast majority of the prefecture's population were indeed Slavic speakers. Moreover, he went on to assert that even 'the Patriarchists' were not a solid group of reliable Greek supporters. He claimed that while they had been supporters of the 'Greek idea' prior to 1912, these Patriarchists did not have a consolidated and unshakeable national consciousness, and that there was a very real danger that they would move back to the Schismatics and again change their sentiments.

Table V: Languages spoken by declared Greeks, 1914 Language category spoken Bulgarian Bulgarian-Greek' Koutsovlach-Greek Koutsovlach Albanian-Koutsovlach Greek-Albanian Total

No. of people

% of total population

5,111 3,250 2,000 950 900 900 13,111

Source: HAM/GDM, File no. 53 Note: 1

Concentrated in the mercantile centres of Florina and Amindeo

128

39.0 24.8 15.2 7.2 6.9 6.9 100.0

The same year (1925), Salvanos, Chief of Staff of the Tenth Army Division of Western Macedonia, wrote a study on the 'ethnological composition' of the Florina area and the possibilities for resettling refugees there." In it, he recognized that only a minority of the region's population had a pure Greek consciousness which had been strengthened through Greek propaganda during the Macedonian Struggle. Salvanos noted that the Slavophone population was divided among those with fanatical Greek sentiments (Ellinophrones), fanatic Bulgarian sentiments (VolIlgaro/)/;rcmes),'" and those who were indifferent to nationality, being concerned only WIth maintaining their lives and livelihoodsY The latter, he maintained, call themselves 'Macedonians' (Ma/wdones), and constituted the bulk of the region's population (making up between one-half and three-quarters of any given village's population). The Bulgarian fanatics usually constituted one-quarter to one-half of a village's population, but sometimes made up entire villages. The Greek fanatics, on the other hand, were widely but thinly dispersed throughout the region, being represented in each village by only one to five families. Only four of the thirty communities surveyed were composed entirely of FJlino/J/Jrolles. Ten years later still, in 1935, on the eve of the Metaxas dictatorship, Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaidis, then Prefect of Florina, sent a letter to a government minister which included a table listing the number of families in each of ninety-three villages in the F10rina Prefecture, and ascribed to each of these families certain national sentiments or leanings,"x There were two major categories in the table: one referring to families with 'foreign morale' (WIth specific sub-categories of Slav, .Romanian, and Albanian), the other referring to those families that were 'foreign speakers' (that is, Greeks in national consciousness but speakers of Slavic, Vlach or Albanian).2" Of the 11,683 families listed, 56.3 per cent were accredited by the Prefect with a Slavic national consciousness, while 41.3 per cent were 'foreign speakers' with Greek national consciousness (Table VII). Of the prefecture's ninety-three

129

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

villages, sixty-five had mixed Greek-Slav populations, ten were inhabited entirely by Slavs, eight entirely by Greeks, and four entirely by Vlachs (Table VIII). Thirty-two per cent of these mixed villages were comprised of 80 per cent or more Slavs, while only 3 per cent were made up of 80 per cent or more Greeks. Several things are clear from these official Greek sources. First, while there was a Greek presence in the Florina area prior to 1913, it was not as strong as that of the Slavs. Moreover, to the extent that a Greek national consciousness existed among Slavic-speakers of the region prior to 1913, these documents indicate that it was not a solid, unchangeable, immutable phenomenon. I would like to suggest that the controversies and debates currently raging along such lines inadvertently misdirect attention from a n:uch more important historical and political phenomenon: that is, the inordll1ate success of Greek nation-building processes in Macedonia as compared to similar processes in other nation-states of the Balkans. In Greek Ma.cedonia, the vast majority of people of Slavic descent eventually came to defll1e themselves as 'Greek'. How did this great achievement of nation-building come about? How were Greek national identity and consciousness constructed and projected amo~lg this diverse local population? Through what media did the hege111011lC forces of Greek nationalism conquer the hearts and minds of this diverse local tapestry? It is to these issues that we now turn.

Emigration, deportation, and refugee resettlement

1913-35

'

In the light of the above evidence, the motivations behind the poiicies and practices of Greek government administrators in the Florina region during

Table VII: National consciousness of the population in 93 villages of the Florina Prefecture, 1935 Category

No. of famHies

'Foreign sentiment' Slav Romanian Albanian 'Foreign speakers' with Greek sentiment Total

6,863 6,578 216

69 4,280 11,683

%

58.7 56.3 1.8 0.6 41.3 100.0

Source: Archives of Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaidis, Prefect of Florina, File no.2/11, Document no. 51, 6 August 1935 (Lithoksoou 1992)

130

Table VIII: National groups inhabiting 93 villages of the Florina Prefecture, 1935 (by village) National category of inhabitants

No. of vii/ages

%

Greek and Slav Slav Greek Romanian Greek and Romanian Albanian, Greek, and Slav Albanian and Greek Albanian, Greek and Romanian Albanian Total

65 10 8 4 2 2

69.9 10.8 8.6 4.3 2.2 2.2 1.0 1.0 0.0 100.0

0 93

Source: Archives of Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaidis, Prefect of Florina File no. 2/11, Document no. 51 , 6 August 1935 (Lithoksoou 1992)

the decades following incorporation become more clear. The J 9205 was a period marked by out-migration,1O displacement and deportation, as Greek government policy was geared towards the systematic removal of all Vouigarophrol1es, coupled with a voluntary exchange of populations between Greece and Bulgaria. 11 There are also reports of deportation and internal exile involving individuals from the districts of Thessaloniki, Serres, Kastoria, Florina, and Grevena. Those targeted for removal from the region were labelled as dangerous threats to public order, owing to their ll1volvement in propaganda activities of the Bulgarian 'committee members' (komitadjides).12 The preferred places for resettling these displaced persons were in the island areas of the country and especially on Crete." By the later 1920s, the Greek authorities had taken steps to curtail voluntary emigration to Bulgaria, fearing that these people would migrate and begin a campaign against the Greek state. The Prefecture of Flonna stopped issuing passports to local inhabitants wishing to travel abroad. \01 (~migres to Bulgaria or other suspect destinations faced even greater hurdles if they attempted to return to Greece. State officials instructed local authorities to investigate the 'sentiment' (phronima) of such individuals, their activities both before and after emigrating, and the extent of the properties they owned in Greece.'5 The 1928 cenSllS reported that only 38,562 Slavophones remained in the Florina Prefecture. Many of those deported or di~placed were replaced (as were the Turks who left Greece after the Treaty of Lallsanne in 1923) in their local communities by resettled Greek refugees (fJrosphyges) from ASIa Minor and

131

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

Thrace. Refugee settlement in the Greek Macedonian countryside was actively encouraged, for the purpose of strengthening a Greek presence in the area. Such, apparently, were the concerns of the Prefect of Florina when in 1925 he asked in a letter to his superiors whether the 'refugee masses' could 'influence in an assimilationist way the foreign-speaking element?'J6 In the short term, the strategy had little success. Few refugees spoke metropolitan Greek, most communicating with each other in Pontic Greek or in Turkish. Turkish, moreovel; was sometimes used as a common lingua franca for refugees and local Slavo-Macedonians, many of whom spoke Turkish as well as Slavic. In 1925, Greek military officials argued that it was imperative to provide economic incentives to encourage the settlement of Greek-speaking refugees, especially those arriving from Thrace, in Greek Macedonia (HAM/GDM (see note 25)). It was hoped that this would help to 'condense' the area's population, then still largely living in compact Slavo-Macedonian communities. Resettling Greek-speaking refugees in such villages was seen as essential. J? Nevertheless, it had by then also become clear that wherever refugees were resettled, intra-community disputes over land ownership were almost inevitable. Mavrogordatos noted that 'Slavo-Macedonian natives reacted strongly and often violently to the massive settlement of Greek refugees and to their occupation of fields they had themselves coveted or even cultivated in the past' .JH Certainly, Slavo-Macedonians were not the only ones to resent the arrival of refugees or the loss of long-envied, highly coveted productive property to the newcomers. Yet by 1928, fourteen of 104 villages in the Fiorina Prefecture were dominated by newly arrived refugee settlers; an additional twenty-one villages had small numbers of refugee families settled among Slavic-speaking iocals (dopioi).J9 My own survey of the Fiorina Prefecture in 1993 found Slavic speakers (or their descendants) present in well over half of the area's ninety villages (see Table IX).

Table IX: Composition of villages, Florina Prefecture, 1993 No. of villages

Composition

'Locals' (dopiot) Slavic speakers Vlachs Arvanites 'Refugees' (prosfighes) Pontic Greek Thrakiotes Mixed Slavic-speakers, Pontic Greeks Slavic-speakers, Arvanites Slavic-speakers, Vlachs Slavic-speakers, Gypsies Slavic Speakers, Pontic Greeks & Arvanites Slavic-speakers, Pontic Greeks & GypSies Slavic-speakers, Arvanites, Pontic Greeks

%

53

58.9

45 5 3

50.0 5.6 3.3 16.7 15.6 1 ,1

15

14 1

21 12 3 2 1

23.3 13.3

3.2 2.2 1.1 1,1

1.1 1,1

& Thrakiotes Unknown Total

1.1

90

[100*]

Source: author's survey, 1993 Note • Numbers given do not appear to total 100 due to rounding.

A leading factor in these involuntary displacements and deportations was that Bulgarian propaganda in the area apparently continued to gain ground after the region's incorporation into Greece. As early as 1922, the Greek military were doing their best to halt the activities of the Bulgarian propagandists and the spread of a Macedonian autonomist movement,'10 Whiie some reports attribute most incidents to isolated occurrences perpetrated by bands of Komitadjides;" the fact remains that this autonomist movement was quite active in the area at the time,"2 It had made significant inroads among both the Slavic-speaking and Turkish populations of the region by expanding its political platform to include the question of Thrace;11 and the Greek authorities were convinced that the group's ultimate goal was eventually to partition Macedonia and Thrace between Bulgaria and Turkey,"4

Such conclusions were based on the rhetoric of the Bulgarian Committees themselves, as evidenced in their propaganda leaflets distributed among the population of Greek Macedonia. For example, in March 1922 there was convened in Serres a Congress of the Macedonian Committee which issued a proclamation to the peoples of Macedonia protesting against what it called the 'Greek occupation' of Macedonia. It stated that, despite a thirty-year struggle, they had not yet achieved a victory and that therefore 'one COUlltry li.e. Macedonia] is still divided and occupied by a regime worse than that of the Ottomans',''' According to these revolutionaries, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) was the only force fighting for the liberation of all the people of Macedonia - Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, Jews and Vlachs - without discrimination. Greece was regarded as an enemy 'against which all oppressed peoples should unite in common opposition,"". Understandably, the Greek authorities went to great lengths to II1vestJgate the activities of suspected Bulgarian sympathizers. Bands frol11 Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbia (see below) were constantly slipping across the Greek border to conduct propaganda activities. Only during harsh winters, such as

132

1.33

Bulgarian propaganda

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

the one of 1922, did their activities in the Florina area subside,"7 As a result, the Greek government kept up a constant vigil over its borders, guarding them with both army regiments and the Gendarmerie. These soldiers were brought to the area from Southern Greece because recruits native to the area were considered 'bad guardians' of the borders and very untrustworthy,"H A major incident that serves to illustrate how extreme outbreaks of violence occurred in the area relates to the so-called 'Dynamite Attempt' in the town of Florina on 16 November 1925:'9 The bombing occurred in the coffee shop Dietlmes in central Florina just after nightfall. Around 6.00 pm, two otherwise unarmed men entered the door and tossed hand grenades into the coffee shop, injuring two children in the explosion. The suspects then fled, allegedly towards the Albanian border, where many Iwmitad;ides found sanctuary from Greek authorities. The following day, the Gendarmerie of Florina conducted an investigation. Ten individuals were arrested and sent to Kozani to be tried by Military Court, while another forty-seven people were arrested on suspicion of collaborating with the Iwmitad;ides. The Commission on Public Order judged the latter to be dangerous threats to society and exiled them to the islands of Skyros and Andros for a period of six months.'" At the same time, other propaganda was coming in from Serbia, channelled through the consulate of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, as Yugoslavia was then known, in Thessaloniki. These efforts reflected Serbia's growing interest in the Slavic speakers of Macedonia, whom they claimed in fact to be Southern Serbs. By 1925, Serbian agents were reportedly very active in the Florina area, urging the population to register themselves as Serbian citizens." The Greek authorities were understandably alarmed by these developments. One report claimed that many Slavic speakers in the area had become hostile towards any 'Greek idea' and were now 'running' for Serbian protection, hoping to have Serbia act as an intermediary on their behalf with the Greek authorities." To counter these foreign efforts to gain control of Greek Macedonia, the Greek government attempted to present a picture to the outside world that the region was definitively 'Greek'. One incident in particular serves to illuminate the anxiety of the Greek authorities. In 1926, the International Commission for the Study of Minorities in Macedonia toured the area. Government authorities directed teachers to hold Greek festivities (eIJideixeis) in the schools for the benefit of the visiting investigators. Teachers also told schoolchildren that the Minister of Education would be travelling along the Edessa-Florina railway, and that in order to please him they were to line the railroad tracks, holding Greek flags in their hands and singing patriotic marches. Students were also instructed that if approached by members of the Commission on the streets or at the railway station and asked if they knew any language other than Greek, they were to answer no. The event was reported as a great success. 5.1

134

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

In conjunction with their attempts to portray the inherent 'Greekness' of the area to outsiders, the Greek authorities also actively suppressed all social and political movements aiming at the autonomy of Macedonia. Despite the fact that the area had been part of Greece for more than a decade, a large proportion of the local population was still hostile to Greek sovereignty and conditions in the region were far from tranquil. The Greek state attempted to consolidate its control over the area through a dual approach involving surveillance and repression on the part of the military and the police,'" on the one hand, and institutionalized forums of national education on the other.

Repression and violence, 1935-49 By the time of the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-41), conditions in the region apparently justified harsher, more repressive actions on the part of Greek authorities. It was during this period that prohibitions against the use of Slavic languages (either in public or private) were first implemented. Violators were subjected to steep fines/' forced to drink castor oil, or in some cases even beaten. Night schools were set up in which adult men and women were taught Greek.\(' Individuals were obliged to change their names from Slavic forms to Greek ones. There were also stepped-up activities surrounding ritual commemorations of Greek national holidays. Local inhabitants were obliged to display a Greek flag in homes and shops on local and national holidays. Some even embarked on house-painting campaigns in which the homes of area residents were white-washed and decorated with blue trim to resemble the colours of the Greek flag. 57 In 1941 the Axis forces occupied Greece. While the Germans tended to concentrate in the towns, their Bulgarian allies, who were allowed to occupy \X1estern Thrace and part of Macedonia, moved more fluidly through the countryside, stepping up their nationalist propaganda in the process. The occupation created a sharp polarization among the area's inhabitants, some collaborating with the occupiers, others resisting by allying themselves with either Greek nationalist forces or the communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) and its National Popular Liberation Army (ELAS).5H Slavo-Macedonian participation in the Greek resistance forces of the ELAS was strong. Following the Axis occupation, conditions in the Florina countryside approached a Hobbesian state of nature. Mark Mazower ' has noted that Greek national forces persecuted communist partisans more than they did former collaborators with the Germans. Many Slavo-Macedonians endured great hardships at this time. As one respondent put it: 'I didn't want to go with the Bulgarians. I wanted to protect my country and so I jOll1ed ELAS. What did they want me to do? In return for my patriotism they sent me into exile'. Many SIavo-Macedonians who were not exiled eventually allied <)

135

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

themselves with the communists, who at one point held out the promise of a future independent Macedonian state, during the Civil War (1947-49).',0 Armed conflict was particularly fierce in the mountains of western Greek Macedonia. Combatants on both sides of the civil conflict burned villages, executed opponents, and abducted children. After the communist defeat, many Greek communists and Slavo-Macedonians alike fled to Yugoslavia and beyond, taking with them as many as 28,000 children,'" who were resettled in various parts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Graecoman and the Greek encountered a local farmer out ploughing his fields. Having difficulties with a recalcitrant ox, the farmer was cursing the beast in Slavic. The Greek policeman summoned him over to them and began writing a fine. When the policeman asked the man for his name, the latter, in confusion, gave him two different names. The policeman became angry and asked if the man were making fun of him. He then grabbed the man, forced open his mouth, and extinguished his burning cigarette on the farmer's tongue. As the man screamed in pain, the Graecoman village president grabbed the Greek policeman by the throat and lifted him up in the air. 'Don't you ever let me catch you doing that again', he warned. 'I will beat you to pulp (tha se spaso sto ksilo).'

Reconciliation and reconstructing the nation,

1949-59 The 1950s were a period of reconciliation in the Florina area. The most fanatic Slavs, so to speak, had left Greece and those who remained had a vivid memory of the retribution and destruction that had been inflicted upon them since 1913 and during the Second World War and the Civil War. Their overt peacefulness reflected their willingness now to integrate themselves into Greek society.61 As many of those Slavo-Macedonians imprisoned after the Civil War were then being released and returning to their native communities, the Greek authorities and their local agents once again stepped up their efforts to promote a Greek national consciousness among the area's inhabitants. l ,] By 1959, the year of the language oaths, the Bulgarian threat had disappeared from the political arena. But the principal axis of conflict and contest had by then shifted to one involving Greece and Yugoslavia. It is important, however, to contextualize developments in Greece in the light of events taking place across the border. The creation of the Yugoslav Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1944 was akin to a nation-building process. The Slavic vernacular spoken in that southernmost region of Yugoslavia and in north-western Greece became the standardized Macedonian language for that new republic. Regional authorities also stepped up their own efforts to present themselves as a separate 'nation', distinct from neighbouring Serbia and Bulgaria. A national 'Macedonian' history found its roots in this period, as scholars attempted to link the ancestry of the region's present population to the glorious legacy of Alexander the Great, Cyril and Methodius, and other illustrious historical personages that would help legitimize the existence of a separate 'Macedonian' nation in the present day."·' However, a lingering consciousness - or perhaps a subconciousness - of Slavo-Macedonian identity continued to persist among much of the local population. Consider a story related to me by a Graecoman"\ and former president of a village in the F10rina area: One day, while en mute to a nearby village on an administrative errand in the company of a Greek Ii.e. non-local I policeman, the

136

Such a vignette is revealing in several aspects. First, it demonstrates that as late as thel950s the Slavic vernacular was still widely used by the local population. Second, it points to the ways in which Greek policemen sometimes abused their power and terrorized the local Slavic-speakers. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is indicative of the mediating role played by interstitial Graecomani as local agents of the Greek state. While they identified with Hellenism, some Graecomalll at least also acted as protective patrons for their local neighbours, guarding them against the abuses of power that occasionally appeared in the course of national assimilation. These bilingual Greek and Slavic speakers filled positions such as those of village president, teacher, or priest, or of local officials. Unlike those of the regional or prefectural administrators, who came to the area from other parts of Greece, the personal experiences of the Graecomal1i made them more sensitive to the subtle and delicate nuances involved in the complex process of national assimilation. What were those nuances? Given what by all contemporary accounts was a complex picture of religious and national (not to mention ethnic) affiliations among the region's population, how was it that the Greek state was able to construct a national consciousness, or a common national culture of co-existence if you will, in this area? Through what means were agents of Greek national identity able to project a hegemonic Hellenism among the local population, re-orienting their consciousness of existence primarily to a broad field of social interaction defined as being part of the Greek nation-state? Has this hegemony been total? Or do competing definitions of identity and contesting expressions of consciousness still manifest themselves, and if so where, when, why and how? To understand these issues, let us examine the role of the agents or 'importers' of national consciousness, and the role of education in particular. 137

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

The importers of national consciousness Social scientists now widely recognize tint ident't , I , ' constru't t1, i fI ,< I Y ane conSCIOusness are , c s; le proc ucts 0 lllman agency. Both are established and dehned 111 OPPOsition to something they are not, an 'other' as it ,., I " ' ,.,', wei e. n <1ttemptll1g to understand t1" .' f' G le constl uctlon of national c,onsciousness in the FI()I'I'll'l legIOn 0 reece W' 'II 'I ' ' ,f' . , ,I I ' e WI exal11l1le t le ,actIvities of those who might be re el re( to as t Ie 'agents' or '" .. ,.' f ' , Ai' , 1 m pOI tel s 0 national conSCiousness " ' cco~'~ Illg to Greenfeld,('" ,the adoption of a national id~nti't~ or COIlS~I;)us~l.ess by a gIven populatIOn IS linked to the interests of thos~ influenL

:11~;:~g ~~~~I~~~l~:t~~)~~'~tU~)~I~I;~1t in~port ,in~o

a~ld

,it ,a g!ven area promulgate it t't ' ,,' 'I, y le pi ocess, such agellts often cnange their ielenI y: consc~ous y or not, because their own structural position; within local Society become transformed as the locale becomes linked witl ' I.. , ' " nOmIC so' I I r' I 1 a algel eco' 'f' Cia" anc po ItlCa arena. By brokering or mediating the iI111)()J"t'lt IOn 0 a national-level ident't I ' < d"", . ' ' I Y anc COIlSClousness among an ethnical! T Ivel se population at the local level, sllch agents invest themselves widl ~ po::.e~'f~d :or~ll ofsocial, or political capital, the value of whicl~ is linked the~estlluc~ul,~IlY II1terstI.tIaI positiO\~s bet,,:e~n (nation) state and locale. t't t, t 1~1 e ,I~ ~;; Imp~Itant analytIca I chstll1ction that needs to be made llne )e ",:elen I ! na, and external' agents of national identity and conscic)lls11 ess n t le Honn'l ' ' :l I ' ' t' 1< countryslc e, t le former consisted primarily of school e~~c leI s, plle~ts, arge landowners, and merchants. The prestige th'lt such I ~ per~onne" enJoyed, in their social milieux was transformed into< )(;wer ~hen they became meehators of state ancllocal relations In the light !f tI . ~lcon,le~ ~lS ~itlt~el~ulrpri~e to find that it was the teacher (~ile son of the (l)l'iel~:) 10 pel suac ec t le vdhgers of At I I t , ,I I '< " rapos to ta <e t leir language o,1th He usee t le power vested 111 him b)T t 1 " , f" <. identity. le state to trans orm local notions of

t:)

':i ' " '"

, At the same ti,l11e, there were also 'external' 'lgellt f " I SClOl 'I r l S 0 natlona con"lsness, 11K uc ll1g )ureaucrats, government officials, tax collectors polIcemen, and army personnel Yet while tl ,', . fl " f o l ' 1" ., , lell 111 uence was often pro.. une 111 'dc en,sely populated admll1lstrative and commercial centres in tl ' country's! e It W'lS pr' ·'1 I ' ,, ', le <, • Il11all y t le ll1terstItIaI Gl'aecomall loC'I I' ' , played the most critical roles. There, the function of eduC'ltion :a~ ~~;s)l~ha~ Importance II1 Hellenizing the region's Slavic-speakers. in all tl;~ ar~hi~I~~ that ~ have ex amll1ed t,here IS one consistent theme: the educatiOll'l1 systell1' was Il1tenc1eel to serve 'I < < , , ,' a natlona purpose; it was a focal lIlStitlltl'()11 f natIOnal conversIOn. 0 >

L

The role of education Vourl,'; I synno

Ias f' 0

cla~·glued Ithat , in llg 1 cu t . ' 1lI e 111

the 187()s, the promotion of Greek lettel's as a I . ,< < t Ie regIon was very much a policy of the Greek

138

nation-state to the south."7 Accordingly, the rhetoric they adopted to promote irredentist policies was disseminated through Greek education and through allegiance to the Greek Patriarchate, the two defining characteristics of one's 'Greekness'."H The Greek language was a tool of communication that people from Macedonia learned in order to secure a position in the structural division of labour."? But through several generations the acquisition of a Greek education, in conjunction with the incorporation of the region into Greece in 1913, macle those with 'Greek letters' the unconscious agents of Hellenism and Greek national consciousness - an issue to which I shall return below, While the idea of Hellenism found roots among many Vlachophones and Slavophones in the area before 1913, it was the subsequent creation of national consciousness through education - that eventually made the area unquestionably 'Greek'. One must distinguish here between two distinct yet interrelated national collectivities. The first, dominant during the years preceding incorporation in 1913, relied heavily on the Greek Church and Greek national educational policies to attract members; the second, which rose to dominance after 1913, used more overtly and covertly coercive methods of state integration, The Hellenic community at the turn of the century was territorially poorly defined. Rather, it was a largely 'imaginary' and ideological coml11ul1lty that found its definition in the alleged superiority of Greek culture and letters. The community of the Greek nation-state, on the other hand, was territorially concrete. At the same time, however, the Greek nation-state not only made allusions to an imaginary community among members of a high culture, but also (following the region's incorporation) provided the bureaucrats, army, police, administrative personnel, and 'national' teachers to disseminate the notion of membership in a national collectivity - and the inherent superiority of that collectivity - among the local population, In both cases, however, education was a focal institution of conversion. As Voud" put it, there existed a 'dialectical relation between the aims of education and national goals'. On the level of policy formulation and the subsequent creation of ideology, it was believed that when the aims of education were attained and the population learned Greek language, letters, and civilization, they would eventually come to conceive of themselves as Greeks. 71 Thus one sees that, at the turn of the century, educational activities were conditioned by nationalist ideologies. The educational and religious institutions of that time took as their mission the transformation of national consciousness among the Christians of Macedonia. But this enterprise continued to be most successful only in urban areas, owing mainly to the fact that formal schooling had little practical utility for Slavic-speaking agriculturalists in the central zone, where the region of Flm'ina was situated. Greek government archives indicate that in 1913 only sixteen out of forty-nine villages in the Florina district had functioning schools and kindergartens. 72 It is significant that in all sixteen villages with Greek schools a 139

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

portion of the population did declare themselves to be Greek.7' Not one of the villages listed as populated by 'Bulgarians' had a school.7" Higher educational institutions, such as the Astilws Skholes (high schools), existed in only five towns and villages. With the exception of Florina, all of these communities were inhabited by Vlachs, the majority of whom declared themselves to be 'Greeks', while a few identified themselves as Roumanizondes or those with Romanian national sentiment. 7s The fact remains, however, that by 1925 the achievements of Greek educational institutions in the area were mimmal. As the Prefect of Florina reported to the General Directorate of Macedonia,"" schools did not function properly for a number of reasons, including a lack of materials, facilities and capable teachers. Nor did they make efforts to provide a special linguistic programme for 'foreign speakers'. Instead, children throughout the region were taught with the same textbooks used in Athenian schools. Moreover, local authorities often brought charges against parents who neglected to send their children to school, thus creating an 'aversion to Greek letters land] impatience and hatred towards the Greek administration'.77 The Greek schools thus functioned only formally, and children learned to read and write Greek only with the greatest of difficulties. The Prefect maintained that teachers in the area were poorly trained and had no ambitions. Their pedagogy created no 'civilizing influence' and failed to construct a Greek national consciousness among the students. He suggested that, in order to solve this problem, a new cohort of teachers would have to be recruited from among the best in southern Greece, those who not oniy possessed adequate knowledge but would also be capable of fostering the creation of national sentiment (phronima) among their local students. In order to attract such teachers, it was suggested that the government offer moral and financial incentives and arrange for easier promotions. Schools, the Prefect cautioned, should be real schools, with an authority that would enable their students to graduate with 'consciousness and pride that they

could not only speak and write the Greek language but [couldl feel and think like Greeks','H For villagers living in their own communities where intercourse with the outside world was limited to personal networks of marriage and economic exchange, local school-teachers represented the principal civil servants with whom they would come into regular contact. But many of these teachers were apparently of low intellectual calibre. Most were mere graduates of area high schools, although a few had graduated from Educational Academies (Didaslwleia).7,! Some, in fact, were themselves only fifth- and sixthgrade graduates appointed to teaching positions under Law 1197, which enabled many inexperienced, ill-trained, or fraudulent teachers to obtain positions simply by swearing oaths and signing statements that they had lost their diplomas. Ho The books in the schools only served to create 'disappointment' (apogoitefsi) and 'aversion' (apostl'Ophi) towards Greek letters and Greek education. These archives readily indicate that by 1925 the Greek educational system, as established in the newly incorporated areas of Macedonia, was not attaining the goals for which it was intended. The assimilation of the local Slavic-speaking population and the creation of a Greek national consciousness among them was still a long way off. Even those Slavic-speakers who did send their children to school continued to speak 'Bulganan' in their homes, at their public meetings, in their associations, and at their festivities, weddings, and holidays. They showed no signs of love towards their new HI country - an observation particularly true of the older generation. Despite the fact that education had been made compulsory through law, many parents were willing to pay fines instead of sending their children to Greek schools. All these archives consistently recommend several measures to remedy this discouraging situation: (1) to bring in the best-qualified teachers from the south and to provide them with incentives, bonuses, and special promotions until the local Slavic population produced its own indigenous Greek-trained teachers; (2) to emphasize education among the very young (that is, kindergarten) and among women (night schools and schools on Sundays); (3) to provide free higher education for those Siavophone children who want to go on to the educational academies; (4) to establish night schools for the elderly in every village; and (5) to make elementary education compulsory. By the time of the Metaxas dictatorship, the linguistic situation in the region remained at crisis proportions. In 1938, an Athenian teacher who worked in the Edessa area wrote a confidential report evaluating efforts to Hellenize Western Macedonia and stressed the importance of the recently enacted language prohibitions. Hz The importance of these prohibitions, he argued, lay in the fact that on the surface they provided for a uniform appearance, so that visitors to the area and local inhabitants alike would see

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141

Table X: Schools and kindergartens, Florina District, 1913 School type

No. of schools

High school Girls' high school Primary Kindergarten Total

5 2 11 16 34

Total no. of students

Males

%

437 141 180 622 1,380

376 0 119 321 816

86 0 66 52 59

Females %

61 141 61 301 564

14 100 34 48 41

Source: HAM/GDM, File no. 53, 'Statistics on Greek Schools'

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

and feel that it was part of Greece. More importantly, on a deeper level 'the young children will finally understand that they live in Greece, and that the Greel< lessons are /tot taught in schools as foreign lessons' (emphasis in original). H3 His observations grasped the twofold significance of the language prohibitions: on the one hand they contributed to the consolidation of a particular nexus of external characteristics of (national) group identity; on the other, they were efforts geared towards the internalization of national concepts and group characteristics, especially in the hearts and minds of the young and ideologically malleable. Although reports from the 1920s suggested that schools in the area were falling short in their national mission because of scarcity of educational materials, disrepair of facilities, poorly qualified teachers, and irregular attendance, after the 1950s education came to assume a more prominent and successful role in influencing the national identity and consciousness of the region's population. The explanation lies in the fact that by then most avenues of economic and social mobility had been restricted to education. Many parents came to realize that their children had little chance of improving their relative socio-economic position if they continued to learn only Slavic. A form of linguistic self-censorship came to be imposed in the home, with many parents discouraging their children from speaking Slavic. To the extent that the latter continued to learn the language, they did so primarily through their grandparents, who at the same time learned Greek from their grandchildren. Clearly, it took several generations for the Greek language and Greek national consciousness to take hold among the Slavic-speaking population of Greek Macedonia. By and large, those among the local population who received Greek schooling did tend to redirect their identity, sympathies, and loyalties to the Greek nation-state. But the fact remains that such individuals were few in number, at least until the 1950s. It was only after the Second World War - and especially with the advent of free higher education in the 1960s - that education became both more widely available and also an increasingly important resource through which families and individuals could pursue concrete economic interests. It was only then that the assimilationist goals of the Greek national educational system came to achieve their intended results. Yet even these accomplishments were predicated on the earlier removal of the most 'fanatic Slavs' from the area, leaving few options to those Slavic-speakers that remained. Today, most of the school children no longer speak Slavic, and the vast majority of the Slavic-speaking (and formerly Slavic-speaking) population identify themselves with the Greek national collectivity. The inordinate success of nation-building in Greek Macedonia (especially when evaluated against the experience of other Balkan countries) was due in no small part to the ability of the agents of Hellenism to bring about an

internalization of certain normative frames of reference in the minds of a population. I-laving identified educators as the agents or importers of Greek national consciousness in the Florina area, let us pause to consider several arenas in which such new national concepts, values, and notions of collective membership took hold among the local population. We must examine the tools and mechanisms through which such concepts were internalized by them. This brings us to a discussion of language, holidays, and ntuals.

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The internalization of national concepts: language and ritual While language is an external marker of identity, it is also a principal medium through which internal characteristics of identity are framed and expressed. lingUists have long recognized that language, as a medium of cultural communication, embodies a structured pattern of concepts that affect or even determine our interpretation of the world around us. H,I It enables us to communicate with those who cohabit our social milieux. Its diversity, its 'borrowed idioms' so to speak, are testimony to the fluid character of those social fields. With the shift from a Siavo-Macedonian vernacular to a Greek one, a new set of semantic categories was imported into local culture and internalized in the minds of the local population. During the late Ottoman period, the Greek language was considered an expression of 'high culture' in the Balkans. The countryside was a patchwork of numerous ethnic groups, many with their own vernaculars. Greekspeakers were concentrated primarily in cities and towns, and Greek was the lingua franca of administration and commerce regardless of one's ethnic or national affiliation. Those Christians who aspired to upward mobility within the Ottoman Empire were obliged to acquire a facility in Greek. The Sultan's firman, which established the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, provided that any Christian community in which two-thirds of the inhabitants so desired could withdraw from the jurisdiction of the Greek Patriarchate and place itself under the authority of the Bulgarian Exarchate. HI In effect, the firmall precipitated a national struggle between two emergent nation-states over the population and territory of Macedonia. In the early phases of this struggle the contest was expressed in ecclesiastical terms, but later this fa<;ade dropped and the mutually opposed interests of the two secular states clashed together more openly. Yet throughout this period of contest, language was regarded by the Bulgarians as a - if not the - principal indicator of national identity, while the Greeks (as noted above) stressed religion, education, and a knowledge of Greek, although not necessarily as one's first language or native tongue. The Slavo-Macedonians were caught in a no-man's-land between the converging frontiers of Greek and Bulgarian nationalism. Their language is of the Slavic family, and has a close affinity with Bulgarian. Bulgarian

143

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

nationalists, of course, claimed that the Slavo-Macedonian vernacular was simply a dialect of Bulgarian, an assessment echoed by their Greek counterparts, who disparaged it and stigmatized it as a 'non-language', a mere 'idiom' of Bulgarian, or a 'gypsy language' (gyflhtilw). Beyond the debates that currently rage over the status of the Macedonian language or non-languageS!' lie more fundamental issues. Through the political positioning of Greek and Bulgarian nationalists at the turn -~)f the century and Greek and Macedonian nationalists at the present day, SlavoMacedonians and their vernacular were relegated to a 'low' cultural status vis-cl-vis their elite, nationally-based neighbours. Consider a story, proudly related to me by a Florina man of Arvanitis (Albanian) descent,S7 of how one day he heard some labourers outside his house speaking in Slavic. Finding this personally irritating, he went outside and asked them, 'Why do you speak this language? Don't you speak Greek?' Or consider the phrases often repeated to me during coffee shop and restaurant conversations: 'We give the wrong impression when speaking that language', or 'it is not proper to speak that language'. As Tambiah HH remarked, language does not only serve as a mere communicative device, but also has 'implications for educational advantage, occupation, and historical legitimation of social precedence'. Whether through self-censorship or externally imposed prohibitions, the Greek language gradually gained dominance among the Florina region's population over the generations. Swearing an oath before God and before the authorities of the State _ God's secular parallel in this symbolic imagery - the people of Atrapos, as I described at the outset of this chapter, vowed to use a language different from that to which they had been accustomed. But in so doing, amid all the elaborate pageantry or decorumS'! of this ritualistic ceremony, the so-called 'simple' people of Atrapos were accepting - or at least recognizing - the superiority of the Greek language over the daily vernacular they had learned at home as children and through which they had communicated all their lives. At the same time, they began to change the linguistic medium through which they internalized their cultural concepts. By acquiring a 'national' language, they acquired the means to understand and internalize national concepts. Yet language, as such, is but one of many tools of communication employed by humankind. We live within a daily poetics of personhood."" As we strive to present ourselves in everyday life,''! we act in different arenas: concrete settings in which the contests between influential bearers of competing paradigms are played out.""The power of rituals, as Mary Douglas'll has noted, lies in the manner in which, as an act of communication, they express, emphasize, and construct agreement upon that level of social structure which is relevant to (or, we might say, dominant in) a given social field. In such contexts, actors are made aware of a greater or lesser range of inclusiveness. As highly structured frames of action through which the normative

It may be constructive to return, for a moment, to the language oath ceremony recounted at the outset of this chapter. I interpret this ritual- and the narrative accounts of it - as an important moment in Greek nation-building in the Florina area. A closer look at the setting of the ritual, the structure of its action, and the symbols employed in it offers a poignant insight into the processes through which Greek national consciousness was constructed and internalized among the local population. The Atrapos language oath may be interpreted as a rite of purification, held under the legitimating efficacy of both mystical or supernatural power (that is, God) and secular authority (that is, representatives of the Greek state). Nation-building often invokes the supernatural in order to legitimize its secular existence. The oath itself both opened and closed with the invocation of the Holy Name of the Christian God. While the oath was explicitly framed in terms of a national mission, the Greek language also became a source of secular patriotism and supernatural pride, for it was portrayed as the language of the Holy Gospel, the Greek Church, the Greek state, and the Greek nation. The 'pure' Greek language and its corresponding 'high culture' was thus juxtaposed with a 'low culture' Slavic idiom that had been 'borrowed' from an invasive, polluting, foreign force. As the Greek language is depicted as 'pure', it stands in opposition to a Slavic idiom that is somehow 'dirty' or 'polluting'. The polluting idiom is dangerous,'" as it causes misunderstandings that threaten the national social fabric. It was the teacher, a local symbol of the 'high culture' of the nation, who proclaimed that the 'foreign idiom' bore no relation to the villagers' 'very Greek descent'. The invocation of kinship, descent, and reproduction completes a transformation of Greekness from a 'high' culture to which people aspire into a natural, inalienable part of these villagers' lives. Whereas the oath itself culminated with divine references to God, the teacher's homily concluded with very secular cheers dedicated to the pillars of the Greek nation: the king, the state, and the army. The pronouncements of the Prefect at the end of the ceremony conferred legitimacy upon the proclamation made by the village teacher just moments before: that the once 'polluted' villagers, now emerging from a state of lil11inality into a newly 'purified' status, were newly affirmed 'Greeks'. The once culturally anomalous Slavophones are thus converted into patriotic heroes of the Greek nation-state. As Victor Turner'''' put it: ritual is akin to a process of 'sublimation', establishing a proper relationship between involuntary

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values of moral facts - as defined by the dominant social structure - are given voice, internalized, and reinforced among participants, ritual action is akin to a process of sublimation."·' One might also view ritual as a mechanism for hegemony.

Interpreting the ritual language oath

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

sentiments and the requirements of the social structure in such a way as to convert that which is socially obligatory to something personally desirable.

State-building, or rather state integration, in northern Greece was a conquest of fields: both real estate and those 'abstract cultural domains where paradigms are formulated, established, and come into conflict',''' The domain of national consciousness has been one such field of contest. In the 'colonization of consciousness',"" people are re-made 'by redefining the taken-for-granted surfaces of their everyday worlds'. Yet the normative paradigms that compete in this field not only govern behaviour or action; they also provide an ideational rhetoric with which such action is cloaked in legitimacy. National consciousness is created or established through a process of hegemony, an internalization of the concepts and normative frames of reference of the nation so that they become accepted without question as a 'natural' state of things. Issues of identity and consciousness are intimately tied to definitions of a social collectivity, regardless of its size. In the case of a national collectivity, the internal characteristics of ethnicity (in other words, a common descent and culture) are collapsed with those of the nation. Their significance fades as definitions of one's self become overwhelmingly oriented to notions of the national collectivity. Descent is no longer traced from a remote ancestor who settled in the area. Instead, a more grand and more mythical descent is claimed from figures more remote and yet more concrete: those of the nation's deities. The transformation of ethnic identity into national consciousness can occur at various speeds, depending on the particular social and economic conditions of the case at hane!. For those individuals tied more closely to the power structures of the newly dominant state society, such transformations occur quite rapidly. For others, they happen more slowly, or not at all. Yet such transformations are always orchestrated through the work of agents. What really gets extinguished in the process of transforming group identity into national consciousness is the memory of distinctiveness. As definitions of the relevant collectivity change, so, too, do the memories of kinship and descent. Through nation-building and national integration, people acquire a new memory, that of the imagined nation. "" As memory becomes nationalized, the whole system of what was important in the past is forgotten. With the Slavo-Macedonians, however, we still see today an active resistance to participation in the Greek national collectivity. Other individuals remain quiet about the whole issue, taking their membership in the Greek nation-state as a 'matter of fact', but still continuing to talk about their group's past distinctiveness and differences.

The advent of free education in the 1960s precipitated a sharp rise in the number of Slavo-Macedonians in Greek secondary schools and universities. The promise of upward mobility was held out to all, but the discrimination faced by many Siavo-Macedonians in their quest for employment (especially in coveted state-sector jobs or in the civil service) left many sharply alienated. National enculturation efforts continued to have a strong conservative tone, often stressing a love for the monarchy that appealed to many native Greek-speakers in the Florina region. In fact, when Constantine, the former King of Greece, returned to the country from exile for a 'personal' visit in August 1993, his first stop was Florina. From 1967 to 1974, Greece was under the dictatorship of a military jU11ta. This was a period marked by harsh suppression of leftists and discrimination against Slavo-Macedonians, and the borders With Yugoslavia were closed once again. The Church re-emerged as a strong nationalist force, and a new puritanical bishop, Kandiotis, was appointed Metropolitan of Fiorina, and began to cultivate Greek Orthodox fundamentalism. The democratization of the Greek polity following the fall of the junta brought significant changes to western Greek Macedonia. The borders were reopened, and seasonal migrant labourers from Yugoslavia helped boost the economy of north-western Greece, while Yugoslav tourists on day shopping trips became a common sight in downtown Florina. When PASOK, the Greek socialist party, came to power in the 1980s, Slavo-Macedonians began to find jobs in the civil service sector, contributing to the creation of an elite stratum within their ethnic cohort. Many, however, found their opportunities for advancement still limited, and new signs of protest and resistance began to emerge by the late 1980s. Political activists began to lobby for 'human rights' and the official recognition of a Slavic-speaking ethnic minority in the region. They called for the teaching of the local Slavic vernacular in local schools, an end to discrimination in employment and promotion, and a return of 'political refugees'. The latter consisted of those Slavic speakers who had fled to Yugoslavia after the civil war which ended in 1949 to escape repression and subsequently had been forbidden to return. The break-up of Yugoslavia, however, once again ushered in a period of mounting tensions and crisis. Border controls have been tightened, much to the dissatisfaction of many Slavo-Macedonians with relatives on the other side of the frontier. Human rights activists in the Florina region have stepped up their organizational and lobbying efforts, while police and security forces have increased their own vigilance. Protesters against government policy in Macedonia have been arrested, tried, and imprisoned, and intellectual critics of Greece's growing nationalistic fervour have faced broad public condemnation. Even Greek diaspora groups with strong patriotic sentiments have entered the fray, taking up the Greek national cause both in Greece and abroad. I submit that there are three basic groupings of people among those of

146

147

Converging frontiers of Greek and Macedonian nationalisms

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

Siavo-Macedonian descent in present-day Florina. First, there are those who possess an internalized sense of their Greekness and consistently express the same in their public and private lives. Among such individuals, Greek nation-building has been most successful and the construction of a national consciousness is more or less complete. The superscription of a national identity and its corresponding consciousness has effectively erased memories or sentiments of those ethnic characteristics that once distinguished them from their neighbours. 'We have been Greek since the time of our remote ancestors (anabam babadam)', a Florina man told me. 'The only similarity we have with the people across the border lies in language. We know what we are and we don't need any strangers to come and tell us. Macedonian means Greek.' Second, there are those who possess a continuing inward sense of their distinctiveness and more or less openly declare and promulgate their consciousness as such. Many members of this group have been alienated from the Greek nation-state owing to the harsh assimilationist policies of the past and continuing economic underdeveiopment. 11l1l As one respondent described them, 'these are marginalized people who had lost members of their families during the Civil War and retain the hatred. The word Greek (Elli11as) means enemy to them. They don't talk about their beliefs, but about their family histories. That's the kind of dialogue that goes on.' It has been individuals from among this cohort that have led the high public profile lobbying efforts for 'Macedonian minority rights' in Greece, as well as the petitions brought before the European Court and the Council for Security and Co-operation in Europe. IIJI It was also those among this group who in January 1993 established the Macedonian Movement for Balkan Prosperity (Makedonihi Kinisi gia tin Vallwnihi Euimer/a). The overt agenda of this organization calls for respect for the freedom and human rights of the indigenous Macedonians in Greece according to the law, the constitution, and the professed ideals of the EEC, the CSCE, and the UN. They do, however, have connections with their brother activists across the border and abroad. They are regarded with great suspicion by both the Greek authorities and by Slavo-Macedonians with Greek national consciousness, both of whom label them as 'Skopians' or 'agents of Skopje' .11l2 Finally, there are those whose internal sense of distinctiveness is expressed more independently, though in conjunction with a consciousness of their conditions of existence within Greek civil society. Their external expressions of identity are oriented towards the Greek state, but not necessarily towards the Greek nation or the notion of Hellenism. Such individuals recognize and accept their differences from the 'Greeks', defending what they regard as a legitimate cultural distinctiveness. Yet while many - quite unjustly - also bear the label of subversive and unpatriotic 'Skopian agents', most in fact also distance themselves from the rhetoric and imagery being promulgated from across the border, as well as from that of local Macedonian Movement 148

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

for Balkan Prosperity activists. Identifying with neither Greek nor Macedonian nationalism, those in this group might best be considered the 'national homeless' .IOJ Such individuals are today caught, as it were, between the converging frontiers of contesting Greek and Macedonian nationalisms. In public arenas, from coffee shop conversations to rituals to interaction with others both inside and outside government administration, they strive to display their membership of the national collectivity. In more intimate, private settings, however, they express slightly different, more nuanced views. As one of these 'national homeless' put it, the present controversy over Macedonia and the Siavo-Macedonians in Greece: is the fault of the near-sighted politics of Greece. You go to Australia and nobody harasses you because of your language or your dances. A Macedonian is somebody who speaks the language and has the traditions (ithi kai ethima). I respect the Greek constitution, but they don't give me my human rights. I don't want to go 'over there' [i.e. to FYROMj. But we cannot say that there is homogeneity [here]. I am not the same as the Skopians. But don't call me a gypsy because I speak that language. In what century do we live? Do not discriminate against me. They [i.e. the Skopiansj are worse. They ask for autonomy. I would become a Turk before I become an autonomist. It is insulting to the name of God to curse the language of another person. Wherever non-homogeneity IS recognized, people prosper. Discrimination divides people. These words, interestingly, come from a man who was once a Graecomal1. In Greece, growing anxieties over deteriorating political conditions in the Southern Balkans have fostered growing intolerance towards the perceived 'cultural anomalies' of this group of 'national homeless'. Their expressions of distinctiveness are often misconstrued as those of national difference. At the same time, national activists and propagandists on the other side of the border and farther abroad, HH as well as some of their sympathizers in the Florina area, play up those distinctions for their own purposes. As pawns in an escalating contest, this group has become trapped, so to speak, between a rock and a hard place. Many are proud of their ethnic heritage. But at the same time their collective sentiments continue to be denied legitimacy by Greek and Macedonian nationalists, who persist in ascribing to such individuals views, attitudes, and loyalties that are not their own. It may be that present-day tensions in Macedonia are, in fact, best interpreted from the perspective of continuing national conflict. Yet there has been little concern or appreciation for how this protracted century-long contest over Macedonia has been perceived by local inhabitants caught up in the struggle, how it has affected them, and how they themselves have reacted to 149

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

it. Nation-building begins with a vision, and follows with a programmatic plan. But even the best-laid plans, it is said, may go awry. Such are the dialectics of social life. Until we can move beyond the level of vulgar polemics, we will not be able to understand the present conditions of national consciousness in this region, much less formulate effective responses to the dialectical processes of nation-building.

THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

4

Acknowledgements Fieldwork and archival research for this paper were supported through a generous grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. I would like to express my profound gratitude to the trustees and staff of the Foundation for the financial assistance necessary for this timely research. The present form of this paper grew from a shorter draft presented at the Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium at Berkeley, California in October 1993. A subsequent, full-length draft was presented at the Oxford University Workshop on Minorities in Greece, organized by Richard Clogg. I would like to eX'p~ess my gratitude to Richard Clogg for including me in that unforgettable mlI1l-conference. Other panellists also deserve recognition and thanks for their valuable comments and support. Philip Cat'abott read an earlier version of this manuscript and dedicated his valuable time to pointing out certain historical considerations that an anthropologist's eye may sometimes miss. A number of other colleagues and friends have made my life more interesting and more productive when pressure from nationalist zealots seemed to grow unbearable. To thank only a few by name, Michael Herzfeld, Loring Danforth, Adamantia Pollis, Andonis Liakos, Laurie Hart, and Gregory Ruf come to the forefront of my mind.

Notes

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13

(NB: HAM/GDM = Historical Archive of Macedonia/General Directorate of Macedonia) 1 As was common th~ough~ut the region, the village name was changed to its present Greek form 111 the late 1920s; see Dimitris Lithoxoou, Meiollotika zitimata kat ethlliki syne/dist stin Ellada. Atasthalies tis Ellilli/~is istoriographias (Athens, 1991),63-4. 2 For a!1(~th~r account of the same ceremony, see Ellinilws Vonas, 11 August 1959. SimIlar oath ceremOl1les took place 111 the village of Kria Nera near Kastona, Kastol'la, 8 September 1959, and in Kardia near Ptolemaida, Ellinikos Von'as, 8 July 1959. See also K. Ioannidis, Abollt the Assimilatioll of the Slavo!Jhones (Florina, 1960). . 3 Such a scenario poses important historical questions concerning the historical 'Greekness' of Macedonia that have yet to be adequately addressed in Greek historiography. One cannot help but wonder what happened to those invaders. Apostolos Vacaiopoulos, The Origins of the Greek Nation: The Byzantine

150

14 15 16 17 18

Period, 1204-1461 (New Brunswick, N.J, 1970),2-12 maintained that the Slavs were 'peaceful' peasants or shepherds who were Hellenized completely by the time of the Ottoman 'conquest' in the fourteenth century. Assertions of this sort, howevel; fail to explain the continull1g use of SlaVIC language, along with other overt characteristics of ethnicity, in Greek Macedonia into the twentIeth century. These issues will be addressed in detail below. The term 'Macedonian Fighters' refers to the combatants who fought on the Greek side during the bloody 'Macedonian Struggle' that was waged between Greece and Bulgaria for control over this predominantly Slavic-speaking region during the period 1904-8. The account in this paragraph follows that in Ellillilws Vorras, 11 August 1959. According to oral accounts from Florina, the Cultural Association 'Aristotle', named after the ancient philosophel; was founded in 1941 with the purpose of promoting to the outside world the Greekness of the area. This took place during the German occupation when the Bulgarians, allied with the Germans, were again active in the area, trying to win the hearts of the area's Slavic speakers and presenting a 'Bulganan' picture of the area to the outside world (see belowl. HAM/GDM, File no. 90 (Propagandas: 1924-1925), Letter of the Prefect of Florina to the General Directorate of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Confidential Protocol no. 6, Florina, 13 January 1925. Evangelos Kofos, 'Dilemmas and OrIentations of Greek policy in Macedonia, .1878-1886', Bal/wll Stltdies, XXI (1980) 45-55. This 'central zone' of Macedonia was defined as a region with a 'polyglot, mixed Christian population, mostly Slavic-speaking 111 the countryside and Greek- and Vlach-speaking in the urban and semi-urban centres, with pockets of Albanian-speaking Christians'. The northern zone of Macedonia was defined as one with a clearly Slavic population who readily allied themselves with the Exarchate. The southern zone was regarded as a purely Greek one, Sofia Vouri, Ehpaide(si hal etlmikisl110s sta Val/wllia. I peri/Jtosi tiS Voreiodytilus Ma/;:.edollias 187()-1904 (Athens, \992). Vouri, ibid. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 49. in 1913, following the Second Balkan War, the geographic region of Macedonia was divided between neighbouring Greece (51 per cent), Serbia (34 per cent), and Bulgaria (15 per cent), Konstantinos Vakalopoulos, KathmlcrIIli 17 July 1988. Each of these countries subsequently launched assimilationist campaigns aimed at incorporating the population of their newly acquired parts of Macedonia into their respective nation-states. In this chapter, I address only the policies of the Greek government and its regional administrators and their cffects on transformmg the ethnic identity and national consciousness of the local Slavic-speaking population in what hecame Greek Macedollla. I-IAM/GDM, File no 90 (see Note 7 above) 4. HAM/GDM, File no. 87 (Police Activities - Propagandas: March-December, 1922), Letter from Krionas, Prefect of Florina, to the Leader of the Revolution, Florina, 16 December 1922, 2. Steven Harrell, 'Ethnicity, local interests, and the state: Yi communities in southwest China', Comparative Stlldies ill SocIety alld I-l is/ory, XXXII (1990) 515-48. Morton Fried, The No/ioll of Tribe (Menlo Park, CA, 1975). There are, of course, additio·nal factors to take into consideration 111 any wellrounded analysis of identity and consciousness. These include, for example, the

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19

20

21

22

23

notions of 'fake' consciousness or identity (i.e. that which is deliberately contrived to achieve some end or purpose) such as that manifest by the 'Bulgarian' village president quoted at the beginning of this section. There is also the issue of 'false' consciousness or identity. By thIS we refer to an mcorrect awareness of one's position in a social collectivity; a condition that develops when one perceives oneself as a memher of a collectivity but lacks an awareness or understanding of those traits, conditions, or factors which, objectively speaking, place that indivIdual outside of, or in oppositIOn to, that collectivity. While I recognize such distinctions, limitations of space and the restrictive nature of the present analysis preclude an extended treatment of these issues in this chapter. It is important to note that the data on Ivlacedonia collected by Greek state administrative personnel that still survive today in government archives do not refer to the ethnicity of the area '5 inhabitants per se. Rather, the classifications employed and the social diviSIons made can be more properly termed 'national categories', as they refer to the perceived Ideological inclinations towards particular nation-states in the region (such as Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Turkey). Failure to distinglllsh between these 'national' classifications and the 'ethnic' composition of the population has contributed to a conceptual muddle on the part of many historians dealing with Macedol1la, a topic I have dealt with elsewhere, Karakasidou, 'Fields of Wheat, Hills of Shrub: Agrarian development and the dialectics of ethnicity and nationalism in northern Greece, 1870-1990', PhD, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, 1992 now published as Fields of Wheat, I-fills o( Blood: Passages to Nationhood ill Greek Macedonia /870-1990 (Chicago 1997), and 'Politicizing Culture: Negating ethnic identity m Greek Macedonia', JOllmal o( Modem Greeh Stlldies, XI (\993) 1-27. HAM/GDM File no. 53 (Population Statistics of the Educational Districts of Vodena, Karatzova, and Gevgeli, 1911 ,1913,1915), T~lble A: Florina District: Ethnological census of the population's inhabitants. According to the same statistics, of the 400 people living in Krapeshtina (that is, Atrapos) during 1911-15,225 (56 per cent) had been labelled by the authorities as 'Bulgarians', and 175 (44 per cent) as Greeks. The village Itself, howevel~ was entirely 'BulgarIan-speaking'. As of \935, Krapeshtina had a total of 92 families, of whIch 66 (72 per cent) were of Slavic 'morale' (phrolllll1a), while the remainmg 26 (28 per cent) were 'foreign-speakers' of Greek 'sentiment' (sec Dimitris Lithoksoou, 'Two unpublished documems about the history and consciousness of the Slavo-Ivlacedonian minority durmg the pre-Metaxas period', Elaos Orioll, 6 .June 1992, 36-47 (in Greek)). In a lettcr dated 1934, First Lieutenant Stefanos GrigorIou reported that only one family in the village was Greek, while all the rest were 'Bulgarians'. The sole family with Greek consciousness was that of the local priest, yet even then the Greekness of this family was only ranked at 'Grade C' (ibid. : 39). In the three Greek-Romanian villages, the languages spoken were AlbanianKoutsovlach, Koutsovlach-Greek, and Greek-Albanian. If these statistics are aggregated by the population of each of the national ethnological categories employed (Table III), we find that 'Bulgarians' made up the single largest category in the region (42.1 per cent), followed by 'Turks' (29 per cent) and 'Greeks' (27.4 per cent), and finally 'Romanians' (1.5 per cent). In terms of the language categories spoken in these villages (Table IV), the largest cohort is agam 'Bulgarian' (49.7 per cent), followed by 'Turiosh' (29 per cent). It should be borne in mind that a large number of Hellenized Vlachs from Monastiri (Bitola) settled in Florina immediately after the Second Balkan War in 1913, bringing to the area a large Greek-speaking commercial population.

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THE SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

24 j-IAM/GDM, File no. 90 (Note 7 above), I. 25 HAM/GDM, File no. 108 (Reports of the Third Army DiviSIon), report entitled, 'Study of the ethnological composition of the DIVIsion's area and the possible settlement of refugees there,' Salvanos, 9 April 1925. 26 It is important to note that Salvanos distinguished several (though slightly confusing and apparently overlapping) sub-categories among those people WIth Bulgarian leanings. These included: those with Bulgarian sentIments, fanatic Bulgarians, VOlIlgarophrolles (Slavophones with fanatic Bulgarian 'sentIments'), Ivery] fanatic VOlIlgarophrol1es, fanatics with Bulgarian feelings, extreme VOIIIgarophnmes, non-dangerous VOlllgarophr(Jlles, and very dangerous fanatic

VOlIlgarophrol1es.

.

27 HAM/GDM, File no. lOR (see note 25) 2. Salvanos recommended that It was the third category that the government should focus its propaganda efforts on, attempting to win them over by takmg advantage of their llldifferent 'psychiC leanings'. They were uneducated, he maintained, and Greece must be on guard to prevent them from bemg mfluenced by the Bulgarian money and propaganda that was reportedly being sent in from Bulgarian nationalists in the UnIted States (for Bulgarian propaganda activities m Greek Maccdol1la dUring the I 920s, see below). 2R Archives of AthanaslOs Souliotis-NikoIaidis, File no. 21II, Document no. 51, 6 August 1935 (cited in D. LIthoksoou, ''Two unpublished documcnts'). 29 The (national) category of 'Romanian' referred by thIS rubriC to those ethnic Vlachs under the influence of Romanian nationalist propaganda. These should be distinguished from those Vlach-speakers who felt Greek 111 national identity and were therefore listed under the category of 'foreign speakers IWIth Greek na tiona I consciousness \'. 30 As early as 1913 there appeared reports in the Archives of the Gcneral Directonne of Macedonia that Slavic-speakers from Macedol1la were 111lgratmg to America through the ports of Thessaloniki and Piraeus. ·rhe Greek state regarded this trend with anxiety, particularly because it was leading to a reduction m conscription quotas (HAM/GDM, File no. 70 (Emigration from Macedonia), Telegram from the Prefect of Florina, Agorastos, to the Directorate of Interior Affairs in Thessaloniki, II November 1913 ). Withll1 a year, however, the Greek authOrities had begun to take a direct role in overseemg these population movements. 31 Barbara Jelavich, History of the Ballwl1s: Twentieth Celllllry (Cambridge, ] 983), 136; S. P. Ladas, The Exchalzge of" Millorities: Blllgana, Greece, Til1·hey (New York, 1932). By ! 919, according to W. H. McNeill (The MetamorphOSiS of Greece sillce World War II IOxford, 1978 j), 46,000 Greeks from Bulgaria had resettled in Greek Macedonia, while 92,000 Slavs had moved from Greek Macedonia to Bulgaria. See also R. Pearson, NatuJl/al Mlllorities /11 Eas/em . Europe, 1848-1945 (London, 1 9 R 3 ) . . 32 By 1925, a major in the Gendarmerie went so tar as to recommend, pendll1g government approval, the deportation of those families found guilty of such activities even in preliminary investigations (HAlVI/GDM, File no. 90, Letter from Major M. Lambrakls, Commander of the Florina Gendarmerie Command, to the High Gendarmerie Command of Macedonia, ConfidentIal, Secret, and Personal, Florina, 20 Octo her 1925, Protocol no. 14711774 IConfidential Section\. 33 I-IAM/GDM, File No. 79 (Displacements, deportations: February-May 1914). Similarly, Mavrogordatos (George Mavrogordatos, Stillfwm [(epI/Mic: Social Coalitiolls alld Party Strategies ill Greece 1922-/936 (Berkeley, Calif. 1983), 248), and Kargakos (Sarandos Kargakos, From fhe MacedIJII1L1II IsslIe to the

153

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

Deadfocl~ :J(SlwfJie (Athens, 1992), 1(0) also mention that" Slavic speakers from villages Il1 I hrace ncar the Bulgarian border were exiled to Crete in an effort to neutralize Bulgarian propaganda in Thrace. Although there is no available concrete Il1formatlon on conditions in the Florina region specifically, reports from Bulgaria mall1talll that, in certain communities of the Kilkis Prefecture in Central Greek Ivlacec/ollIa, police gave local inhabitants what amounted to a time limIt for making the conversion to Hellenization. Those failing to do so faced deportation WIthin twenty-four hours (HAM/GDM, File no. 79, Letter from Sofia, Preporets, 2H March 1914). At this tllne, authorities 111 the Prefecture of Thessaloniki were obliging 'Bulgarian' families to sign declarations that they recogllIzed j-jellel1lsl1l and 'the sovereignty of the true Christian .religion of the PatrIarchate and that they would all send their children to Greek schools' (ibid.). 34 HAM/GDM, File no. 70, Letter from the Prefect of Florina to the Prefecture of Thessaioniki, 25 ./uly 1929, Protocol no. 10915. When applicants attempted to circumvent such barriers by filing their petitions in Thessaloniki rather than in Florina, that prefecture adopted a similar policy, claIming that such petitions \~ere motivated by 'familiar national reasons' (HAM/GDM, File No. 70, ConfIdential letter from the Prefecture of Thessaloniki to the Prefect of Florina, dated29 July 1929, Protocol No. 44). It should be pointed out that such actions were Il1 direct opposition to the poliCIes outlined for directorate, judicial, finanCIal, and law enforcement authorities in Macedonia bv the General Director of Ma.cedonia, Themistoklis Sofoulis. The latter had urged restraint and impartIalIty on the part of admlllIstrators, who were to extend 'fatherly conduct' to all people 'without regard to religion, race, and language, within the spirit of equal entitlement to citizenship and the protection of the law, which is the basis of Greek liberal government' (HAM/GDM, File no. 78 1Reports on Public SeclIrity: February-December 19141, Letter from the General Directorate of Macedonia in Thessaloniki to the Directoral, Judicial, Financial, and Police Authorities of Macedonia, 17 April 1914, Protocol no. 18H 17). 35 If the property of such applicants was found to have been confiscated bv the Greek government, their applicatIons to return were to be denied. If such l~roP­ erty were ll1tact, they were still to be denied permission to return for fear that they would bring information and intelligence to the VOllfgarizol1des in Greece (HAM/GDM, File no. H5 IBulgarian Immigrants: 1925, 192H, 1929J, Letter from the Border Sector to the Tenth Army DIvision of Veroia, Florina, 12 January 1929, Protocol no. 27/5). These findings were to be forwarded to the MinIstry of the Exterior (HAM/GDM, File no. 841Bulgarian Propaganda - Bands: December 1921-19221, Confidential letter from the General Directorate of Kozani and Florina to the Prefectures of the Area, Kozani, August 1922, Protocol no. 60(5). 'fhe Greek consular authorities in Bulgaria were ordered to screen applicants for return immigration meticulously. Many, It was reasoned, only pretended to he Greeks who had been displaced and forcibly expatriated by the BulgarIans, while in reality they were pure Bulgarians who had been deported by Greek military authorIties. (HAM/GDM, File no. 85, Letter from Sofia to the General Directorate of Macedonia, 23 August 1922, Protocol no. 3636. For examples of the type of information collected on individuals who wished to return to Greece, sec HAM/GDM, File no. H5.) 36 I-IAM/GDM, File no. 90 (see note 7), 7-H, Letter from the Prefect of Florina to the General Directorate of ThessalonikI,13 January 1925. 37 Ladas, Exchange of MinOrities, 106-7; Salva nos, HAM/GDM, File no. I 08 (see note 25) 10. 38 Mavrogordatos, Stilfbom Republic, 249. 39 I must hIghlight here a significant distinction in the manner in which the term

154

THE.SLAVO-MACEDONIAN 'NON-MINORITY'

'local' (do/Jioi) is applied in western and central Greek Macedonia. In the Florina area, dopioi is a term used by Greek speakers (refugee or otherWIse) to refer to the Slavic-speaking populatIOn. In the area of central Greek Macedol1la where I have also conducted field research, dOfJioi is a term used by all villagers (refugee and non-refugee alike) to refer to Greek speakers living m the area prior to, or at the time of, the refugees' arrival. 40 This propaganda was reportedly orchestrated by a sclf-proclalllled 'BulgarianMacedonian CommIttee', said to be centred in Lausanne (Switzerland). The Committee allegedly controlled an operating budget of ten million gold pieces collected from contributors in America and Europe (HAM/GDM, File no. 87, report entitled 'About the General Situation of the Propaganda Movement in Macedonia', from the Ninth Army Division, signed by D. Dlaletis IColonel of the InfantryJ, 4 October 1922, Staff Office no. 2, IConfidentIaIJ Protocol no. 138. Active members of this Committee were referred to m Greece as Komitadiides. 'Bulgarians' in America who had emigrated from the Florma villages of Layeni (present-day Triandaphyllia), Neret (Polypotamos), Kotori (Kato Idrousa) and Karapesnitsa (Atrapos) were accused of 'bad-mouthll1g' Greece and collecting funds for this Macedonian autonomous movement (HAM/GDM, File no. 88 IPropaganda, December 1923-January 1924J, Letter from the High Directorate of the Gendarmerie of Macedonia to the General DIrectorate of Macedonia, 18 April 1924, Protocol no. 6H/2). 41 HAMfGDM, File no. 84, Report from the Higher Military Directorate of Macedonia to the General Directorate in Thessalonil