Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (21 page)

In view of these differences it is not surprising that there can be a gulf of incomprehension between the Church of England, young (less than 500 years old) and much concerned with behaviour, and the Orthodox Church with its much longer history and ultimately based on contemplation.

However, there is another Orthodox tradition that seems to run directly counter to this, and can also surprise Anglicans. This is the involvement of the Greek clergy in politics, not in this case political issues, such as campaigns against injustice or poverty, but political office. In the chaotic Greek conditions at the end of 1944 Archbishop Dhamaskinós became for fifteen months the Regent of Greece as a result of a hurriedly summoned conference in Athens, chaired by Churchill, in an unheated room lit only by hurricane lamps. This was in spite of Churchill’s earlier expression of the traditional Anglican distrust of the clergy in politics, calling Dhamaskinós ‘a pestilent priest, a survival from the Middle Ages’. Some years later, when Cyprus became independent in 1959, it was another archbishop, Makários, who was elected as first president of the new republic.

This political tradition too goes back to Byzantine times, when there was a debate, lasting throughout the Byzantine centuries and ultimately inconclusive, about the relative positions of the Emperor and the patriarch. The ideal was unruffled harmony between them: at the end of the
ninth century the Emperor Leo VI, in a statement drafted by the patriarch, maintained that ‘the state, like man, is formed of members, and the most important are the Emperor and the patriarch. The peace and happiness of the empire depends on their accord.’
³
But who took precedence if the accord broke down? One of the early church fathers, St John Christóstomos, had maintained that ‘the domain of royal power is one thing and the domain of priestly power another; and the latter prevails over the former.’
⁴
But there were occasions when the Emperor replaced the patriarch, though the appointment of the patriarch was officially in the hands of the Holy Synod, and other occasions when the patriarch excommunicated the Emperor. Though the debate was never conclusively resolved it was accepted that the patriarch had a crucial political role as well as a general spiritual one.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, the patriarch’s political function continued after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. In some ways it was extended. The patriarch was now responsible to the Ottoman authorities for the good behaviour of his flock and for ensuring that they paid their taxes to the state. These patriarchal powers and responsibilities were not limited to the Greek members of his church. They extended in principle to all the Orthodox churches that then or later were part of the Ottoman Empire: the patriarchates of Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch and the Slav Orthodox Churches within the empire, and outside it even the Russian, albeit nominally. Patriarchal rather than Turkish courts were to deal with all cases where only the Orthodox were involved, an adaptation of the Byzantine system of episcopal courts for cases involving clergy. The church was also responsible for education. But there was no longer any question of patriarch and secular ruler being equal, let alone of the patriarch being pre-eminent. The patriarch was a servant of the state of which the Sultan was the head.

During the centuries of Ottoman rule the Orthodox Church had three principal functions. It was specifically given the responsibility for education. It took upon itself the task of preserving the Greek language unchanged. And it was assigned the role, perhaps more retrospectively than at the time, of maintaining Greek identity, or – to avoid that elastic and disputed term – the Greeks’ sense of what it meant to be Greek.

The purpose of medieval Greek education was not to provide vocational training in the skills of different trades, and still less to give pupils an understanding of the wider world. It was designed to prepare a few for the priesthood, and the many simply to be able to follow the church services. Education might be free from interference by the Ottoman rulers, but it was constrained by the limitations that the Church
itself imposed. Thus for higher education there was only the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople to train the clergy, and it concentrated naturally enough on Church doctrine. Other academies may have been set up later in large cities such as Thessalonika, but we know little of them and they seem to have been short lived.

Otherwise there was only teaching in the villages, and it is an enduring myth that these classes had to be held in secret. Greeks of today still remember the children’s rhyme beginning ‘
Phengaráki mou lambró
’:

Why, the mystified child would ask, should it be the moon which lights the way to school, and the child would be told that because of Turkish oppression children had to creep from their homes at night to learn their language and religion secretly from the local
papás
.

Unlike most myths, this one has a known origin. In 1888 Nikólaos Gízis exhibited a painting, still widely reproduced, entitled ‘A Greek School in the Time of Slavery (
Dhoulía
)’. It showed a priest in a candle-lit church crypt teaching a surrounding group of children, a composition of dominant adult and obedient youngsters that Gízis often used. Some ten years later Iánnis Polémis published a poem based on this picture, and gave his poem the title ‘The Secret School’.
⁵
The poem has a stirring conclusion. From Christ’s image in the dome of the church, it proclaims, and from the immortal works of ancient Greece, and out of the enforced silence of slavery’s noose around the neck,

That the school had to be secret is no more than implied in the text of the poem and ‘Secret School’ is explicit only in the title. It seems that it was the wish to believe that schools had to be secret, as further proof of Turkish tyranny, rather than any evidence for them, which prompted generations of Greeks to accept the story. The myth has been an enduring one: until a few years ago secret schools featured in history lessons for primary- and secondary-school pupils, and only when they reached university were they taught that secret schools had never existed. The
reality was much more mundane: village classes were held at night because the children, and probably often the papás too, were working in the fields all day.

Reports of the state of education in Greece, from Greeks and foreigners alike, were universally gloomy. It was hardly flourishing to start with. Yennádhios himself wrote, ‘The state of education is pitiable,’ and lamented that priests were few in number, and that even those were unfit and uneducated.
⁶
A century after the fall of Constantinople Martin Crusius wrote: ‘In all Greece studies nowhere flourish. They have no public academies or professors, except for the most trivial schools in which the boys are taught to read the Horologion, the Octoëchon, the Psalter, and other books which are used in the liturgy. But amongst the priests and monks those who really understand these books are very few indeed.’
⁷
Crusius received a letter from an official of the patriarchate estimating the total number of Greek students: ten in Constantinople, four in Chíos, twenty in the Peloponnese, and barely fifty in all the Greek communities put together.

It was Italy, and in particular Venice and Padua (part of the Venetian Empire from 1406) that kept Greek education alive. In the decades after the fall of Constantinople, as most of Greece came under Ottoman rule, Venice became a magnet for Greek students, mainly of course from Venetian Crete and Cyprus. In 1500 Venice established a new academy for humanist studies, to teach exclusively in Greek, and a third of the scholars were Greeks. Cardinal Vissaríon (Bessarion), a fifteenth-century Orthodox bishop who converted to Catholicism, left his library of some 800 Greek books to the Venetian state. Manutius and others in Venice printed books in Greek. In Padua the university, founded in 1222, was famous for medical and philosophical studies, and a professorship of Greek was established there in 1463. Padua has been called the alma mater of the entire captive Greek nation.

The great difference between the Italian city-states and Greece was that in Italy education was state funded. The state needed the doctors and lawyers that the universities produced, and universities were supported by special taxes, in Rome on imported wine, in Padua, bizarrely, on prostitutes. By contrast the Greek Church was chronically short of money for education. The effect can be seen in a letter from a teacher in Iánnina at the end of the seventeenth century, who wrote: ‘Three years have now gone by, and no money has arrived at our school. I want to leave. I am unable to work, borrow or eat.’
⁸

It was money that began to revive Greek education in the later eighteenth century, money that came from the increasingly prosperous Greek
merchants. This prosperity was a result of the treaties that ended the Russian–Turkish war of 1768–74, which gave Greek merchant ships access to the Black Sea, and merchants on land freedom to trade in all the Habsburg territories. During the Napoleonic wars blockade-running also proved lucrative. Merchants not only had the means to promote education, but also could appreciate its value when handling complicated international trade and dealing with sophisticated foreigners. But this meant a revolution in education: it had to become secular, not church bound.

The results were obvious to the Reverend William Jowett when in 1818 he visited the Greek school at Kidhoniés on the Anatolian coast. The school had been established fifteen years earlier, and had 200 students, a library of over 7,000 books, and many scientific instruments. Jowett attended a class in which the teacher was explaining Newtonian astronomy, as part of a three-year course. ‘I liked the pupils’ practice of putting questions to him,’ wrote Jowett, ‘though some asked very absurd ones,’ and he concluded that ‘the scientific part of education in Greece is evidently in its infancy.’
⁹

As revolution approached, the westernised Greek intelligentsia began to see education as the necessary key to success. The French Revolution, said Adhamántios Kora
ḯ
s, was the result of education, and a Greek revolution too would be based on it. Kapodhístrias, first president of independent Greece, wrote that the Greeks should devote themselves exclusively to education, declaring that ‘All other object is vain, all other work is dangerous.’
¹⁰
But for Kora
ḯ
s the purpose of education was to inspire the young with the glories of the past, and for Kapodhístrias education was primarily about moral teaching. For neither was it the very limited education that the Church had more or less preserved for the previous four centuries.

These limitations of church education are to some extent understandable. The Church did not see its function as providing training in skills – that was the job of the multifarious trade guilds – nor in equipping the young for material advancement in any sphere. Nor did it have any interest in the wider teaching of philosophy or science, which could undermine religious belief. Its mission was the maintenance of Orthodoxy, and a crucial part of this was the preservation of the Greek language in its original form.

The language to be preserved was
koiné
(kiní) a form of the Attic Greek used by the great prose writers and dramatists of the fifth century
BC
, adopted by Philip of Macedon, and spread by his son Alexander. It became the lingua franca of the Greek world, and is the language of
the Greek New Testament and of the liturgy of the Greek Church up to present times.

Anyone who glances through these
koiné
writings and knows some Ancient Greek will find familiar features. Ancient and
koiné
Greek are very close, and English schoolboys studying Ancient Greek used to be encouraged to follow the chapel readings from the New Testament in the
koiné
version, thus combining secular with religious education. In this version one finds, for example,
ouk
instead of modern
dhen
,
gar
for
epidhí
, and the elegantly succinct
men
. . .
de
for ‘on the one hand . . . on the other hand’. The long defunct optative occasionally appears, and in the Beatitudes, detailing the rewards that the virtuous shall receive, all the ‘shall’s are in the old one-word inflected future, not
tha
with a form of the present.

The church was intent on preserving these ancient forms of Greek, and when in 1638 a version of the New Testament in contemporary Greek was published abroad the Church quickly had it suppressed. There was one ancient word that the Church was especially concerned to keep:
ichthís
for fish, still to be found on the signs above fishmongers’ shops. The fish had been the covert symbol of the early Christians, not only because the disciples had been called to be fishers of men, but also because the letters of
ichthís
formed an acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.