Free Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence by David Brewer Page B

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 theninth 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 Churchitself 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