Salonica Terminus. Fred A. Reed
of Ibrahim Pasha in 1824, was rescued in extremis when a French-British-Russian fleet destroyed the Turkish armada at Navarino. The European victors, not the tattered and beaten Greek insurgents, would set the terms for the new state’s existence.
Hardly a democracy on the exalted Athenian model, the new country was ruled by the youthful Prince Otho of Bavaria, overseen by a Regency Council established by the protecting powers. One of the first initiatives of the tiny, poverty-stricken, debt-ridden state was to have the Church of Greece declared independent from the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the rock of faith upon which Orthodox religious identity had endured and thrived throughout the four hundred years of Ottoman rule. Where the Church of Constantinople ministered to the spiritual needs of a huge, multi-lingual and pluri-national flock spread across the Balkans and the Middle East, the newly founded Church of Greece was, from the beginning, the prisoner of the autocratic, Bavarian-ruled Greek state. The breakaway, which was denounced by the Patriarchate, touched off violent reactions among the religious conservatives who hewed to the strict traditions of Orthodoxy. Canonical communion between Constantinople and Athens was restored in 1850, but by then the Church of Greece had been totally converted to the secular values of nationalism, and transformed into an arm of the state, becoming the spearhead of the aggressive, irredentist ideology which has dominated Greece ever since.33 The greater tragedy lay in the gradual conversion of the supra-national Patriarchate, under the influence of Athens, into an agent of Hellenization. From there, it was a slippery slide into the morass of national-religious identity. The Serbs, the Bulgarians, and ultimately the Macedonians insisted on asserting their own national-spiritual autonomy from Constantinople. The stage was set for the fragmentation of the Balkans along the historic and cultural fault-lines, what Thierry Hentsch calls the “imaginary frontiers” whose bloody fissures, zigzagging through Bosnia, Kosova and Albania, gape open still.
Late that evening I return to Saint Demetrius’, drawn by the market atmosphere. More than a simple religious feast, the Saint’s day marked the end of the trading and agriculture season throughout the southern Balkans. Salonica itself had been, for centuries, the site of a market fair which drew merchants from as far away as Serbia, Italy and Asia Minor, an event which lives on, some claim, in its latest reincarnation, the Salonica International Trade Fair. On the broad portico in front of the church, ill-shaven, dark-skinned men with strange accents sell tiny Greek flags and balloons; stooped old women in tattered black dresses beg in the shadows, repeatedly invoking the grace of God, the Saint and of thee, most merciful passer-by. Mercifully, the passers-by drop coins into her gnarled hand. Saint Demetrius’ at night is redolent with beeswax and incense; for an instant I catch a whiff of rosewater, as if to underline the underlying community of devotion which, like the dark sea depths of the Mediterranean, unites Christianity with Islam, the invisible former inhabitant of this space.
PROFESSOR PAPADOPOULOS IS PRIMED for our meeting, a meeting for which I contrive to be precisely on time at nine o’clock one crisp morning. I’ve barely managed to sit down in his office in the Theology Faculty of the University of Thessaloniki before he plies me with books on—what else?—Saint Demetrius. No other saint in Orthodoxy has generated such a rich and extensive literature. All its religious tendencies claim him as their own, he volunteers. Even the quietists—the Hesychastes—a shadowy movement of fourteenth century mystics who fought a bitter and ultimately victorious battle against the ideas of the Western European renaissance. But, I insist, I want to know the professor’s own views on the saint’s identity; is he truly present in the icon, as professor Bakirdzis claimed the day before, or is the representation a symbolic one. Yes, yes, he reassures me, there is an identity of the two, the saint and his icon, in the sense that the icon leads you directly to the worship of the sacred. Professor Papadopoulos’ true interest is less the icon, more its hidden—and, he would argue, truer—essence. “Only when the Son of God becomes human,” he assures me, can He be depicted in His visible dimension. The icon, he explains, provides the agency.
Once the leap of faith has been made, worship through icons or the remains of saints provides solutions to the problems of life, he asserts. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?” he says, looking at me from under bushy, arched eyebrows. “We venerate the images of the saints because they express man’s material nature which in turn is created by God.” By now the professor is in full flight, and I’m nodding and muttering uh-huh as my pen scratches furiously across the pages of my note-book. “Science can only deal with what is materially existent. But religion deals with the immaterial. Studying religious objects like icons leads us to knowledge of God. But this is not science. You know, the work of Orthodox icon painters is a form of prayer; the painter is preserving the spirit in the work. Without faith, it’s impossible to depict the sacred, impossible to touch it.”
Professor Papadopoulos’ formula is both reassuring and troubling. The theoretical principal may be, from the theological point of view, unassailable. But when we come to an examination of cases, it is not always clear what exactly is the spirit preserved in the work and how it is apprehended by the faithful who look upon it. In the icon I have in mind, the one which best embodies the faith of the Salonicians, their protector Saint Demetrius, astride his rearing stallion, plunges a lance into the thorax of a bearded man who twists on the ground, teeth gnashing in finely drawn and exquisite agony.
Who is the bearded man that he should have so infuriated the saintly martyr? Greeks and Bulgarians both agree: the victim is a Bulgar. What they do not agree upon how he should be named.
In 1207 the Tsar of the Bulgars, Kalojan—John the Good—laid siege to Salonica, then a Frankish duchy. Those were dark days for Byzantium. Popish schismatics—the drunkards, master pillagers and freebooters who called themselves the Fourth Crusade—fresh from their conquest of Constantinople in 1204, defiled the throne and carved up the Byzantine dominions. Kalojan, his pride piqued at having been brushed aside like a vassal by the Latin conquerors, entered into a contre nature alliance with the Greeks. Restoring the offended glory of Orthodoxy may indeed have been the Tsar’s prime motivation. More probably, he longed to wear the crown of the Basilieus and had aimed for the main chance: establishment of a Bulgarian empire at Constantinople.34
Short-lived and tenuous, the alliance crested with the battle of Adrianople, where the Greco-Bulgar armies under Kalojan routed the Crusaders. Soon thereafter the alliance collapsed, and the Tsar turned vengefully on his erstwhile comrades-in-arms, who had meanwhile thrown in their lot with the Greek-speaking Empire of Nicea, in Asia Minor. He took to styling himself Romaioctonos, the “Roman Slayer.” In none too subtle a manner the nickname scornfully reminded the Byzantines that they would pay one day for the exploits of Basil II, known as Bulgaroctonos, the “Bulgar Slayer.” As for the Greeks, they called him—inimitably—Skyloïoannes, “John-the-Dog.”
Despite the population’s lack of enthusiasm for their current overlords, the Franks, the siege of Salonica dragged on, and as it did, the Tsar’s patience began to wane. Kalojan, relates a chronicler called Stavrakios, impudently implored Saint Demetrius to deliver the city to him, for which he would cause a great monastery to be built. Long converted to Orthodoxy, the Bulgars had come to venerate Saint Demetrius as ardently as they longed for his city. Were they to capture Salonica, the mounted saint would be theirs, blessing their military virtues and dreams of empire. Providentially, however, Kalojan was murdered in his tent by a rival. For the Greeks the Tsar’s death had clearly been the work of the saint himself, determined to protect his city from the Bulgars. Saint Demetrius, not a rival, had entered Kalojan’s tent and dispatched the presumptuous monarch while he slept.35
One can understand the frustration of the Bulgars—and their intense desire to lay hands on the icon which was, lest we forget, simultaneously the saint himself. Demetrius alone, so it seemed, had blocked their path when in the early years of the seventh century they swept into the southern Balkans from the steppes of Central Asia in the footsteps of their Hunnish predecessors, determined to build an empire of their own. All they lacked was a respectable capital city. Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, engrossed in plans for his campaign against the Sassanids in Persia, could not come to their aid. The people of Salonica were abandoned to their own devices. Repeatedly, relate the Miracles of Saint Demetrius, the monkish compilation of his life and posthumous achievements, the saint sallied forth