Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches: A Concise History of the Religious Cultures of Greece from Antiquity to the Present

By Vasilios N. Makrides

Covering an expanse of more than three thousand years,Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches charts, in one concise volume, the history of Greece’s religious cultures from antiquity all the way through to present, post-independence Greece.
Focusing on the encounter and interaction between Hellenism and (Orthodox) Christianity, which is the most salient feature of Greece’s religious landscape—influencing not only Greek religious history, but Greek culture and history as a whole—Vasilios N. Makrides considers the religious cultures of Greece both historically, from the ancient Greek through the Byzantine and the Ottoman periods up to the present, and systematically, by locating common characteristics and trajectoriesacross time. Weaving other traditions including Judaism and Islam into his account, Makrides highlights the patterns of development, continuity, and change that have characterized the country’s long and unique religious history.
Contrary to the arguments of those who posit a single, exclusive religious culture for Greece, Makrides demonstrates the diversity and plurality that has characterized Greece’s religious landscape across history. Beautifully written and easy to navigate, Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches offers an essential foundation for students, scholars, and the public on Greece’s long religious history, from ancient Greece and the origins of Christianity to the formation of "Helleno-Christianity" in modern Greece.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780814795941

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Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches

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Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches

A Concise History of the Religious Cultures of Greece from Antiquity to the Present

Vasilios N. Makrides

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

© 2009 by New York University

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Makrides, Vasilios, 1961 –

Hellenic temples and Christian churches : a concise history of

the religious cultures of Greece from antiquity to the present /

Vasilios N. Makrides.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-9568-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8147-9568-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Greece—Religion. I. Title.

BL980.G8M36 2009

200.9495—dc22 2009009940

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials

to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of my father, Nikolaos (1907–89),

who experienced the vicissitudes

of the Romeic Hellenism of Asia Minor

We feel that even when all possible scientific

questions have been answered, the problems

of life remain completely untouched.

Of course there are then no questions left,

and this itself is the answer.

—Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.52

(emphasis in original)

Contents

Preface

Introduction

I Religious Profile of Greece: An Overview Across Time

1 Hellenic Polytheism, Hellenism, Hellenic Tradition

2 Christian Monotheism, Orthodox Christianity, Greek Orthodoxy

3 Judaism, Islam, and Other Religious Cultures

II Hellenism and Christianity: Interactions Across History

4 Antithesis, Tension, Conflict

5 Selection, Transformation, Synthesis

6 Symbiosis, Mixture, Fusion

7 Individuality, Distinctiveness, Idiosyncrasy

Epilogue

Notes

Index

About the Author

Preface

The story of this book goes back to a 1996 congress at the University of Crete on the treatment and appropriation of the ancient Greek heritage, both in Greece and abroad. My own paper focused on the various modes of interaction between Hellenism and Orthodox Christianity in modern Greece. Since then I have reflected further on this subject matter and gathered additional material. My plan was to extend the temporal limits initially set and, if possible, consider this topic through the entirety of Greek history. This plan did not get set in motion until I started discussions with New York University Press about writing a concise religious history of Greece. The result is the present book, designed for students, academics, and other interested parties. In spite of its synthetic character, this volume does not simply summarize existing knowledge. To be honest, this was unavoidable in many cases. But all in all, its contributions are to bring together Greece’s religious past and present, and to consider its religious plurality as a whole, from a diachronic perspective—that is, tracing its development over time.

The endeavor to write such a book was intimidating for a number of reasons. To state the obvious, I am not an expert on all periods of Greek religious history (given the ever-growing specialization in academia, perhaps nobody is). Yet because holistic perspectives that aid in the understanding of religious change over long periods of time and in the context of broader social, political, and cultural transformations always intrigued me, I took the challenge. Certainly, all books are special in one way or another, but the present one was even more so. From the moment of its conception, I had to deal with a fundamental difficulty created by the nature of its material: How to adequately cover such an enormous temporal span within the limited space allowed? What exactly ought to be mentioned or left out, and following which criteria? Ideally, this huge topic could be better treated either in a multivolume work or in a special encyclopedia. Despite all this, I decided to adhere to a specific research agenda that had germinated in my mind over the past few years—selecting pertinent material, putting emphasis on some aspects of the topic rather than others, and interpreting the available evidence. In this sense, responsibility for any shortcomings remains entirely my own.

At the press, I would like to thank Jennifer Hammer for inviting me to write this book and offering her expertise on many issues, as well as for her flexibility in extending the manuscript delivery deadline. I am also grateful to the editorial staff of New York University Press, especially to Despina Papazoglou Gimbel, for their help in the course of producing this book, as well as to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their suggestions. Additional thanks go to Charalampos Tsochos, Stamatios Gerogiorgakis, Katharina Waldner, Brigitte Kanngiesser, Sebastian Rimestad, Gabrielle Begue, Katerina Seraïdari, Stavroula Sdrolia, and my secretary, Diana Püschel, for their help at various stages of this project. Last, but not least, I am grateful to Barbara Hobbie, Matthew Uttley, and Blossom Stefaniw for smoothing out my prose.

VASILIOS N. MAKRIDES

Ertfurt/Leipzig

Note on the figures: Those without indication of provenance stem from the author’s personal collection or from unidentified sources. The author has tried to locate all potential copyright holders, but this proved impossible for various reasons (e.g., due to the age of the material). If, however, a copyright holder raises legitimate claims after the publication of this book, the author will be ready to rectify this position accordingly.

Introduction

When visiting the Greek capital of Athens for the first time, a contemporary foreign visitor might be struck by the unfamiliar: a different mentality; peculiar habits and practices; indeed, another way of life. Manuals like The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Greeks can provide clues only to a certain extent. Things are, in principle, the same when it comes to religion. The visitor may have some inkling from school days about the glory that was ancient Greece in Classical times and may even remember the names of a few ancient Greek heroes or thinkers. Certainly, it is a must to know something about the rock of the Acropolis and its majestic Parthenon. The citadel of the ancient city, its sacred locus, still stands, arguably the most internationally recognizable trademark of Athens. In ancient times, it served a religious function, being the site for important celebrations like the festival of Panathenaia, which honored the goddess Athena as the city’s patron deity. Today, it is simply an open museum for tourist attraction, the new Acropolis Museum having been built nearby. The massive wave of visitors has created severe problems for preserving the Acropolis; in fact, it has been designated one of world’s leading monuments to be endangered by tourism.

Today’s visitor has the chance to glimpse many surviving antiquities in the city related to religion, such as the remaining colossal pillars of the temple of Olympian Zeus in central Athens. A visit to the National Archaeological Museum also promises abundant cultural rewards. One can even observe the rich past of the city by traveling on the magnificent new metro. At some stations, glass display cases reveal selected exhibits uncovered during digs. In fact, metro construction unintentionally occasioned the most systematic archaeological excavation program ever, in order to unearth the city underneath the city—namely ancient Athens.

Further, the visitor can easily notice the omnipresence of Christianity and the Orthodox Church in the capital. Near Syntagma Square stands the imposing building of the Athens Cathedral. In Plaka, an old historical neighborhood of Athens, one finds picturesque Byzantine churches. Other Christian places of worship, like the eleventh-century Kapnikarea or the Petraki Monastery, can also be seen in central Athens. At the summit of the Lycabettus Hill is a chapel dedicated to Saint George. Finally, the priests, or occasionally the monks, seen strolling through Athens make it clear that the city has a Christian character, one that has been deeply influenced by the Orthodox Church (despite the fact that the ancient Greek monuments are more attractive to tourists than the Christian and Byzantine ones). In light of these contrasts, what were the historical relations between Hellenic and Christian traditions and how did they affect the religious identity of Greece and the Greeks?

The visitor gleans the same impression in other parts of Greece—the interplay between Hellenic and Christian vestiges can be traced everywhere. For instance, the island of Aegina in the Argo-Saronic Gulf was an important place in antiquity and today offers up many monuments, including the impressive Doric temple of the Athena Aphaia (fifth century BCE). The same island is still known among Orthodox Christians today for another reason: the holy relics of the highly revered modern Greek saint Nektarios Kephalas (1846-1920) are preserved there in the Convent of the Holy Trinity and generate a great deal of religious tourism.

Not surprisingly, religious sightseeing in Athens and the rest of Greece includes Jewish and Islamic monuments. In addition to the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens, there is a museum and Holocaust Memorial in Thessalonica, Greece’s second largest city, which served as home to countless Jewish people for centuries up to World War II. Both sites testify to the Jews’ long historical presence in Greece. Due to the lengthy period of Ottoman rule, Greece is also full of vestiges of Islamic life, especially mosques used today for secular purposes by the Greek state or religious purposes by the Muslim minority in Western Thrace. In the flea market of Monastiraki in Athens, for example, one can see the Tzisdaraki Mosque; built in 1759 and restored in 1918, it houses the Museum of Greek Folk Art today. Interestingly enough, there is much more to say at present about Greece’s religious diversity in the wake of the arrival of numerous immigrants of varied provenance since the early 1990s.

Bearing this in mind, the main objective of this book is to present Greece’s religious history from a diachronic perspective, starting from antiquity, moving through the Byzantine and the Ottoman periods, and extending through to the modern Greek nation-state—all in this single concise volume. This is precisely where the first problem arises: how to cover an enormous temporal span of more than three thousand years in just one book? Needless to say, I have been extremely selective in all respects, from the material on which I drew to the notes and bibliographic citations that I decided to include. This made the whole endeavor extremely difficult. How can one do justice to selected persons, events, or cases by squeezing them into one or two paragraphs when several monographs already exist for every one of them? There was no other alternative for such a synthetic book, so my approach has been to maintain a balance between detailed analyses and holistic perspectives.

The first part of the book introduces Greece’s varied religious scene: first, the development and legacy of the Hellenic polytheistic religion; second, the emergence, spread, and establishment of Christianity, a monotheistic system that later on in its Orthodox version monopolized Greece’s religious landscape; and finally, other religious cultures integral to Greece’s religious history, particularly Judaism and Islam. The interactions and interconnections among the major and the minor religious cultures of Greece are also taken into account.

The second part of the book applies the synthetic agenda even more forcefully. First, at the systematic level, I have tried to delineate the various modes of interaction that typify Hellenism and Christianity throughout Greek history. In given historical moments, both Hellenic and Christian actors oriented themselves accordingly and went into action. These modes have been subsumed under the following four clusters, which should not be regarded as hermetically sealed from one another but as overlapping and complementary: (1) antithesis, tension, conflict; (2) selection, transformation, synthesis; (3) symbiosis, mixture, fusion; and (4) individuality, distinctiveness, idiosyncrasy.

Second, at the historical level, I follow a conventional chronological division of Greek history by period: (1) the ancient one, up to 330 CE; (2) the Byzantine one, 330–1453; (3) the Ottoman one, 1453–1830; and (4) the modern one, 1830 to the present. The book examines each of the above clusters over successive eras and through all periods of Greek history. This method thus combines a vertical systematic perspective with a horizontal historical one, treating each mode of interaction over the longue durée.

My aim is to show the complex ways in which these two main religious cultures have intertwined and interacted with each other throughout Greek history, and the consequences thereof. The historical examples and cases selected to show this vary considerably, from political and church decisions, as well as theological-philosophical discourses, to the manifold world of artistic creation and popular religious practices. Understandably, all these examples and cases do not pertain in the same manner and frequency to all periods of Greek history, for each bears its own distinct socio-historical background and characteristics. No doubt, it would be possible to adduce hundreds of similar examples to support the arguments of the book. After all, my intent is not a detailed inventory and analysis of all pertinent material but rather an attempt to regard Greece’s religious history over the centuries as a whole.

So why did I decide to write such a book? My belief is that it fills a gap. There exist numerous excellent introductory or specialized books covering various periods of Greece’s religious history, whether ancient, medieval, or modern. There are also many books that deal with the religious history of even shorter periods, such as Hellenistic, Late Antique, or Late Byzantine times. Still, we lack a more synthetic approach to Greece’s religious history, one that considers it diachronically and as a whole. Books on Hellenic religion usually end in Late Antiquity and hardly deal with its fate in Byzantine and later eras, save some scantily referenced exceptions. The same is true for books dealing with other periods of Greece’s religious history, rendering the historical record rather fragmented and compartmentalized. This should not be viewed as problematic per se because it goes hand in hand with the specialized research of those scholars delving into Greece’s religious history. This is also mirrored in the institutionalization of the respective disciplines and the division of labor within academia. Regarding Greece’s general history and culture, there have been some synthetic, usually collective attempts,¹ yet a similar effort is missing in its religious history. There are a few books covering selected aspects of it diachronically,² but their perspectives, goals, and ranges are different from those of this volume.

Another prime motivation for writing this book was to tease out the complex interrelations between Hellenism and Christianity, the most salient aspect of Greece’s religious history. This is hardly a new topic, for the studies devoted to it to date are legion. But again, something is still missing. First, most of these studies have been undertaken in the standard academic division of labor mode. Second, this topic has been approached many times with specific presuppositions and related value commitments in mind (e.g., pro-Christian, pro-Hellenic, anti-Christian, and so on). Their goal was to prove, for instance, either the harmonious synthesis between Hellenism and Christianity or, conversely, the disastrous effects of Christianity on the Hellenic religion and culture.

This book, without claiming ultimate objectivity, avoids taking sides. Instead, written from a historical-cultural perspective, it sets out to show the complexity and the plurality of different voices, both major and minor, that characterize Greece’s religious scene over the centuries. Greeks have responded to the religious cultures of their geographical area in different ways. There were varied layers of reception, interpretation, and appropriation, each based on distinct factors, conditions, and time frames. There was neither a single voice about this matter nor a single perspective and goal. In fact, quite the opposite was true: many diverse, even contradictory, voices, orientations, opinions, and decisions arose. Contrary to widespread discourses about the religious homogeneity and unity of Greece in history and at present, its religious scene was, and still is, quite colorful, multiform, and varied—in short, chock-full of differences and antinomies.

Although not serving any particular ends, ideological or otherwise, I am aware of the unavoidable imperfections and limitations of this undertaking. For example, the aforementioned modes of interaction between Hellenism and Christianity are not objective realities and historical entities but rather my own constructs, naturally with some degree of arbitrariness. They should be viewed as conceptual tools to better capture, describe, analyze, and understand the phenomena under consideration. This work reflects our awareness that reality is much more differentiated, ambiguous, and polyvalent than our theoretical schemes and conceptual frames, which, despite their eventual usefulness, are relative and contextual.

Let us now turn to the terminology used in this book and clarify related matters. Terminological problems are notorious for resisting definitive resolution. All terms have their own history and concomitant problems, and the same is true for all alternatives suggested. This is more so the case in a book such as this, which covers a huge temporal span. Simply by looking at the various names attributed to Greeks over the centuries, one becomes keenly aware of the problem. There have been recent attempts at an official level in the Greek state to replace the term Greece with Hellas ( λλάς) for wider international use. Yet this falls far short of establishing a single accepted designation for the country and its citizens worldwide.³ Is it possible to find generally acceptable terms and use them diachronically, even if they were used in various epochs, in different contexts, by diverse actors, and with a distinct meaning each time? Are these terms applicable to the entire religious history of Greece? My decision was to opt for a specific terminology without, however, totally excluding other terms that could also be used. I deemed it necessary to keep a balance between consistent terminology and inevitable deviations from it. This approach preserves the evidence of patterns of continuity and plural diversification in Greece’s long religious history.

Moreover, I have opted to talk in this book about religious cultures and not about religions alone. Scholarly discourse on the relationship between religion and culture is extensive and varied, especially in the wake of the widely influential essay by social anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System, which did not, however, remain immune to criticism. After all, both categories—religion and culture—are cornerstones of the dominant discourse of modernity, and their use and concomitant ideology have been subjected to various criticisms, especially by those holding postcolonial perspectives.⁴ Further, for many Christian theologians religion is something higher or superior to culture, a transcendent force that transforms and radically molds culture (understood in mostly mundane terms). The perennial debate is whether to consider religion as a subset of culture or vice versa. This is a seemingly intractable problem to solve once and for all. Yet, even as a subset of culture, religion may overlap or coincide in many cases with culture as whole—which is why it is pertinent to opt for the term religious culture. As scholar of religious studies Mark Hulsether aptly wrote, "Because of these overlaps, there is a major benefit in approaching religious studies as the study of religious cultures. It allows us to translate analyses of religions—their genealogies, relations with power, prospects within postmodern society, and so on—into analyses of culture."⁵

From this perspective, religion as a socio-historical phenomenon is always embedded in specific cultural contexts and is not seen as a separate system beyond its surrounding culture. We approach religion and culture in open and flexible ways rather than with clear-cut definitions and demarcations, directing our attention not only to clearly religious manifestations but also to other realms that may be under the influence of religion. The way that religion is able to influence and to connect other domains of culture, serendipitously articulating related discourses, is particularly noteworthy. Yet this is a reciprocal process, for other domains of culture may also influence religion. These observations do not mean, however, that religion constitutes the core component of culture, nor that it should be regarded and treated as such. Actually, in modern times religion has either come under attack from other cultural forces or has been subjected to broader socio-political and cultural orders and assigned a subordinate role. The development of West European modernity in terms of churchstate relations—to some extent also applicable to the modern Greek case—accounts for religion’s secondary social status today.

Needless to say, Greece’s two main religious cultures were far from identical, despite interconnections or elements of continuity. In ancient Greece, religion was not strictly separated from other spheres of life. Being religious within the coordinates of antiquity exhibited many aspects of behavior that are barely recognizable in modern, structurally and functionally differentiated societies. Even the term Hellenism incorporated a broad cultural formation, of which religion became an indispensable part. Aside from this, the position and role of religion could vary dramatically, even within the same religious culture. This is true of Christianity with regard to the Orthodox Church in Byzantium and to that in the modern Greek state. The role of the church was not even the same during the various phases of Byzantine history itself. Consequently, it is essential to pay attention to specific socio-historical contexts in order to discern continuities, variations, or particular phenomena within religious cultures.

Further, this book is about religious cultures of Greece and not in Greece. This formulation is not accidental but rather quite purposeful. Talking about religious cultures in Greece would signify a meticulous examination of all these cultures found historically and diachronically in Greek territory. This is not, however, the purpose of this book. On the contrary, the expression of Greece places greater emphasis on the religious cultures that preeminently characterize Greece’s religious scene, both historically and diachronically, namely Hellenism and Christianity. Other religious cultures, especially those of Judaism and Islam, appear but do not constitute the main axis of this concise history. Although their historical and contemporary presence in Greece is incontestable, we cannot argue that Judaism and Islam come immediately to mind when talking about Greece’s religious history.

Concerning the polytheistic religious culture of ancient Greece, the terms ancient Greek religion or simply Greek religion, sometimes pluralized, are generally accepted. In parallel, the term Hellenic religion is also used but not very often. This lexicology reflects some commonly interchangeable ways of expressing ancient Greece and Hellas as well as ancient Greeks and Hellenes. Although I discuss ancient Greeks, ancient Greek society, and the like, I decided for various reasons to use the term Hellenic with regard to religion or other domains of culture that had to be differentiated from Christian ones.

Why? First, the term Hellenic more clearly differentiates this specific religious culture from the Christian one that has been and is still considered today "the Greek religion or the religion of the Greeks. Second, the term Hellenic religion is more closely related to Hellenism" ( λληνισμ ς) and its derivatives, used especially in Late Antique times as denoting paganism and as opposed to Christianity. Initially, this term connoted the entire Greek culture, an amalgam of various strands of thought, language, religion, mythology, images, practices, and influence, as it came to be formed at different stages in antiquity up to the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods. But the term took on a new meaning in Late Antiquity.⁶ For example, Emperor Julian used the term Hellenism in the fourth century in addressing a high priest of Galatia named Arsacius in the hope of reviving ancestral religion and traditions; he also used the term Hellenist ( λληνιστ ς) in the sense of pagan.⁷ In Christian usage, the term Hellenism negatively denoted a false Hellenic polytheism, superseded by the truth of Christianity.⁸ The term Hellenism thus referred to both the religious beliefs and practices of ancient Greeks as a whole as well as to their overall culture and traditions, as opposed to the Christian ones.⁹

The terms pagans, paganism, and the like will also find their place in this book for many reasons. These terms have a long history, mostly negative, having been used by Christians as opposition labels to denounce Hellenic religion and polytheism. From the Christian perspective, pagans (from the Latin word paganus) were thought to be both rural dwellers and civilians. The term paganism has a more comprehensive and collective character. It is not strictly limited to religion but includes many other phenomena, such as mythical narrations, philosophical doctrines, local cults, and cultural expressions of various provenances beyond the Hellenic one. Although it is not clear whether the pagans referred to in various sources were Hellenes, it is certain that Hellenic religion was what most Christians had in mind when using that term. After all, Hellenic religion was the main religious fountain to feed and influence similar polytheistic traditions, including that of the Romans, and remained dominant up to Late Antiquity. In addition, the term paganism and its ilk have long been introduced in a neutral sense in scholarly literature, remaining valid and still used freely today despite objections and criticisms. Thus, it makes little sense to avoid them completely, especially when dealing with Hellenism and Christianity. Except for mentioning them here, I steer clear of terms of opprobrium with stronger negative connotations, like heathenism or idolatry, once used by Christians against their pagan adversaries and sometimes still in use among Greek Orthodox rigorists.

This book is about the religious cultures of Greece, but were there any non-religious or explicitly secular conceptualizations of Hellenism in Greek history? These appear mostly in the modern period, when the tension between the religious and the secular became stronger and more evident than before. In fact, despite the officially propagated ideology of Helleno-Christianity in the modern Greek state, many individual Greeks conceptualized Hellenism or the notion of Hellenicity in non-religious terms.¹⁰ (To some extent, the same also pertains to the Greek diaspora.) Hence, several cases mentioned in this book clearly suggest that nonreligious conceptualizations of Hellenism were quite possible in various contexts. Yet such attempts did not necessarily turn against the Orthodox Church and Christianity. In many cases, such conceptualizations acquired additional religious features, particularly as they were brought into some relation with Christianity. Non-religious conceptualizations of Hellenism might also be observed among Greek Jews, especially among those with an overall secular outlook. Be that as it may, our main interest in this book definitely lies in those cases exhibiting a religious dimension in Hellenism, particularly in its interaction with Christianity.

Regarding Christianity things are slightly less complicated. References to Christianity during its early history appear in more general terms, despite its significant internal variation, because mainline Christianity tried to keep a clear distance from its pagan surroundings in an endeavor to demarcate itself. In later centuries, Christianity became established in Byzantium in its Orthodox version, expanded among many Slavic peoples in Central and Eastern Europe, survived the Fall of Constantinople under Ottoman rule, and materialized in the modern Greek state in the institutional form of the Orthodox Church. In all these cases, terms like Orthodox Christianity, Orthodoxy, Christian Orthodoxy, or even Greek Orthodoxy will be used largely interchangeably, indicating not only this specific trajectory of Christian tradition but also a concomitant culture that dominated the Greek world from the Byzantine period up until today. Depending on the context, the particular form (Orthodox) Christianity is also sometimes used to indicate that Hellenism was related to both Christianity in general and its later established Orthodox version more specifically.

Finally, there is another terminological, but also factual, difficulty regarding the inclusion of religious cultures of Greece in the book’s subtitle. I could have substituted other phrases, like Greek religious cultures or religious cultures of the Greeks, which are more flexible and not geographically bound to particular frontiers. The problem, however, becomes obvious. We cannot talk of Greece in antiquity by taking the modern Greek state as a point of departure.

Greece, as we understand it today, is a modern construction. Such a country did not (and could not) exist in the past, for the ancient Greek world was not territorially bound. Ancient Greeks not only lived on both sides of the Aegean coast but also had colonies in southern Italy and Sicily, in southern Gaul, in North Africa, and throughout the Black Sea region. Elements of Greek culture, influence, and of course religion could be found in all these areas. During the Hellenistic period, in the wake of conquests by Alexander the Great, Greek learning, culture, and language spread rapidly from Egypt, Syria, and Palestine and on to Persia and India. Hellenization was widespread at the time, rendering major cities like Antioch or Alexandria almost fully Hellenized. To be Greek was no longer a matter of descent but rather part and parcel of a common consciousness sharing Greek language (the lingua franca of the period in the East), culture, and ideals.

The same mapping problem applies to later periods of Greek history. The so-called Byzantine (East Roman) Empire was much larger territorially than the modern Greek state. In no sense is there any connection between the two, either politically or ideologically, although early enough Greek language and culture became dominant in Byzantium. The same problem occurs in later periods as well. The Ottoman era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed centers of Greek learning and culture in such places as Bucharest in Wallachia and Jassy in Moldavia (both in modern-day Romania) under the aegis of the Phanariote rulers. The commercial and international city of Smyrna on the Asia Minor coast, an equally important seat of Greek culture up to its destruction in 1922, was also situated outside the boundaries of the modern Greek state.

After reflecting on this dilemma, I decided to discard the two alternatives, Greek religious cultures and religious cultures of the Greeks. Despite certain advantages, they posed definite drawbacks. Being free of geographical constraints, both are too generic and threatened to encompass a huge number of cases, hardly realistic for the concise book that I envisioned. Throughout history, Greeks have traveled the globe, making it impossible to trace all their local religious traditions or convictions. This pertains not only to antiquity but to later periods as well, including the modern one, characterized by its massive emigration currents abroad (the modern Greek diaspora).

Map of contemporary Greece (with selected references to ancient, medieval and modern places mentioned in this book).

So mainly for practical reasons, I chose the term Greece to provide a more tangible, stable, and accessible basis for describing and analyzing its religious cultures over the centuries. This is not altogether spurious, even when referring to antiquity. By the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the Greek world already included many geographical areas: Macedonia, Thrace, Thessaly, and the rest of middle Greece; Peloponnesus, Crete, the Aegean Islands, the Black Sea coast, the Asia Minor coast, and additional mainland; Cyprus, the Ionian Islands, southern Italy, and Sicily; and other locations. But, in fact, the political and cultural center of this world was much smaller and included basically the middle of Greece (especially Boeotia and Attica), Thessaly, Peloponnesus, and the Aegean Islands. Thus, it is not amiss to argue that the most salient geographical center of the ancient Greek world can be found primarily in what is known today as Greece. Hence, this consideration justifies the use of the term Greece in the present book. The same definition of Greece adapts well to our discussion of religion. A lot of our knowledge about Hellenic religion pertains to the area of Athens and its dependencies, a city-state that played a predominant role in Classical times. The term Greece also had different definitions during the Byzantine and Ottoman periods of Greek history, but it was identified primarily with what was known as the Greek mainland together with the Aegean Islands.

This is not to say that the term Greece should be employed in the strictest geographical sense as a means of exclusion. As a result, I did not confine selected examples and events solely to Greece’s main territory; several cases from the broader Greek world also appear in this book. Nonetheless, a limited idea of Greece, applied very selectively, is the general rule. The same rule applies to selected persons living outside Greece, those who had either verifiable or probable Greek origins, or those who at least possessed a Greek cultural background to an exceptional degree. Through this moderate broadening of the term Greece, I hope to have done it justice from a diachronic perspective, at least for the purposes of this concise history.

All the aforementioned difficulties have to do with a factor somewhat peculiar to Greece: the problem of too much history, as scholars have eloquently observed.¹¹ In other words, Greece looks back at a long, diverse, and not quite homogeneous past, not only in antiquity but also in medieval times. The ideal combination of the Hellenic with the Byzantine past has been a perennial dilemma in the modern Greek state and a tenacious source of debate. In addition, it is not just a history of a random people; rather, it is arguably something exceptional. Put bluntly, the wider impact of the Hellenic tradition was not a common one in world history. Classical Greece was instrumental in forging West European modernity and is regarded as the font of European civilization. Its multifarious repercussions in modern times can be felt at many levels worldwide. But, and perhaps more important, this foreign appropriation of Greek history and culture had an impact on the way that Greeks themselves came to see their own past, especially in modern times. In many cases, Greeks saw themselves through a Western lens. The plurality of perspectives and its usefulness notwithstanding, this was not always beneficial for forging a viable modern Greek sense of identity. The crux of understanding is more likely to be found in both the great and minor differences among all these perspectives and evaluations, indigenous and foreign alike. These mixed perspectives have also affected Greece’s religious cultures and their diverse appropriations. In presenting and analyzing the material of this book, I have thus chosen to emphasize the continuous dialectics and antinomies that characterize not only Greece’s religious history (especially in the relations between Hellenism and Christianity) but also Greek culture as a whole.

Yet I am definitely not presenting the antinomical character of Greece’s religious cultures as a problem or as a disease that needs a cure. Rather, it is a historical reality with which Greeks over time have managed to cope in various ways, at times controversially but often quite effectively. Their respective strategies, answers, and attempted solutions constitute the main focus of this book. After all, culture is not coterminous with order, coherence, and uniformity; rather, it also includes elements of disorder, discontinuity, and antinomy. Cultural ambiguities and dissonance most likely constitute the norm rather than the exception. The discovery of a multiplicity of voices within one culture has been a dominant approach in recent decades.¹² The promotion of traditional, time-honored values is, to the contrary, regarded today as a calculated attempt to silence alternative voices and promote a single concept of culture. Certainly, people may well have contradictory beliefs and exhibit paradoxical attitudes toward cultural formations, past and present alike. Yet these people can still live with or accommodate these contradictions in a satisfactory way, one that may be incomprehensible to cultural, political, and religious ideologues. Such ideologues tend to abominate, taboo, and denounce cultural and religious aberrations and posit clear-cut systems of thought and action, supposedly with no antinomies at all. But reality is far too complex, varied, and full of inconsistencies to satisfy such unrealistic expectations and demands for uniformity. Due to their historical, inherent, and unavoidable differences, the religious cultures of Greece do not deviate from this pattern of non-conformity and thus suggested to me a pertinent angle for approaching this immense subject.

PART I

Religious Profile of Greece

An Overview Across Time

It should come as no surprise that I begin this overview of Greece’s religious cultures with a succinct summary of their underlying historical and systematic basics from antiquity to the present. This overview starts with the Hellenic and Christian religions, whose historical interactions form the main focus in part 2. It subsequently considers the rest of Greece’s religious scene, including important religious and cultural traditions, such as Judaism and Islam. In addition, it explores various marginal and minority religions, both broad movements and small groups, which were often controversial once (Orthodox) Christianity took hold and became predominant. Although there is a tendency to overlook these other religious branches, or to minimize their importance, they are an inseparable part of Greece’s religious history. To ignore them would obfuscate Greece’s religious variety and richness. My aim is thus to make evident the plurality of Greece’s religious scene, both historically and in the present.

Once we have examined the historical context, there are two other main focuses in part 1. First, to what extent and how did these religious cultures contribute to the formation or construction of Hellenicity/Greekness? The connection between religion and ethnicity/nationality has been a much-discussed and controversial issue in Greek history since Late Byzantine times. Naturally, this dual sticking point refers not only to Hellenism and Christianity but also to other religions. Second, how have all these religious cultures interacted with one another in history and what were the consequences of their mutual exchanges in the Greek context? This point is very pertinent to the complex and intricate relations among the predominant religious cultures and the rich array of other faiths. Answering these questions thoroughly enables us to adopt an integral view of Greece’s religious scene—its various trajectories, developmental lines, and concomitant changes in the long run. This approach does not look at religion in isolation but rather at the juncture of religious and sociocultural realms, from the political sphere and the intellectual domain to public and private life.

1

Hellenic Polytheism, Hellenism, Hellenic Tradition

There are many important reasons that would prevent us from doing this even if we wanted to. First and foremost there are the statues and temples of the gods which have been sacked and destroyed; it is necessary for us to avenge these with all our might rather than come to an agreement with the man who did it. Then again there is the matter of Hellenicity—that is, our common blood, common tongue, common cult places and sacrifices and similar customs; it would not be right for the Athenians to betray all this.

—Herodotus¹

This was the Athenian answer given in 479 BCE to the Spartan envoys, who feared an alliance between Athenians and Persians. This categorical statement cited by Herodotus (484–ca. 425 BCE) reveals that, even then, there was considerable consensus among the Greeks as to what constituted Hellenicity (τò λληνικ ν)—namely a common Hellenic identity. He depicted common religious traditions, involving deities, temples, shrines, and sacrifices, as playing a crucial role. Herodotus’s witness is a strong one, but were things quite as he would have us believe?

No matter how one might consider Greek Antiquity, the rich and manifold tradition of Hellenic religion comes immediately to mind. This reflects long-standing, and more recently interdisciplinary, scholarly interest within academia. For example, scholar of Hellenic religion Walter Burkert, using a socio-evolutionary approach to Hellenic religion, derived sacrifice from hunting and then derived religion from sacrificial ritual.² The frequently used