Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (51 page)

One cannot speak of one role of the Church in the war of independence because its two parts played diametrically opposed roles. Bishops were deeply involved in planning the revolution, and bishops and lower clergy fought throughout the war. By contrast the patriarchate consistently condemned the revolution, often in the fiercest terms. This should not be seen as a despicable lack of patriotism: the patriarchs had respectable reasons for the line they took.

The Church, despite its shortcomings, clearly played a major part in sustaining the Greek people during the centuries of foreign rule and preserving their sense of themselves as special, with a distinguished ancestry and one day a bright future. The Church was, some say, the custodian of Greek national identity, though references to national identity in any context can be irritatingly imprecise. It is sometimes necessary to rewrite any statement about national identity without using the words ‘national’ or ‘identity’ to see what, if anything, the statement means. Religion was only one aspect of what it meant to be Greek, and a more complex picture is given by one of Greece’s most distinguished modern poets, George Seferis.

Seferis’ career and character were full of apparent contradictions. He was a diplomat who rose from lowly and unenthusiastic government service in the 1930s to become Greek ambassador to Britain. But he is best known as a poet and his verse is cerebral in tone but packed with memorable images. In 1963 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, the first Greek Nobel laureate of any kind.

He was a man of ideas, but claimed that he rejected the abstract for the concrete. ‘My task’, he said, ‘is not with abstract ideas but to hear what the things of the world say to me,’ and these things of the world were primarily Greek things – Greece’s mountains and stones, the shore and its seashells, the sea itself, and above all the light of Greece that illuminates and suffuses them all.
³
He also wrote metaphorically of light as the basis for optimism. ‘Deep down’, he wrote, ‘I am a matter of light,’
⁴
and the ‘I’ is all humanity. Perhaps at the back of Seferis’ mind was the doctrine of Divine Light of the early Church fathers, who taught that he who participates in God’s grace becomes the Light, and is united to the Light.

There were further seeming anomalies in Seferis’ life. He was passionately Greek, but as a diplomat spent the greater part of his life abroad. He was born outside Greece in Smyrna, and lived there till he was fourteen, spending his summers in the nearby coastal village of Skala, and it was Skala, not any place in Greece, which he called his lost paradise. Near the end of his life in 1969, despite his diplomatic standing and his aversion from politics, he publicly denounced the military junta that had seized power in Greece two years earlier. His character too was complex. His friend Henry Miller described him as a cross between bull and panther, and they met through a shared love of American negro jazz. So there were many sides to Seferis. He was both an intellectual and involved in public affairs; he was a patriot, often an expatriate one, but not a narrow nationalist; and he was deeply attached to the Greek people but well aware of their failings. He was thus uniquely placed to articulate what it means to be Greek

Seferis distinguished three elements of being Greek. One of these is a basically false one, which Seferis called
Ellinikótita
, usually translated as ‘Greekness’. Seferis loathed it. He saw it as a derivative, like the ‘Greekness’ of the Athens Academy buildings, the work of a Danish architect in 1887, basically north European but with the superficial appearance of a classical temple. ‘Greekness’ was also false because it was narrowly nationalistic, like the petty authoritarianism of the so-called Third Greek Civilisation proclaimed by the Metaxas dictatorship of the 1930s. This ‘Greekness’ is just pseudo-Greekness.

The false ‘Greekness’ of
Ellinikótita
is opposed to the genuine Hellenism of
Ellinismós
. This Hellenism embraces everything of value in the Greek tradition, from ancient Greece through Byzantium to modern times. For Seferis it was a living tradition, continuous but constantly developing, not something fixed and rigid. It was the inheritance of all Greeks, not of the narrow Greek state, and Seferis found this genuine Hellenism in Cyprus, which had never been part of the Greek state. It was a tradition to which non-Greeks could contribute. Examples for Seferis were T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, in which he found an element of tragedy that could not but be moving to a Greek, and James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, a classical Greek story retold in the wholly different frame of a day in the seedier parts of Dublin. And for Seferis Hellenism was even wider than that. It embraced the whole of humanity, embodying as it did the idea of human worth and freedom.

Seferis distinguished both
Ellinikótita
and
Ellinismós
from
Romiosíni
, which is something different again. It is today’s reality of being Greek, and derives from the time when Greeks were part of the Ottoman millet-l-Rum, and a Greek was not
Éllinas
but
Romiós
. Patrick Leigh Fermor has written very engagingly about his view of this distinction. As he puts it, the word
Romiós
‘conjures up feelings of warmth, kinship and affection, of community of history, of solidarity in trouble, of sharing the same hazards and aspirations, of being in the same boat’.
Romiós
can also be partly derogatory. A Greek told Leigh Fermor that ‘it reminds us of our dirty linen,’
⁵
that is, the compromises, deviousness and downright dishonesty that became part of Greek life under foreign rule. In short,
Romiosíni
is everything that is real about being Greek, good or bad, source of pride or of sorrow. Seferis was clear that many things were wrong in Greece’s history, and much of that could be laid at the door of Greeks themselves, not Greece’s enemies. Nevertheless he wrote, towards the end of his life, ‘But the Greek people has compensated us richly for all.’
⁶

The prologue to this book quoted Gaetano Salvemini on how we should think about the past: ‘Impartiality is a dream, honesty is a duty.’ It is fitting to end the book with Seferis’ advice for thinking about the future. Smyrna was Seferis’ birthplace and scene of some of his happiest memories, and its destruction in 1922 affected him deeply. Nevertheless he wrote: ‘The Greeks say it was the Turks who burned down Smyrna, the Turks say it was the Greeks. Who will discover the truth? The wrong has been committed. The important thing is: who will redeem it?’
⁷

Chronology