My Greek Odyssey

Refreshing Turkish Memories

The very foundation of a civilization which is the heritage of centuries, the property of all mankind, has been gravely attacked. The sacred things of our religion have been defiled, seventy of our churches and houses of worship destroyed and most of them set on fire. Our sacred objects of religion were desecrated, floundered and plundered. The graves of our dead, including those of the Patriarchs were broken open. Newly buried corpses were torn to pieces, the bones of the dead removed from their resting places, scattered around and set on fire. Our clergy men were everywhere persecuted. When found they were manhandled, threatened with killing, and one of them was actually put to death. The immunity of private dwellings was violated, virgins were ravished, and even the sick, old and children were maltreated. All of us, without any defence, spent moments of agony, and in vain sought and waited for protection from those responsible for order and tranquillity.  From a letter to Adnan Menderes from Patriarch Athenagoras November 15, 1955

For the Greeks of Constantinople, September is a time of remembrance. It marks the sad anniversary of the 1955 pogrom, an event that my family and I lived through and which changed our lives forever. Things would never be the same. For the few remaining Greeks still living in Turkey, most of them elderly and those of us who now live elsewhere, this month, in particular is a portent of a future in which the more things change, the more they remain the same.

In modern day Turkey, the chilling reminders of past atrocities, designed to send an unmistakable message, pass without a whimper from the local press or government officials. On the anniversary of events which saw the the wonton desecration of churches and cemeteries. we are forced to relive those events by being silent witnesses to the desecration of our cemeteries by a new wave of hate. Once again Christians are identified and marked for elimination as they were in 1955 when Greek businesses and homes were painted with a red cross in the dead of night. 

The events of 1955 are of course, another piece of history that has been expunged from Turkish history books. Even the exhibition of police photos saved by a government prosecutor caused an uproar when they were shown in 2005. Recently a much touted Turkish film, Güz Sancısı, or The Pain of Autumn made its debut. It's claim to fame is that it is the first time that the entire subject has been served up to a mass Turkish audience. It was intriguing to think of such a film finally seeing the light of day. Until I saw it. 

The film revolves around a love story between a Turkish man and Greek woman, with the events surrounding the pogrom serving as a backdrop. While it does at least try to touch upon what happened, it does so in such a manner so as not to reveal the full extent of what actually happened. There is no attempt made to show the full extent of the atrocities that occurred. It perpetuates the falsehood that the entire thing was planned and executed by right wing nationalist members of the deep state. In actuality the pogrom was centrally organized, many of the rioters recruited in Istanbul and in the provinces by the party of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. They were transported by train, trucks, and some 4,000 taxis, with specific targets and instructions. They were given axes, crowbars, acetylene torches, gas, dynamite, and large amounts of rocks in carts. The Turkish military planned and directed the entire operation. The Army and Police intentionally refrained from protecting the lives and properties of the Greek victims, their primary mission being to preserve Turkish property and protect it from being destroyed. Interestingly, Menderes was later hung from the Galata bridge for the crime of "abuse of discretionary funds."  Subsequent governments have named an international airport, a University and two high schools in his honor, ignoring his infamous crimes against the Greek minority, which after all, was business as usual in Turkey and a job well done.

The other problem I had with this film is the way that it depicts Greeks. The heroine is a prostitute who is sold to the highest bidder by her Greek grandmother who sees the Turkish boyfriend as a threat not because he is Turkish but because she might lose her meal ticket. The Greek victims of the pogrom are mostly an invisible group in this film. Nothing about churches or cemeteries being desecrated or even the extent of what happened. Anyone without an inkling about what really happened, i.e. most Turks, would wonder what the fuss was all about. The only sympathetic characters beside the two lovers are all the Turks who stand heroically in front of apartment buildings marked as containing Greeks (but where they also happen to live) and a rather troublesome journalist who meets a grisely fate at the hands of some villainous deep state goons. If this is an example of a Turkish attempt at honesty or even progress, in the hopes of expiating their genocidal sins, I am not impressed. 

The Pogrom of 1955, imposed on innocent Turkish citizens of Greek origin by their own government must be seen in the light of a religiously driven program of genocide and ethnic cleansing executed by successive Turkish governments.  It was designed to put the finishing touches on an ethnically pure Turkey however, it was only one of many pogroms before, during, and after the First World War, which included the elimination of the Greek communities of the Pontos and Asia Minor numbering in the millions. It must always be viewed in that historical context.  Unfortunately, there are always new enemies to expunge as the Greeks of Cyprus and the Kurds of Turkey have discovered.

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Semper Fi, Nick

It was a beautiful day. The kind that makes you happy to be alive.

I got up early that Saturday morning, awakened by the birds chirping outside my bedroom window. My wife was still asleep as I crawled quietly out of bed on my way to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. That done, I got dressed and walked out to the mailbox to collect the mail. It was wrapped up in a copy of the Hellenic Voice newspaper. I walked back to the kitchen and poured myself a cup of coffee, grabbed the paper and went out to the porch to sit on a rocking chair. As I opened the paper my eyes fell on the front page photo of a young Marine. I didn't know this young man however I had seen that familiar youthful countenance and the steely determined look before. It reminded me of the faces of hundreds of Marines I had known in the course of my twenty two year career in the Corps.

Cpl.  Nick Xiarhos, U.S. Marine Corps, had been killed in action in Afghanistan.

As a father, I thought about the inconsolable grief of his parents. I thought about my own sons and about the sons we have lost and the sons we will lose. I remembered also the palpable gut-wrenching fear one feels in combat and the struggle to overcome that fear.  To do your duty and above all not let down those by your side. I wondered about where he had died and what his last moments were like.  It is said that the soul leaves the body and sets out on the road to God, tarrying for awhile among the places and people it loved. A gentle breeze blew through the leaves and the sunlight began to emerge through the trees. The words of the Orthodox funeral service swirled through my head: "O Lord give rest in a place of light, in a place of green pasture, in a place of refreshment where pain and sorrow and mourning have fled away."  I prayed silently that Nick would find just such a place and live in the presence of his Maker again.

As my family continued to sleep safely in their beds and as I sat in the stillness of the early morning, the image of Cpl. Nick's young face haunted me and my thoughts drifted to the buddies he left behind, still in harm's way. They are the only thing that stands between us and the evil that has always existed in our fallen world. A thin green line of men, very much in the image of the Byzantine soldiers known as Akrites, guardians of the frontiers. These citizen-soldiers continue to defend us, to lay down there lives for us, in spite of ourselves. We owe them all so much, a debt we will never be able to repay.

Semper fi, Nick, and God speed.

"They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."

                                                   Laurence Binyon

Say My Name by Dean Kalimniou

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names,” Chinese Proverb.

      Modern Greeks don’t generally hold Northern Epirotes in high esteem. They tend to equate them to Albanians, a people generally considered as culturally inferior in the common consciousness. This particular trait of self-loathing is nothing new by the way. When the Asia Minor refugees arrived in Greece, expecting to find a safe haven from persecution and intolerance, they too were segregated, isolated, and made subjects of derision. The irony is greater however, in the case of the Northern Epirotes, because their ancestor’s endeavours and bequests are responsible for the construction of most of the landmarks of Athens and the foundation of some of its most enduring educational and financial institutions.
        Having endured some of the harshest forms persecution for approximately seventy years, which they did stoically, their eyes forever fixed upon Greece as a symbol of hope, Northern Epirotes generally find that apathy at best is their compatriots’ response to their plight. Sometimes, that apathy inexplicably turns into hostility, as is the sorry case among some insular Epirot groups here in Melbourne, unaffiliated to the Panepriotic Federation of Australia, and as was recently attested to in a bizarre incident in Canberra where a representative of a Sydney Epirot group purported to tear up Australian Hellenic Council submissions to Parliament on the subject of human rights for Northern Epirotes, claiming that “there is no issue,” and implying that he had been asked by ‘higher Hellenic powers,” to commit such a heinous act..
        The human rights of ethnic Greeks in Northern Epirus seems to be of secondary concern when it comes to Greek government policy on bilateral relations with Albania. Just three months after the official state visit of Greek PM Karamanlis to Albania, a visit touted as a great success by his government, and his undertaking to support Albania’s accession to the EU, the Albanian PM, Sali Berisha, former doctor of the paranoid Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, has chosen to reciprocate, by announcing his plans to change all Greek toponyms in Albania to ones derived from “ancient Albanian.”
        The ludicrousness of such a decision is immediately apparent. Firstly, no archaeological or literary records exist, attesting to an ancient Albanian language. Secondly, no amount of name changing can mask the fact that Northern Epirus has formed part of the Greek cultural world for over two millennia. The vast majority of toponyms in Southern Albania and coastal Albania are of Greek origin, simply because these places were or are founded and inhabited by Greeks. Dürres, for example, is Dyrrahion – the ancient Epidamnos. Gjirokastër is Argyrokastro, Himarë is Cheimarra and the list goes on endlessly. To change the names of these places is to deny their history.

Read the whole thing here.

The Enemy Within: An Interview with Elder Dionysios

Source: What is Enlightenment Magazine

Photo by Douglas Demetrios Lyttle

WIE: What is the ego?

ARCHIMANDRITE DIONYSIOS: When Satan, who was the first and highest angel, looked away from God and turned his attention to himself, there we had the first seed of ego. He took his spiritual eyes from the view of the Holy Trinity, the view of the Lord, and he looked at himself and started to think about himself. And he said, "I want to put my throne in the highest place, and to be like Him." That moment started the history, the reality and the existence of ego—which is not in fact a reality, but the refusal of reality. Ego is the flower that comes out from the death of love. When we kill love, the result is the ego.

WIE: What is the character of the ego? How does it manifest within a human being?

AD: When we don't trust. Ego is born when we don't trust others. When we're afraid of others, when we need guns against others, then we need to have an ego because we are in the wrong way of life. We think only of ourselves, and we see only our ego. But when we see each other, when we trust each other, there is no need for ego, no reason for ego, no possibility for ego.

WIE: So in the way you're speaking about it then, ego is the insistence on our separation, our independence?

AD: Yes, on our solitude. Our need to be alone, to have our own way of thinking that satisfies us and preserves our personality in the wrong way.

WIE: Putting ourselves first and foremost?

AD: Yes. And Christ said, "The last is the first." Because when you want to be the last and you choose the last seat, only then may you call the others friends of yours.

WIE: The ego, this sense of self-importance you've been speaking about, is often described in The Philokalia and other writings of the Christian mystics as the primary enemy with which the spiritual aspirant must wrestle in their quest for union with God. Why is the ego considered to be such a formidable adversary on the path?

AD: It is such a powerful enemy because it is the enemy within us. We are enemies to ourselves, like Adam and Eve in paradise. Of course, the snake talked to Eve. But she could have avoided him. The snake said to her, "The Lord lied to you," but if she would have trusted the Lord, she would not have started to talk to the snake. And Adam, too, lost his communication with the Lord and stayed with his ego. And the two egos worked together, Adam and Eve.

The real enemy is the ego. It is the enemy because it is against love. When I look at myself, I don't love others. When I want to occupy for myself what is yours, I become the killer of my brother, like Cain killed Abel. When I want to satisfy myself, this satisfaction is gained through sacrificing the freedom of the other. Then my ego becomes my lord, my god, and there is no stronger temptation than this. Because to us, this ego may seem like a diamond. It has a shine like gold. But whatever is shining is not gold. The ego is just like a fire without light, a fire without warmth, a fire without life. It seems that it has many sides and many possibilities—but what is this possibility? What is ego? Only the means by which I protect myself as if I were in a battle, as if every other person is my enemy, and the only thing I care about is winning the victory.

WIE: It has been said by some of the greatest spiritual luminaries that when one takes up the spiritual path in earnest, one often comes face-to-face with the ego in a way that one never could have imagined previously. In describing their encounters with the ego, many saints have characterized it as an almost diabolical force within that does not want the spiritual life, that does not want God, but that wants to do everything it can to obstruct our illumination, to undermine our firm resolve to stay on the path.

AD: Saint Paul writes beautifully about this event, this struggle inside the human heart. He says, "There is another law inside me telling me to refuse the will of God, to do things against Him, to refuse the grace. It tries to keep me in my past, in my old life, to take me far away from the Lord, to prevent me from following the Lord." This is why I said that the biggest problem in mankind is in each person, not outside of him. For this we need spiritual fathers. For this we need spiritual doctors. We need surgery; we need an operation; we need something to be cut in our heart.

We don't understand that this enemy that we have inside us is not our self; it's not our personality. It's only a temptation. This is the seed of the problem of the ego. We unite our personality, which is a priceless event, with our faults. We confuse our personality with our sin; we marry these two things, and we have a wrong impression of what we are. We don't know what we are, and we need someone to show us who we are; we need someone to open our eyes so that we can at least see our darkness.

There's a mystic, the greatest of the mystics, Saint Gregory Palamas. For thirty years, he was praying only this prayer: "Enlighten my darkness. Enlighten my darkness." He did not name the Lord because he did not feel worthy to name him. He did not address it to anyone, but he said this prayer day and night, more than he was breathing. Because all he knew in himself was his darkness. And he was talking to someone—to whom else?—to Christ, who said, "I am the Light." But he said only, "Enlighten my darkness."

WIE: Show me my faults?

AD: Or come to my darkness and burn it. Make fire in it and make light in it. The greatest thing we can do in our lives is to discover that by ourselves we are nothing. We are darkness. We are dust.