Objects of Cult, Objects of Confrontation: Divine Interventions through Greek History

Abstract

This paper examines the nationalist character of divine interventions that marked Greek society during critical periods. In order to analyse the diachronic structure and the variety of such interventions that can occasionally even convey an anti‐Greek meaning, distant and more recent events of Greek history will be discussed. It will be shown that the warrior saints, who are predominantly male characters, are presented as able to assist the Greek warriors against the national (or the local) enemy. The key figure of the Virgin seems to retain her female attributes and to waver between two different positions, one of inferiority and one of superiority: perceived as a female character who may need protection, she can also guarantee ultimate victory for the Greeks.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Greece
• Icons
• Nationalism
• Panayia
• Virgin Mary

Notes

[1] Jill Dubisch (1995: 235–236) argues that the term of “Virgin Mary”, commonly used by the Roman Catholic Church, “is inappropriate in the Orthodox context. […] Most commonly she is called Panayia, a term that can be translated as ‘all holy one’ and that signifies dominion over all the other saints.” It is for that reason that I use here the term of Panayia.

[2] Cited by a Greek folklorist (Florakis 1990: 72), who has published interesting popular iconographic and journalistic documents of that period.

[3] According to Dubisch (1995: 167), “several older histories of the finding of the icon, however, written shortly after this event, do not even mention the struggle for independence […] and the finding of the icon does not seem to be conventionally included in histories of the struggle”.

[4] They also define the ally—even when he belongs to another Christian confession. So, two icons of the Panayia of Tinos were offered by the archbishop of Athens to the English navy in 1940, during a ceremony commemorating the victories of Greeks and Englishmen in the Anglican church of Athens (Florakis 1990: 139).

[5] The same tendency is attested amongst the Byzantine people. For instance, a poem by Manuel Philes, seeking to characterize portraits of the two warrior saints Theodore, turned to the classical imagery of Hercules (Maguire 1996: 77).

[6] This positive parallelism is not, of course, accepted unanimously. In the monastery of Lavra, in Mount Athos, a fresco represents Athena chased away by the Virgin (Lacarrière 1975: 90): in that case, their relationship is one of radical rupture, not of continuity.

[7] In fact the cross was another powerful symbol during World War Two: more precisely, the swastika of Hitler was considered to be the deformation (strevlosis) of the real cross (Florakis 1990: 177, Dubisch 1995: 244).

[8] On the other hand, during one of the sieges of the town by Slavs in the seventh century, the Greek bishop asked God not to allow “stranger nations to invade his own heritage” (Bakirtzis 1997: 255). So, according to the situation, God, the Christ or St. Demetrius have alternately been presented as the “owners” of the town. The manipulation of identifications is not always inoffensive, and the popularity of a local saint can challenge the Church's divine hierarchy. According to Walter (2003: 81, note 56), “it was complained that in Thessaloniki St. Demetrius was more venerated than Christ”.

[9] This is a case of spoiled “popular” etymology: Skalojan (in Greek Skyloyannis, ‘Dog John’) constituted a changed and depreciatory form of his name, Kalojan, which meant “John the Good” or “John the Nice” (Kaloyannis).

[10] The political manipulation of religious symbols is a common phenomenon. When the Polish authorities forbade the wearing of emblems of Solidarnosc, many people replaced them by a little figure of the Virgin of Czestochowa, re‐baptized “Holy Virgin of Walesa”. At the same time, there occurred apparitions of the Virgin wearing a badge on which the Solidarnoscč leader Lech Walesa was portrayed (Zowczak 1998: 208). As for Spain, in the local context of San Miguel de Aralar (a great shrine of Basque Navarra), the Archangel's struggle with the dragon and that of Catholics with the Second Republic were equated in 1931 (Christian 1996: 206). In all these cases, through appropriation and identification, divine powers are used to legitimate specific political requests and actions.

[11] According to Walter (2003: 67), St. Demetrius was a “universal saint”, venerated in “Byzantine and Slav countries”, but “unlike St. George, he never cut much ice in the West”.

[12] For example, during the Greek–Italian war, Greek soldiers observed in December 1940 that forty totally unknown soldiers were fighting by their side. After the victory of the Greek army, these forty soldiers climbed up the hill and disappeared in to the ruins of an old Byzantine church: it was then obvious for all that they were the Forty Saints (Ayioi Saranta), a group of male martyrs, who were the elite of a Roman legion before their persecution (Florakis 1990: 103).

[13] According to Maguire (1996: 93–96), images of the Virgin were frequently given a higher degree of corporality and movement than those of other saints. He explains the special responsive character of her images as the consequence of her intercession, related to maternal closeness and to emotional attachment.

[14] There are, however, political allegoric representations of the early twentieth century showing a crowned feminine character, dressed in an ancient Greek way, holding a sword and with the dragon lying at her feet. One (glorifying the military coup at Goudi in 1909) is to be found in the actual text book of contemporary history, taught in Greek high schools.

[15] Mount Athos was definitively liberated in 1913. See also the story of the Panayia of Kastro: every time that the Turkish ships arrived at the Dodecanesian island Leros, the Panayia was taking a broom, putting it in to the ashes and shaking it in the direction of the Turks, who thus became blind. This story is to be found in the classified material of the “Center of Research on Greek Folklore” in Athens, n.47, subject “Panayia”, L.A. n. 2279, survey realized by G. Spiridakis in 1958, p. 273.

[16] See also the story of a Norwegian heroine, who defeats Swedish soldiers by simply playing her traditional role of housewife (Eriksen 1998). If, for Orthodox people, the sexual roles of the divine powers seem to be well‐defined, this is not apparently true for the Catholic world, where it is quite common to officially name a certain statue of the Virgin General of the national army. See, for instance, the Nossa Senhora Aparecida who was named the highest General of the Brazilian Army in 1964 by the “president” of the military takeover (Johnson 1997: 129).

[17] For similar Catholic rituals in the medieval period, see Geary (1979).

[18] This is not an Orthodox exclusivity. Christian (1992: 103–104) asserts that the activation of Catholic images “especially in imitation of the Passion, was considered a bad sign”, suggesting that “Spain or the world was ripe for chastisement” and also that “the Christ was moving precisely to avoid it, by interceding with God”.

[19] Text cited by Herzfeld (1986: 131). I have slightly changed the translation.

[20] According to Leontis (1995: 75), Constantinople remains, even today, “a Neohellenic topographical signpost”; “the ideal city, capital of Byzantine Hellenism, signifies the homogeneity and distinctiveness of an unfinished Hellenism, while it leans uncomfortably against the self‐enclosed legal entity of the helladic Kingdom [until 1974] symbolized by its capital, Athens”. The idea of “an unfinished Hellenism” refers not only to the legend of the unfinished mass but also to the Megali idea, the political project of Greek expansion in the nineteenth century to fit a territory associated with Byzantine Hellenism.

[21] At the same period, the Greek battleship Averof arrived in the Bosporus and the Greeks of Constantinople visited it en masse; it was for them as if they had accomplished a sacred pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Saint Sophia. Thousands of postcards representing the battleship anchored in the sea of Marmara had been printed, and each Greek house possessed at least one (Laskaridhis 1987: 93–96). As with Elli in 1940, we find here another example of the sanctity attributed to certain Greek battleships.

[22] Kordatos (1974: 579–580) gives another version of the same account, which depicts a completely negative image of the Emperor: not only is he characterized as “miserable” and sinful (because he was for the Union of Catholics and Orthodox), but the Virgin is also presented as ordering him to go and die, according to God's will. Kordatos comments on the fact that Constantine left his crown not on the altar of Saint Sophia (which was already polluted by the celebration of masses of the Orthodox who had accepted papal supremacy as the price for military assistance from the Catholic Europe), but on that of the Marian church, which belonged to those who were against the Union of Catholics and Orthodox.

[23] The same type of legend may narrate the rupture between a local community and its icon. For example, the Marian icon of Hrysovitsas Metsovou abandoned its monastery in July 1480 because of the sins of the inhabitants (Dimitrakopoulos 1971: 60). In that case, however, the devotional rupture did not have any political effect on the local society.

[24] This is a controversial issue that I am not treating here. Among the various explanations of these conversions, the most popular are the dissatisfaction of local populations with the Christian Churches or the Byzantine authorities, “opportunism” and the material advantages offered by the conqueror.

[25] In that account, Greeks are identified as Romioi, that is, Romans. On the contrary, Catholics are the Frankish—an expression that probably wants to assert their “barbaric” origin. So, the icon is characterized as “roman picture” (itane romeiki zografia) and the Catholic church chosen by the Virgin to stay in, as the “church of Franks” (Fraggoklisia). Herzfeld (1986) discusses the different forms for defining the Roman element.

[26] The Greek folklorist, Romaios, asserts that, in the Song of Saint Sophia, it is the archangel who consoles the lamenting Virgin (Herzfeld 1986: 133); according to another approach, it is the emperor who speaks in that way to the weeping icons (Herzfeld 1986: 135). Herzfeld analyses precisely the double significance, “national” and “historical”, that this song had for the Greek scholars who edited it.

[27] Drawn by Stathis and published in the journal Eleutherotypia, Wednesday 29 Aug: 2001, p.6.

[28] Claverie (2003: 205) refers to satirical cartoons from the press of Sarajevo, where a militiaman ustase is supposed to reveal the real face of the Virgin of Medjugorje. This kind of representation aims at criticizing the political function of the apparition in the 1990s, which asserted the patriotic feeling of Croats against the universality of the socialist Yugoslavian programme. Even if the political situations of Greece and former Yugoslavia are quite different, we find here the same schema of internal rupture because of a crisis that is as much political as religious.