Travellers in Greece. An Occasional Series 3. Peter Hammond

It may be a bit of a stretch to classify the Rev. Canon Peter Hammond (1921-1999) as a travel-writer. He spent most of his adult career as a priest in the Church of England, and I for one had rather forgotten about him, until I was reminded of his fine book, The Waters of Marah: The Present State of the Greek Church (London: Rockliff, 1956), when reading John Binns’s An Introduction to the Christian Orthodox Churches (Cambridge: CUP, 2002): itself an admirable work. I had first encountered The Waters of Marah when I was sixteen or seventeen, and, rereading it the other day, was surprised to discover how much of it had entered into my own thinking about Greece.

Hammond was eighteen when the Second World War broke out and he spent it in the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman. In 1946, he was demobbed and took up a place at Oxford to read history. There he became interested in Eastern Orthodoxy and decided to train for the Anglican priesthood. On graduating and before entering theological college, he won a scholarship from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki to study the Church of Greece in its northern dioceses. He studied and travelled extensively there from 1948 to 1950, and in 1951 won a prize from the University of London for a preliminary draft of the book that would finally be published in 1956.[1] 

 

To speak of the man and his work in these terms is something of a disservice, flattening and banalizing Hammond’s raw experiences in Greece and the book that resulted from them. The fact is, when he arrived in Thessaloniki, the Civil War was still raging in the Pindus mountains and the lives of the local clergy and their parishioners were caught up in the murderous cross-fire of the national struggle between the Government and the communist forces. Like the American Kevin Andrews, who was travelling through the Peloponnese at broadly the same time, to conduct research on the castles of the Morea, Hammond appeared undaunted by the dangers and gained access to many war-torn communities, in his case with the help of the military, civilian and ecclesiastical authorities. Both The Waters of Marah and Andrews’s The Flight of Ikaros: Travels in Greece During a Civil War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959) can be profitably read together as, in some ways, parallel, contrasting attempts, by foreign writers with different ideological perspectives, to tell the story of Greece in those difficult years. 

 

At any rate, The Waters of Marah is a unique compendium of civil-war testimony, theological reflection, ecclesiastical history, biography and personal memoir, and luminous travel-writing. But it also reflects, and reflects on, past English (and Anglican) encounters with Orthodoxy. Hammond refers to and quotes from many of his predecessors, such as John Covel and Thomas Smith - chaplains of the Levant Company, whom we have encountered in an earlier blog, in the eighteenth century; he often gently dissociates himself from their views. He clearly felt closer to the scholarship of John Mason Neale, the Cambridge Camden Society’s main expert in Orthodoxy, in the nineteenth century. Like Neale, Hammond was closely involved in the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, whose general secretary he was from 1953 to 1955.

 

The Waters of Marah can be analysed in terms of chapters that deal with: church history (chapters II, III); church organisation (ch. IV); monasticism (ch. VII, VIII); the church’s social and relief programmes (ch. IX); church education and ecclesiastical training (ch. XI-XIII); church liturgy and customs (ch. VI, XV). But all of this is enlivened by Hammond’s acute awareness of the resurgence of Orthodox theology (in Paris, the USA and in Greece) and by vivid writing from his own travels, which provide an audible heartbeat to the narrative. There are, moreover, three particular chapters which offer a direct, extended testimony of life as it was being lived in the communities endangered, displaced and brutalised by the civil war: ch.V ‘A Village Festival’; ch.X ‘A Macedonian Diocese’; and ch.XIV ‘The History of a Country Parson’.  

 

In the very northernmost Diocese of Nevrokopi, which was partitioned between Greece and Bulgaria after the Balkan Wars, Hammond celebrates the Feast of the Dormition (15 August) in the small village of Dasoto, eight miles or so away from Kato Nevrokopi itself. On the Feast Day, he accompanies the Metropolitan of Nevrokopi to the small community, and there attends not only, in the recently redecorated parish church, the elaborate and beautiful liturgy, which he describes in admiring detail, but also the festival that ensued, observing that ‘When one has fasted as a Christian one feasts as a Christian - in Greece at least’: 

When the last of the antidoron had been distributed, Anargyri had replaced the mitre in its black box, and the Metropolitan had concluded a long conversation with the churchwardens about the best method of shoring up the roof…, we left the church and made our way to the dwelling of the parish priest where a vast table had been erected in the shade of a vine. There we feasted until it was high afternoon: the Lord Agathangelos, the president of the community, the kapetanios of the militia, the papas, the schoolmaster, Anargyri, the churchwardens, the singers and several officers from the garrison of Nevrokopi who had accompanied us to Dasoto that morning. It was not by any means my first experience of a village festival: a few months earlier I might well have been deceived into thinking that the bowls of eggs, goat’s milk cheese, olives and finely-shredded vegetables soaked in oil and lemon which appeared with the ouzo constituted the substance of the feast not a mere hors d’oeuvre. Now I knew better, and I was not surprised when the clearing of the table by the papadia [2] and her daughters after forty minutes proved to be no more than a prelude to a banquet of an altogether more serious character. [p.50]

 

This strong sense of the Church’s rootedness in traditional, village life emerges very clearly in the moving, lyrical chapter about Father Constantinos Photis, who, in 1937, became the parish priest of his village of Palaiochori, a little to the west of Kalambaka. Photis was the son of the village carpenter and as a boy had been trained in his father’s footsteps: as a carpenter and as a psaltes [singer] in the village church:

In 1937, the parish priest died. The elders of the village debated the question of a worthy successor - and who more suitable than the carpenter, Constantinos Photis? A man universally respected among his fellows for his uprightness and integrity; who knew the intricacies of the Venetian service-books with a familiarity such as could come only from long experience. Polycarp, Metropolitan of Trikkala and Staghi, willingly acquiesced in the village’s choice of a pastor, and Constantinos Photis, the carpenter, went off one day to Trikkala (after a short stay in a nearby monastery) and returned clad in black gown and kalymmafchion [3] as ‘Papa Costas’. [p.156]

 

While he was also very interested in the Church’s efforts to raise the standards of theological education of its priests, Hammond was impressed and surprised by the community-based formation of many a Greek parish priest. He goes on to recount, with admirable simplicity, the fortunes of Papa Costas and his family as they deal with German and Italian brutality under the occupation, and then face further displacement at the hands of communist forces under the civil war. It is a well-told story.

 

In the first two winter months of 1950, Hammond travelled extensively in the Diocese of Grevena, in two itineraries that were designed to enable him to see parts of the diocese that had been abandoned and not repopulated, and parts to which refugees had started to return. He travelled at first by jeep, but only five miles from Grevena was transferred to mules, with a small military escort. It was February and the winter was harsh and deep. Villages were deserted and ruined. At Ziakas, which had been burned by the Germans and then fought over in heavy fighting between Government and communist forces, all was desolation. The following day, the small party set off for Spelaion and Trikomon:

 

The paths were ice-bound and treacherous, the snow deep in places. Spelaion came into view after half an hour, set amongst towering cliffs. A long and laborious ascent between high rocks, the Venetikos murmuring through its gorge far below, the path clinging to precipitous cliffs rising from the dwarf oaks and myrtle to lose themselves in the grey mists that swirled around their summits, brought us to a point immediately below the village. After a stiff climb through massive fortifications of uncertain date, we suddenly found ourselves looking down upon a tiny Byzantine church with twin domes, sharply outlined against the untrodden snow; a sombre red jewel laid in a setting of purest white.  This proved to be the catholicon of a small monastery, dedicated to the Mother of God. [p.105.]

 

When they reached the monastery, they found the church intact but in disarray, while the rest of the monastery had been utterly destroyed. In accounts such as this, Hammond tells a riveting tale with skill and control. He unfolds the story of the impact of a decade of war in terms that are neither sensationalist nor mawkish, but carefully and compassionately descriptive. The quality of writing about geography, climate and people is notably high - and the reason why I have included Hammond in this series. 

 

Hammond was very interested in the whole process of religious revival in Greek Orthodoxy since the mid-nineteenth century. He drew particularly close to those involved in the Zoë (Ζωή) Movement, which would play a much criticised role under the Colonels’ dictatorship, and it is clear that Zoe was very keen to facilitate Hammond’s access to academics (lay and clerical) and to sources of Orthodox renewal. There is, in this book, little or no attempt to consider the Civil War from a perspective other than that of a Church that felt threatened, and was threatened, by the communists after 1946, in a way that was markedly different from the more harmonious positions taken by the communist leadership and many priests in the early years of the Resistance in the mountains, after 1941. Wider matters of politics do not figure here. None of this, I think, seriously detracts from the value of the book as a very particular testimony to the times. As I mention above, there are different accounts by different travellers in this time telling the story from a different perspective.

 

For me at least, much of the value of The Waters of Marah lies in Hammond’s close familiarity with a church that was under pressure from civil war, but was managing to preserve so much of its ancient way of life, in communities that continued, where war allowed, to exist in conditions little changed from time immemorial:

 

To this day the majority of the villages of northern Greece are inaccessible to wheeled transport, at any rate during the winter months; and while the truly remarkable achievements of the last few years - the repair of the shattered railways, and the construction of roads and air-strips - have given Greece a very fair system of long-distance communications, the facilities which most bishops enjoy for travel within their own dioceses remain much as they have been since apostolic days. The metropolitan of a country diocese will think nothing of long journeys by mule or mountain pony across appallingly difficult terrain, his episcopal vestments slung from the high wooden saddle; of fording torrents swollen by the melting snows; and negotiating precipitous slopes where the path seems scarcely to afford adequate foothold for a goat - much less for an elderly ecclesiastic. It is little wonder that many mountain villages saw their father in God but seldom, even in the days before the natural hazards which confronted the traveller had been supplemented by mines and wandering bands of katsapliades, as the Communists were styled in the villages. [p.29]

 

The landscapes of northern Greece are the dramatic backdrop to this finely woven analysis. But it is Hammond’s admiration for the Church of Greece, its ancient way of life, and its rootedness in the lives of ordinary believers that shines out in this book. It is very much a case of travel-writing plus.

 

John Kittmer

30 October 2021

 

[1] There is an account of Hammond’s life in the obituary of him, by Esther de Waal and Keith Murray, in The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-canon-peter-hammond-1082634.html.

 

[2 ] A papadia is the wife of a Greek priest, a papas.

 

[3] The kalymafchi is the tall, black, cylindrical hat worn by Orthodox priests.

Στην έρημο του Γιόρκσιρ

Μάουντ Γκρέις από την εσωτερική αυλή

Στην άκρη των ρεικοτόπων του Γιόρκσιρ («Yorkshire Moors»), μέσα στην όμορφη δασωμένη εξοχή, βρίσκεται ένα συγκρότημα ερειπωμένων μεσαιωνικών κτιρίων, από τα οποία κάποια αναστηλώθηκαν και αναζωογονήθηκαν τον 17^ο και τον 19^ο αιώνα. Αυτά τα κτίρια αποτελούν τη Μονή του Μάουντ Γκρέις («Mount Grace Priory»), τα απομεινάρια ενός από τα πιο σπουδαία και πιο μεγάλα των εννιά αγγλικών «charterhouses». Η αγγλική λέξη «charterhouse» είναι διαφθορά της γαλλικής λέξης «Chartreuse», της πνευματικής έδρας των Καρθουσιανών, του μοναστηριακού τάγματος που ιδρύθηκε τον ενδέκατο αιώνα από τον άγιο Μπρούνο της Κολωνίας. 

 

Το Καθολικόν

Η Μονή του Μάουντ Γκρέις απέχει μονάχα λίγα χιλιόμετρα από την βιομηχανική πόλη του Μίντλεσμπρο, όπου γεννήθηκε και μεγάλωσε η μητέρα μου. Όταν ήμουνα παιδί, περνούσαμε συχνά τη μονή, της οποίας το καμπαναριό είναι ορατό από την εθνική οδό Υόρκης-Ντάραμ, καθώς ταξιδεύαμε από το σπίτι μας στο Ανατολικό Γιόρκσιρ για να δούμε τις θείες, τους θείους και τα ξαδέρφιά μας. Από έφηβος ενδιαφερόμουν για τη μοναστηριακή ζωή και ζητούσα από τους γονείς μου να μας επιτρέψουν να επισκεφτούμε τη μονή. Αλλά η απάντηση ήτανε πάντοτε «όχι»: θα αργούσαμε για τους συγγενείς μας ή για την επιστροφή στο σπίτι μας. (Δεν παραπονιέμαι: είχαν δίκιο οι γονείς μου!)

 

Δυο εβδομάδες πριν, κατάφερα τελικά να επισκεφθώ και να ξεναγηθώ στο μοναστηριακό συγκρότημα: ήταν κάτι περισσότερο από καταπληκτικό! Παρόλη τη βουή της κυκλοφορίας από την κοντινή Εθνική Α19, ο τόπος είναι γαλήνιος. Οι δασωμένοι λόφοι είναι πανέμορφοι (μια μακρινή υπενθύμιση των αλπικών τόπων που επέλεξαν ο άγιος Μπρούνο και οι ακόλουθοί του), και η περιουσία των ερειπωμένων μοναστηριακών κτιρίων έχει εξωραϊστεί από το «English Heritage». Γενικά, τα καρθουσιανά μοναστήρια δεν μοιάζουν πολύ με τις Βενεδικτιανές, Κιστερκιανές και Ορθόδοξες μονές. Το τάγμα ιδρύθηκε τότε που προσπαθούσαν πολλοί μοναχοί να ξαναβρούν τις βασικές ρίζες του μοναχισμού, και να επιστρέψουν σε ένα όραμα της ζωής στην έρημο. Οι Καρθουσιανοί μοναχοί ζούσανε μια πολύ αυστηρή ζωή, ο ένας σε απομόνωση από τον άλλο. Ο καθένας είχε τον δικό του χώρο, που αποτελούταν από τρία ή τέσσερα δωμάτια σε δυο ορόφους, δίπλα σε έναν περιτειχισμένο κήπο και ένα αποχωρητήριο, με τρεχούμενο νερό από τις βουνίσιες πηγές. Ως επί το πλείστο ο μοναχός περνούσε την ημέρα στην απομόνωση: με προσευχή, λατρεία, μελέτη, αγροτικές εργασίες, χειροτεχνία ή το διακόνημα που αναμενόταν ο καθείς μοναχός να ασκεί. Δεν μίλαγαν παρά σπάνια οι μοναχοί. Στο Μάουντ Γκρέις, ένας από τους χώρους των μοναχών έχει αναστηλωθεί, ώστε να δώσει μια πολύ καλή ιδέα για το πώς διαβιούσαν οι αδελφοί. Όσοι ζήσαμε τις πρόσφατες απαγορεύσεις κυκλοφορίας εξαιτίας του κορωνοϊού έχουμε μια μικρή αίσθηση των δυνατοτήτων και των ανησυχιών που προκαλεί τέτοια απομόνωση.  

 

Η μονή του Μάουντ Γκρέις του Ίνγκλεμπυ, της οποίας το επίσημο όνομα ήταν το «Μοναστήρι της Αναλήψεως της Θεοτόκου και του Αγίου Νικολάου», ιδρύθηκε το 1398 από τον Θωμά ντε Χόλαντ, κόμητα του Κεντ και ανηψιό του βασιλιά Ριχάρδου Β’.  Έτσι ήταν μια από αυτές τις μονές που ιδρύθηκαν μετά από την καταστρεπτική Μαύρη Πανώλη η οποία έφτασε το 1348 στην Αγγλία. Για δυο αιώνες περίπου αναπτυσσόταν συνεχώς η μονή και, μέχρι την εποχή της διάλυσής της, είχε χώρο για 15 γέροντες, τον καθένα στο δικό του χώρο, συγκροτημένο γύρω από το μεγάλο περιστύλιο. Οι λαϊκοί, που διηύθυναν τα κοσμικά ζητήματα της μονής, ζούσαν σε κελιά που τοποθετούνταν στην εσωτερική αυλή.  Δυο μεγάλα αρχονταρίκια υποδηλώνουν πως απέκτησαν οι μοναχοί μια φήμη για την αγιότητα και πως προσέλκυσαν άφθονους προσκυνητές.

 

Το μεγάλο περιστύλιο

Διότι οι μοναχοί προσκυνούσαν και έτρωγαν μαζί μονάχα σπάνια, το καθολικόν, η κύρια αίθουσα της αδελφότητας («chapter house») και η τραπεζαρία είναι πιο μικρά απ’ ό,τι ήτανε στις μεγάλες βορεινές μονές που ανήκανε στους Κιστερκιανούς και τους Βενεδικτιανούς. Αλλά πάντως το καθολικόν είναι απροσδοκήτως καλά διατηρημένο: συνήθως στη διάλυση των μοναστηρίων, οι καινούργιοι γαιοκτήμονες αναγκάζονταν από το Στέμμα να κατεδαφίσουν πρώτα τους ναούς, αλλά φαίνεται ότι αυτό δεν συνέβη στο Μάουντ Γκρέις. Ακόμη και σήμερα ο κύριος ναός, το καμπαναριό, το ιερό και τα παρεκκλήσια βρίσκονται στη θέση τους. Δεν χρειάζεται πολλή φαντασία κανείς για να ακούσει στον άνεμο την ηχώ της ψαλμωδίας των αδελφών, μαζεμένων μαζί για να ψάλουν τα νυχτερινά απολυτίκια και να συμμετέχουν στη Θεία Λειτουργία τις Κυριακές και στις εορτές. 

Στο Μάουντ Γκρέις ένα από τα δυο αρχονταρίκια μετατράπηκε σε ιδιωτικό σπίτι μετά από τη διάλυση. Λειτουργεί ακόμα, μετά την επέκταση και την αναπαλαίωση κατά τον 19ο αιώνα, με τον τότε της μόδας ρυθμό «Arts and Crafts». Το αρχοντικό έχει μια ωραία έκθεση για την ιστορία της μονής και της μεταμοναστικής ανάπτυξής της. 

 

Ένας προσκυνητής και δυο γέροντες στην Άγια Άννα

Όσο εξαιρετικά σημαντικός κι αν είναι ο μοναχισμός για το Ορθόδοξο δόγμα, δεν υπάρχει τίποτε στην Ορθοδοξία που να μοιάζει στην οργάνωση του καρθουσιανού τρόπου ζωής. Ο Καρθουσιανός Κανόνας - πρωταρχικά οι «Consuetudines Cartusiae» (οι Συνήθειες της Σαρτρέζ) - υπαγορεύει ένα είδος θεσμοθετημένης ερημίας. Στο Άγιον Όρος οι ερημίτες ζούσανε και ζούνε μια άγρια, ιδιότροπη ζωή, ενώ οι κοινοβιακές μονές, όπως και οι Βενεδικτιανές και οι Κιστερκιανές, είναι, βέβαια, πλήρως κοινόχρηστες. Ίσως το πιο κοντινό είδος  μοναστηριακής ζωής μέσα στην Ορθοδοξία - τουλάχιστο όσον αφορά τον τρόπο ζωής των μοναχών των ίδιων - είναι αυτό που συμβαίνει στις σκήτες, τις μικρές δομές που υπάγονται στις κυρίαρχες 20 μονές του Άθωνα και αποτελούνται από μερικές καλύβες συγκροτημένες γύρω από το λεγόμενο «Κυριακό».    

Το 2014, έμεινα μια νύχτα στην σκήτη της Αγίας Άννης στις πρόποδες του Άθωνα. Τότε συναντήθηκα με δυο γέροντες που έμεναν στα κεντρικά κτίρια της σκήτης: κι οι δυο φιλόξενοι, ήπιοι, πνευματικοί άνθρωποι. Η πεζοπορία μας στην κορφή του Άθωνα και πίσω ήταν σκληρή (μας πήρε 15 ώρες περίπου) και γυρίσαμε στην σκήτη καθώς έπεφτε το σούρουπο. Λόγω της περασμένης ώρας είχα κιόλας χάσει κάθε ελπίδα για ένα γεύμα, αλλά με μεγάλη καλοσύνη οι γέροντες μάς προσέφεραν πλούσιο χορτοφαγικό φαγητό απ' αυτά που ζεσταίνουν την καρδιά του κάθε πεζοπόρου. Φαντάζομαι ότι οι προσκυνητές που έφταναν στο Μάουντ Γκρέις θα είχαν ζήσει παρόμοια φιλοξενία τον 15^ο αιώνα και θα είχαν κι αυτοί ευχαριστήσει για τη φιλοξενία, όσο σύντομη κι αν ήταν, σε έναν τόπο μεγάλης αγιότητας, του οποίου οι κάτοικοι είχαν απολύτως αφιερώσει τη ζωή τους στην αγάπη και τη λατρεία του Θεού.

 

Μονή του Αγίου Χίου, Πάρκμινστερ

Η μονή στο Μάουντ Γκρέις διαλύθηκε το 1539 και για τρεις αιώνες δεν είχε η Αγγλία καμία καρθουσιανή κοινότητα. Μετά από την απελευθέρωση των Καθολικών το 1829, όμως, ιδρύθηκε το 1873 μια καινούργια μονή στο Πάρκμινστερ του Σάσσεξ. Σχεδόν 150 χρόνια μετά, το «Charterhouse» του Αγίου Χιού (St Hugh) ανθίζει ακόμη. 

 

Γιατί είναι τέτοιοι χώροι πολύ σημαντικοί ακόμη και τώρα; Για μένα, τουλάχιστον, το ενδιαφέρον μου για χώρους σαν το Μάουντ Γκρέις δεν είναι θέμα αρχαιολογίας. Η παρουσία καρθουσιανών κοινοτήτων που ανθίζουν σε τρεις ηπείρους υποδηλώνει την αντοχή αυτού του πολύ απαιτητικού μοναστικού ιδανικού. Η ζωή που ζει κανείς υπό τον κανόνα της πίστης, υπό την απόλυτη αφοσίωση στον Θεό, υπό την υποταγή στον σταυρό προσφέρνει διαφωτιστικά παραδείγματα θυσίας - αυτό που απαιτεί από όλους μας το χριστιανικό δόγμα. Τέτοιες πρακτικές αυστηρής λιτότητας δεν είναι κάτι για όλους. Αλλά η πειθαρχία της καρθουσιανής ζωής - η απομόνωση (δηλ. η ριζική εξάρτηση από τον Θεό), η σιωπή, η ταπεινότητα, η τήρηση των ωρών, η βύθιση σε στοχαστική προσευχή, οι βιβλικές και θεολογικές σπουδές, η πρακτική ασκητική δουλειά - δίνει και σε εμάς που ζούμε κοσμικές ζωές κάτι στο οποίο να προσβλέψουμε, κάτι από το οποίο να αντλήσουμε υλικό για τον δικό μας τρόπο ζωής. Ειναι, στ’ αλήθεια, καλό το ότι η παράδοση που αντιπροσωπεύουν τα ερείπια του Μάουντ Γκρέις, συνεχίζεται μέχρι τώρα, και καλό είναι το ότι τα ερείπια αυτά συνεχίζουν να διατηρούν τη μνήμη των «φτωχών ανθρώπων του Χριστού» στο Γιόρκσιρ.

Tο αναστηλωμένο κελί

Το Αρχοντικό του 17ου και 19ου αιώνα (παλιό αρχονταρίκι της μονής)

 

Τζων

11 Οκτώβρη 2021

Travellers in Greece – An Occasional Series 2. Robert Liddell

Robert Liddell (1908-1992) is at risk of becoming an unknown name. The author of a dozen or so novels, several academic works about fiction, and a 1974 biography of C.P.Cavafy (still, amazingly enough, the only literary biography in English of the Alexandrian poet), he also wrote three travel books about Greece and one about Constantinople/Istanbul. All of his books are now out of print and most are hard and expensive to source at second hand. His is a minor voice, no doubt, but the oblivion of his work would be an undeserved fate. The Cavafy biography is out of date but still useful. And the travel books, Aegean Greece (1954), The Morea (1958) and Mainland Greece (1965), certainly repay an investment of time and money in the catalogues of second-hand booksellers. Together, they cover most of Greece, including Athos but excepting Attica and Evia, Macedonia, Western Thrace, the Ionian Islands and Crete; they offer a richly sophisticated, multi-layered reading of Greek topography, culture and history. 

 

Liddell lived half of his adult life in Greece. He joined the British Council in Athens, when it first set up shop there in 1939. During the wartime evacuation, he moved to Egypt where he taught at the University of Cairo for twelve years. Returning to Greece in 1953, he worked at the University of Athens, until retirement in 1972. After 1947, he never returned to England and spent the last decades of his life in Greece. 

 

Liddell read Classics at Oxford and on graduating took up work in the Bodleian Library. It is clear from the three guidebooks that during those years he was travelling extensively in Greece with his younger brother Donald. In the course of time, Liddell became a fluent Greek speaker and acquired an extensive knowledge of the country, its literature, traditions, topography, religion and people. He was, therefore, extremely well placed to write the sort of learned cultural guides that are something of an exception in the genre these days. I emphasise cultural. Liddell was not at all interested in politics: Osbert Lancaster’s brilliant characterisations of the Greek political game in Classical Landscape with Figures (1947) and Kevin Andrews’s very real encounters with Civil War politics in The Flight of Ikaros (1959) are as far removed from Liddell’s approach as could be imagined. Fleeting and superficial references to the third round of the Civil War in Epirus, to the Cyprus crisis of the 1950s and to the general election of 1951, seen from distant Amorgos (‘nowhere could have been quieter’), are as political as Liddell allows himself to be. All else is loftily high-minded and Olympian.

 

Liddell was living in Athens when he wrote the three travel books and they represent a composite account of many years of travelling in the places described: some of the experiences come from his travels with Donald in the second half of the 1930s, others appear to date from the late 1940s, when he was resident in Cairo, or from the 1950s, when he returned to Athens. Their structure is basically topographical (like a gazeteer) but is often influenced by place-related narratives, such as myth. The opening chapters of Aegean Greece are, for example, structured around the notion that Theseus is the central figure of Aegean mythology: Liddell traces Theseus’ presence in Crete, on Naxos and Skyros, in the Argo-Saronic, at Troezen and across his adventure-strewn land journey to Attica, as he himself explores those places. In The Morea, of course, the descendants of Tantalos and Pelops (the houses of Thyestes and Atreus) take centre stage, particularly in the Argolid. 

Despite his earlier travels with brother Donald, Liddell usually travelled alone, though his journeys by car were sometimes undertaken with a specially hired driver (he is amusing about the habits of his Greek driver ‘Nick’). He also travelled by taxi, by train, in buses, on the back of mules, and - in the great tradition of British explorers of Greece - by foot. Roads were often bad and public transport put him in touch with the patient, indomitable and often garrulous spirit of the people. At sea, on the Aegean, he is funny and ironic about the sufferings of ferry-passengers (‘the stewards include the best and the worst of humanity’). 

 

Liddell was evidently an introvert exiled (voluntarily) in a nation of gregarious extraverts: he was most certainly not Paddy Leigh Fermor (‘How glad I am to be travelling alone - how cross I should be with anyone else’; ‘it is a great disadvantage to know Greek’). But his preference for his own company did not, seemingly, isolate him anywhere and he doesn’t appear to have been shy; on the contrary, he throws himself repeatedly into animated conversations, gatherings, social events, shared meals. He attends a party (γλέντι) on Siphnos and falls to wondering why obsolete English often provides the best means of translating Greek terms such as μάγκας (‘roaring-boy’) or ντερμπεντέρισσα (‘roaring-girl’). He gives great accounts of a wedding on Carpathos, ‘panegyrics’ (πανηγύρια) at Tegea and on Kasos, though he always maintains some distance (‘I did not let myself be drawn into closer participation in the feast’). On Nisyros he overhears a complex theological conversation; on Kalymnos he talks extensively to the sponge-divers (only a few years before Charmian Clift and George Johnston would head there). It’s a curiously engaging account by a diffident Englishman in a society where diffidence is abnormal.

 

Liddell was a pleasingly dyspeptic traveller, often complaining about his lodgings and the food. In the years of his travels, tourism was only just getting going and few places had hotels of a good standard. Before motorways, airfreight and reliable shipping, food supplies were very local and restricted, as Patience Gray would discover on Naxos. ‘Island food’, he comments, ‘is as nasty as anyone has ever said it was’. Poros has ‘the most dreadful food to offer; nor is the wine much better’, while ‘the cuisine of Syra is atrocious.’ To be fair, he didn’t like English cooking either (‘yet one never feels that English food will kill one’). In Greece, he was happy wherever there was fresh fish on offer; he gives luminous accounts of great meals on Siphnos and Kasos. Even in the 1950s, it seems, cuisine wasn’t always terrible (and, as I am happy to attest, is now everywhere miraculously transformed). 

 

Liddell undoubtedly loved Greece: its seascape, its landscapes, its human characters and its cultural richness. Indeed, he is among those many British travellers who have seen it as the lost Eden:

 

To some of us who most love the Aegean, it is like a type or foretaste of Paradise. In the mountains and dry streams of these wind-shaken islands our homesickness for ‘that imperial palace whence we came’ is soothed, we almost forget that we are exiles, and we recognize places where we have never been before. Here, more frequently than anywhere else, come those unsought and unseekable moments of penetrating bliss, of Wordsworthian joy and quiet, when ‘we see into the life of things’. 

 

Like many of us lovers of Greece, Liddell was happiest when surrounded by nature at its most sublime: either at sea or on land. If there is a mountain to climb, he tackles it (though, like me, he often gets vertigo); if there is a famous cave nearby, he enters it (though he usually gets claustrophobia and doesn’t get in very far: ‘I am something perhaps of a spelaeophobe’). He wrote enchantingly about remote places, marrying poetic, often romantic description with great topographical clarity and accuracy. Indeed, he had a topographical sense that reminds me most of William Martin Leake (1777-1860), whose ground-breaking accounts of the Morea and Northern Greece Liddell clearly knew well and admired. Like Leake, he could seemingly put a name to every mountain, every stream, every out-of-the-way classical, mediaeval and Ottoman fragment that he encountered, and yet do so without sounding pedantic or fussy. In this extract he enters the Vale of Sparta from Kalamata through the Langada pass:

 

Descending we entered the Langhadha or gorge of Trypi. The road has been cut or blasted as a terrace in the rock face. Here the stone is a brownish cream. Pillars rise up from the gorge and needles poke up from the sides. Perhaps there is nothing of the sort finer in Greece, with the exception of the broad calm gorge of Tempe. But the splendid Bouräikos, with its mountain torrents, must not be forgotten. The Langhadha is bone dry in summer. At Trypi there is a fine fountain. Near here is the chasm where the Spartans hurled criminals to their death, and whence Aristomenes, the Messenian hero, escaped holding on to a fox’s brush. But more beautiful even than the pass was the backward view of Taygetus, when we emerged into the plain of Sparta. This, perhaps the loveliest of the Morean mountains, with great bastions and deep mysterious clefts, rises so sheer from the level ground towards a long, jagged ridge. Whenever it can be clearly seen it is magnificent, as now when its summits, the great ‘five fingers’, were blue and bare. It is even better in early spring or in winter, when there is a brighter green on the lower slopes and the trees are golden with ripe oranges, and the peaks are besprinkled with snow.

 

Liddell’s knowledge of the flora of Greece was no less impressive than his topographical mastery. As he moved across the landscape, he was able to do that most human and necessary (but vanishingly rare) of things: to name the plants, trees and fauna that he sees. His eyes are particularly acute in the mountains and forests of the Pindus; his descriptions of walks there are masterful, evocative, aromatic.

 

Topography and mythology compulsorily set the scene. But it is his knowledge of history (ancient, mediaeval and modern), of the diachronic sweep of Greek literature, and of Greek culture in all its forms that really constitutes the tapestry of Liddell’s storytelling. In Mainland Greece, the history ranges from antiquity to early modernity: he is compellingly interesting and opinionated on the figures of the Greek Revolution (Androutsos, Botsaris, Trelawney); on Byron and Hobhouse; on Ali Pasha. In The Morea, he has material aplenty to co-ordinate several layers of Greek history simultaneously, and is particularly masterful in his use of the little-known Frankish history of Achaea. Who might have imagined that at Isthmia, where ‘at the Isthmian Games of 196BC Titus Quinctius Flaminius, the victor over Macedon, proclaimed the liberty of Hellas from taxes’, the Frankish Prince of Achaea would, in 1305AD, celebrate a great tournament, ‘sending messengers through all Frankish Greece to proclaim that seven champions had come from overseas to joust there’, such that more than a thousand knights and barons entered the lists?  

 

In passages like this Liddell came close to achieving an ideal that I suggested in a lecture given at the Benaki Museum in 2016: the ideal of releasing from the very stones of the Greek landscape three millennia of continuous, interpenetrating, overlapping, startling, wonderfully and specifically located histories and tales. Liddell’s knowledge of literature (modern, Byzantine, Frankish and ancient) was no less compendious. Music, dance, karaghiozi shadow-plays, gorgeous liturgies - all were of equal interest to him.

 

Interestingly, however, we learn very little in all of this about Liddell’s personal life. As mentioned, he tells us of the tours of Greece he made with his brother in 1936-8, and we sense his aloofness as a traveller in the 1950s. Liddell was gay, but, with one exception, we get only a few passing hints of this. In Mainland Greece, however, he tells us, unusually, of visiting a friend called Francis on an otherwise deserted island near to Evia. It took me some research to work out who this friend was. But it turns out that Liddell was a friend of Francis Turville-Petre (1901-1942), an English archaeologist who had made an important discovery in Palestine and from 1933-1938 was living on the tiny island of Ktyponisi, in the hope of securing permission to dig a Mycenean grave-mound closeby. Turville-Petre was colourful. Openly gay, from an aristocratic Roman Catholic family, flamboyant if highly nervous, he was a friend of W.H.Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and had been with them in Berlin in 1929-1931. There he  introduced Isherwood to Heinz Neddermeyer, who would become Isherwood’s boyfriend. In 1933, Isherwood and Neddermeyer visited Turville-Petre on Ktyponisi; the visit would be immortalised in Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel, Down There on a Visit (1962). Liddell too visited, around 1938:

[Francis] settled upon the islet of St Nicolas the Less in the bay, where he built a bungalow. I stayed there for some three days about five years later, when the building was over and life was less uproarious, though still very odd: Francis (a self-doomed Mycerinus) lived by night and slept by day.

 

A small but intriguing glimpse into Liddell’s social life. It would be interesting to learn more, though this might be a tough task now. Liddell rejected the idea of autobiography and is a challenge for would-be biographers: he routinely destroyed his friends’ letters and urged them to destroy his; he left no archive. Real writerly introversion!

 

An Englishman who fell in love with Greece and spent the last four decades of his life there, teaching English in the university, Liddell is a great example of a very specific Anglo-Hellenic temper. His learned and absorbing travel books have deepened my understanding of places I thought I already knew; they have tantalized me with descriptions of places I haven’t properly visited (e.g. Aetolo-Acarnania). They inform and entertain, and consistently make the most interesting and surprising of connexions. Let me close with a typical piece of his writing. The excerpt comes from Aegean Greece; the author is at Phry on Kasos:

 

The café (owned by the dentist) is better than tolerable. I live there, reading Shakespeare - brought up on Greek poetry and English landscape, I have chosen for myself the even greater beauties (as I think them) of Greek landscape and English poetry. Notes on Shakespeare get mixed up with notes on my travels; but then, notes on Shakespeare are apt to be notes on life. Surely the Mantuan apothecary’s shop (for instance) looked, and smelt, like a provincial Greek grocer’s?

 

                                                    About his shelves

                   A beggarly account of empty boxes,

                   Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,

        Remnants of pack thread and old cakes of roses…

 

John 

30 June 2021

Anglo-Hellenism: Anglicans and the Orthodox Part IIb. A Greek Archbishop of Canterbury

In my earlier two posts in this series of three, I looked at the relations between the English and Greek churches in two periods: first after the foundation of the Greek state in 1830 and then in the period between the English Reformation and the Greek revolutionary war.  

Before the correspondence in the early seventeenth century between Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria and Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury, there is no evidence of direct contacts between the English and Greek churches for nearly a thousand years. But on 27 May 669AD, a remarkable man, known in English as Theodore of Tarsus, arrived in Kent, as the duly consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, to take up position as the head of the Church in Great Britain. He was already 67 when he landed on our shores, but he steered the church with energy and skill for 22 successful years, leaving a legacy that endured for centuries and is still reflected today in the structure of the Church of England. He is the only Greek to have exercised primatial authority over the English Church and, like all the earliest archbishops of Canterbury, he is revered as a saint by Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans alike. 

 

The story of who he was, how he arrived here and what he achieved in England deserves to be more widely known. It rests primarily on two sources: first, the highly favourable account of Theodore’s archiepiscopacy in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum), written in the monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow in the 730s; and secondly, inferences that can be drawn from the Biblical Commentaries written in the school established by Theodore himself at Canterbury.[1]

 

Bede tells us that Theodore died at Canterbury in 690AD, aged 88. He was born around 602AD, at Tarsus in Cilicia, the city of St Paul. At the time he was born, the Eastern Roman Empire still controlled Palestine and Syria, though that would end during Theodore's lifetime. He was Greek-speaking and was educated in the exegetical traditions of the theological schools of Antioch, most likely at Antioch itself. Many Syrians were bilingual and Theodore may also have acquired a knowledge of Syriac Christianity in its most important city of Edessa. It seems likely that he remained in Syria after the Persian occupation of 613, which was finally ended by Emperor Heraclius in 630AD. But he must have left his homeland no later than 636AD, when Syria fell to the Moslem Arabs. 

 

There is ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that Theodore spent time in Constantinople. The range of interests in the Canterbury Biblical Commentaries matches what is known of the university curriculum at Constantinople in the seventh century. Bede mentions Theodore’s knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages, plus their secular and sacred literatures, alongside metrics, astronomy and mathematics; on top of which modern scholars add philosophy, medicine and Roman civil law. He may have gone to Constantinople either as a scholar or refugee (or both).

 

By 667AD, however, Theodore was in Rome, living as a monk among other refugees of the Arab invasions, probably in the Cilician Monastery of St Anastasius Magundat (a Syrian who had been martyred by the Persians in 628). In that year, Wighard, who had come to be consecrated as the successor to Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury, died unexpectedly of a fever in Rome. At first, Pope Vitalian turned to Hadrian, Abbot of the Monastery of Nirida near Naples, to lead the English church, but he refused and the choice eventually settled on Theodore. On 6 March 668AD, Vitalian duly consecrated him as Archbishop of Canterbury and sent him off to England, accompanied by Hadrian himself, who was to keep an eye on this very Greek archbishop, in case he stirred things up in England on the still unsettled monothelete controversy. 

 

In the event, Theodore turned out to be the greatest of all the early occupants of St Augustine’s throne. He arrived only five years after the Synod of Whitby had settled the argument between the Celtic and Roman wings of the Church about the dating and observance of Easter. Following the victory of the Roman party at Whitby, he was thus the first Archbishop to enjoy authority over the whole English church in the Kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, Essex, Wessex and Kent alike. 

 

Ruins of St Augustine's (once St Peter's) Abbey

Together with Hadrian, whom he appointed Abbot of St Peter’s Abbey in Canterbury, he toured the English kingdoms, establishing his personal authority with the Anglo-Saxon monarchs and the Church’s often powerful and strong-willed hierarchs. He ordained bishops to long vacant sees; he split the powerful Northumbrian and Mercian dioceses, creating new sees at Hexham, Lindisfarne, Lindsey (northern Lincolnshire), Lichfield, Hereford and Worcester. Despite disruptions and changes arising from the Viking and Norman invasions, Theodore’s administrative reforms underpinned the basic territorial patterns of English dioceses until the Reformation and largely subsist still today. 

At Hertford in 673, he called the first synod of the Church in English lands, bringing canonical discipline to ecclesiastical and monastic administration. A second synod, held at Hatfield in 680, firmly established Catholic Orthodoxy across the Anglo-Saxon lands, proclaiming the authority of the then five Ecumenical Councils and the First Lateran Council (which had repudiated monotheletism). 

 

In 679AD, Theodore made the peace between King Egfrid of Northumbria and King Ethelred of Mercia, proving himself not only the master of the Church in England but also a major powerbroker in secular politics.

 

But perhaps his greatest accomplishment was his establishment, with the help of Abbot Hadrian, of the first great school of international learning in English lands.[3] Alongside the parallel foundation of the Monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow by Benedict Biscop, who had also accompanied Theodore from Rome to England in 668/9, the school at Canterbury brought advanced knowledge and intellectual method to England and set in train their transmission across the Anglo-Saxon centuries. From Canterbury and Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, the torch of learning was carried by men such as Aldhelm and Bede, until it reached its florescence under, e.g., Alcuin of York in the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries. 

 

St Theodore of Tarsus was buried in the Abbey of St Peter at Canterbury; his grave is still marked today in the abbey ruins.[2] Living before the Great Schism of 1054 between the Eastern and Western churches, he was in a unique position to mould the still nascent English church, intellectually and administratively, enriching it with the sophistication of Greek knowledge. He achieved this through an example of clear-sighted authority, commanding persuasiveness and personal holiness. The presence of this Greek saint in Canterbury in the early years of Anglo-Saxon Christianity never ceases to astound and inspire me. Truly he is one of the greatest saints of the English Church. His feast is celebrated on 19 September. He should not be forgotten. Αιωνία του η μνήμη.

 

John

Monday, 7 June 2021

 

[1] The relevant passages of Bede are largely in Eccl.Hist. IV (chapters 1, 2, 5, 12, 17, 21); his death is recounted in book V (ch.8). The reconstruction of Theodore’s intellectual life from the Biblical Commentaries is set out in Bernhard Bischoff & Michael Lapidge (ed.), Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge: CUP, 1995); there is a useful summary in chapter 1 of Michael Lapidge (ed.), Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence (Cambridge: CUP, 1995). 

[2] In the course of time, St Peter's Abbey was rededicated to St Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury. The abbey ruins are open for viewing and are managed by English Heritage.

[3] The career of Abbot Hadrian, an African, is almost as extraordinary and fascinating as that of Theodore himself. See the articles in the bibliography below by Michael Wood.

 

 

Further reading

 

If you have enjoyed these three blogposts and want to read more (or simply check out my sources), you can find much more in the following bibliography:

 

Bede, Historical Works II. Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Books IV-V. (trans. J.E. King) (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP 1930)

 

Bernhard Bischoff & Michael Lapidge (ed.), Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)

 

Stanley Casson, Greece and Britain (London: Collins, 1943)

 

William Chauncey Emhardt, Historical Contact of the Eastern Orthodox and Anglican Churches: A Review of the Relations between the Orthodox Church of the East and the Anglican Church since the Time of Theodore of Tarsus (New York: Department of Missions and Church Extension of the Episcopal Church, 1920)

 

Richard Clogg, Βρετανία και Ελλάδα (London: Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 1995)

 

J.A.Cramer (ed.), The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius of Corcyra (London: Camden Society, 1841)

 

Theodore E. Dowling & Edwin W. Fletcher, Hellenism in England: A Short History of the Greek People in This Country from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Faith Press, 1915)

D.E. Eichholz, 'A Greek Traveller in Tudor England', Greece & Rome 16.7 (Apr. 1947): 76-84

 

M. Epstein, The Early History of the Levant Company (London: Routledge 1908)

 

Bryn Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2010)

 

Jonathan Harris, ‘London’s Greek Community’, in George Kakavas (ed.), Treasured Offerings: The Legacy of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St Sophia, London (Athens: Byzantine & Christian Museum, 2002): 3-8

 

Michael Lapidge (ed.), Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)

 

Robert Liddell, The Morea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958)

 

John Mole (ed.), The Sultan’s Organ: The Diary of Thomas Dallam, 1599 - London to Constantinople and Adventures on the Way (London: Fortune Books 2012)

 

Mark S. Nestlehutt, ‘Anglicans in Greece: The Episcopal Mission and the English Chaplaincy at Athens’, Anglican and Episcopal History 65.3 (1996): 293-313

 

Bernard Randolph, The Present State of the Morea (London: Wm. Notts et al. 1689³)

 

Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): 289-319

 

Dimitris Salapatas, ‘Anglican-Orthodox Relations: A Dead End or a Way Forward?’, Koinonia 63 (2014): 15-31

 

F.H.W. Sheppard (ed.), ‘The Greek Church (Later St. Mary's, Crown Street)', in Survey of London: Volumes 33 and 34 (London: London County Council, 1966): 278-287 (available at British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols33-4/pp278-287)

 

Bp. Theodoritos of Nazianzos, ‘History of the Greek Cathedral of Saint Sophia in London’ in Kakavas, op.cit.: 21-26.

 

Paul Watkins, ‘An English Church on Kythera’, Argo: A Hellenic review 11/12 (2020): 44-46

 

Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Frank Cass 1964) 

 

Michael Wood, ‘Anglo-Saxon Christianity’, BBC History Today (December 2017): downloaded (3 June 2021):

https://www.historyextra.com/period/anglo-saxon/michael-wood-anglo-saxon-christianity-refugees-hadrian-theodore-syria-libya/

 

Michael Wood, ‘The African who transformed Anglo-Saxon England’, BBC History Today (October 2020): downloaded (3 June 2021): https://www.historyextra.com/period/anglo-saxon/hadrian-clerk-libya-african-who-anglo-saxon-england/

Anglo-Hellenism in religious form: Anglicans and the Orthodox Part IIa. Diplomacy, commerce and scholarship after the Reformation

Before the creation of the Greek state in 1830, there were two periods, separated by a thousand years, when Greek and English interests in Christianity overlapped. In the seventh century, Theodore of Tarsus was appointed and consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian, arriving in England to take possession of his diocese in 669AD. Part IIb of this blog takes a brief look at his career and his importance to the English church. In this piece I consider the contacts that arose in the immediate aftermath of the English Reformation and the particular forms that they took in the seventeenth century, a period of active, mutual interest between the Anglican and Orthodox churches. 

It is diplomacy that gives us the first window into English perceptions of Orthodoxy and Orthodox perceptions of Anglicanism. The earliest accounts by a Greek and an Englishman of travel to each other’s lands both come from the sixteenth century. In 1545-1546, Nikandros Noukios of Corfu visited England as member of a diplomatic mission from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to the English king, Henry VIII; in 1599, the organ-maker Thomas Dallam made a long trip to Constantinople, with the diplomatic objective of bestowing a magnificent and costly gift from Queen Elizabeth I and the City of London on Sultan Mehmed III. Both men wrote about their diplomatic missions, and their wonderful accounts still survive. 

Nothing is known about Nikandros Noukios beyond what he tells us in the three books of his Travels / Ἀποδημίες. He was a Corfiot, living under Venetian rule. At Venice, sometime around 1545, he met Gerardus Veltuyckus, rector at Louvain University, who was heading towards Constantinople as ambassador of Charles V. Noukios managed to get himself attached to the mission, accompanying Gerardus to the Sublime Porte and returning with him across Europe to debrief Charles at his court in Brussels. Gerardus was then sent on diplomatic business to Henry VIII in London and Noukios once more managed to attach himself to the mission. 

 

The 1540s were a period of religious ferment across Europe and, as an Orthodox Greek with no personal investment in the turmoil, he took a keen interest in religious developments. In book 1 he writes - in a crabbed form of classical Greek - about the reforms of the Lutherans: their abolition of monasticism, liturgical simplification, abolition of holy days and so on. He also reports on the activities in Munster of the Anabaptists: the radical protestants who held all property in common. 

 

Book 2 of his travels deals primarily with England, but he also went to Scotland, in the company of Greek mercenaries from Argos, and had time to absorb the prejudices of Englishmen about Ireland. His account of religious developments in England isn’t always accurate and is told entirely from the perspective of the reform party in Henry’s court, but it throws light on how the English reformers presented and explained their actions to foreigners. It’s a very different account from Noukios’ report of the Reformation in German lands. The political opposition of the Papacy to Henry’s annulment; the alleged abuses and profanities of the English and Irish monasteries; the purportedly deceitful and corrupt religious cults and ‘superstitions’: all these targets of the king’s commissioners - whether or not overblown and self-serving - are recounted by Noukios in surprisingly neutral terms: surprising in that Noukios rarely even hints at the particular perspective an Orthodox outsider might be imagined to have on the events described. One could be a little unkind and say it’s all rather gossipy and short of breath. 

 

Perhaps only in the account of the dissolution of the cult of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, which had happened ten years earlier, does Noukios allow a small note of censure to appear. He also relates a detail, which may or may not be true, about the dispersal of the saint’s remains that is not reported elsewhere. Given the laudable Becket exhibition currently being mounted at the British Museum, I quote this passage in full:

 

'Henry, as being successor to the kings of former ages, condemned Thomas as a rebel and a pest of his country, and gave orders to commit to the fire the coffin which contained his remains. Whence those appointed to this quickly fulfilled the order they had received. Wherefore one might see the remains, formerly honoured as those of a saint, and consecrated, both dragged along the public road and exposed to the gaze of the populace; and treated with every indignity, one might say, and committed to the fire in the middle of the city, and reduced to ashes; and, having put the ashes into a cannon, they discharged them into the air. And a decree was promulgated throughout England that no one should dare, as heretofore, to speak of him as a saint, but as Thomas the rebel, and one who had been disloyal and disobedient to the kings of England.’[1]

Noukios was, as we can see above, immersed in the Zeitgeist of English reform and he absorbed a lot of Henrician propaganda: nowhere is he more credulous than in relating what he heard from the court about where the wealth expropriated from the monasteries was going. But the whole account, however naïve and unquestioning it appears, is fascinating (copies can be found in second-hand bookshops). The manuscript in which it was written was unearthed by 1841 and had been owned by Archbishop Laud, whose interest in Greeks will concern us shortly. 

 

Five decades after Noukios’ trip to Britain, Thomas Dallam, an organ-builder, found himself heading to Constantinople on an unusual mission. In 1598, wishing to obtain trading concessions in the Ottoman Empire, merchants in the City put up funds to pay for a costly present, in the form of a pipe-organ that could be played both manually and, through a clock mechanism, automatically. The present was offered as a personal gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmed; it was dismantled and stowed on board the merchant ship Hector. The ship left Gravesend in February 1599 and arrived in Constantinople six months later, in August. Dallam was accompanied by the organ’s engineer, painter and carpenter, but it is his diary that has immortalised the journey and the successful presentation of the gift. 

 

Zakynthos Town

In April, the ship and its crew reached the Ionian Islands. On 20 April, the ship anchored off Zante (Zakynthos), which was then ruled by the Venetians, and the crew and passengers went ashore. It was Orthodox Easter. Dallam’s diary is the first account we have by an Englishman on Greek soil and it gives us the first report in English of Easter as celebrated in Greece. Dallam and his friends headed inland where they encountered Greeks commemorating the Resurrection and were made welcome, despite their lack of familiarity as protestants with the Orthodox liturgy - and particularly with the segregation of sexes at worship:

 

‘[Our host] bowed to me and took my hand and led me around the end of the house and through a little cloister into a chapel where we found a priest saying mass and wax candles burning. He sat me down in a pew, where I watched what the people did. There were about twenty men but no women, who were in a lower chapel by themselves, but they could still hear and see what was going on. Ned Hale came in but he didn’t see me and knelt down near the women, whom he didn’t notice. But they saw him and were surprised at what he was doing. I got up from my knees to look for him and saw two women laughing at him, as well they might, for he was making a fool of himself. Neither he nor I had ever seen any part of a mass before and we were none the wiser now. The chapel was very elaborately painted and decorated in a way I had never seen before.’ [2]

 

After the liturgy ended, the men were taken into the house to have lunch: ‘good bread and excellent wine and red eggs’. As a result of their curiosity, Dallam was thus the first Englishman to witness and record for posterity the Greek custom of dyeing eggs red for Easter. I will leave it to my readers to discover what happened when the group reached Constantinople: needless to say, more surprises lay in store for them.

 

**********

 

Dallam’s diplomatic visit to Ottoman lands in 1599 owed much to the foundation seven years earlier (1592) of the Levant Company in England: this was an early attempt by English merchants to muscle in on and exploit trade opportunities in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the following century, the activities of this company caused commercial contacts between England and the Greek-speaking world to grow; the company’s charter was subsequently confirmed and renewed by King James I in 1606 and King Charles II in 1661, respectively. 

 

Levant Company Arms

Out of its own revenues the Levant Company paid the salary of the Ambassador in Constantinople (he was appointed, formally at least, on behalf of the British monarch), and established consulates in key trading posts, particularly Aleppo, Smyrna and Constantinople itself. In Venetian-held Greek territories, the company appointed consuls in Zante (Zakynthos) and Cephalonia; in Ottoman-occupied Greek lands the company’s consuls operated in the Morea and on Chios, and, at later dates, on Crete and at the Piraeus. The Levant Company also appointed chaplains: one post was based at Constantinople and would, as we shall see, play an important role in Anglican-Orthodox contacts; the other chaplaincies were at Aleppo and Smyrna. 

In the Morea the consuls were usually based in Patras, where they superintended the large and important trade in currants (the English word ‘currant’ is a corruption of ‘corinthiaka’: meaning ‘from Corinth’). But between 1638-43, the consul Sir Henry Hyde established himself at Chlemoutsi, the site of the great Frankish castle of the Villehardouins. There he is reported to have ‘lived in great state, built a small church, and a fair house with many gardens and vineyards about it’.[3] Although its whereabouts is not, I think, now known, this ‘small church’ must have been the first Anglican church established in mainland Greece. It would be fascinating to know more about this church: what form it took, what services took place there.

 

The activities of English merchants in Venetian and Ottoman lands offered employment to Greek mariners, and the Greek merchant fleet was itself active in English ports, including London. Only a few years after the building of Henry Hyde’s small church in the Morea, the Greek community established in the English capital took its first steps to build an Orthodox church there. 

 

The efforts were begun in 1674 by Daniel Voulgaris, an Orthodox priest, who petitioned the king’s privy council for permission to build a church. Permission was granted within a year but the project languished. Efforts were boosted in 1676 by the arrival in London in exile of the Archbishop of Samos, Joseph Georgirenes; he set about raising funds and securing broad support for the building. The Bishop of London, Henry Compton, also supported the Greek initiative, while the king and his brother, James Duke of York, both contributed money to it. Land was acquired in Soho, in the Anglican parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, between what are now called Greek Street and Charing Cross Road (then Hog Lane), and building work commenced in 1677. Shortly after, Archbishop Georgirenes dedicated the church to the Dormition of the Mother of God (the dedication plaque is now in the Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom in Bayswater). 

 

The 'Greek Church' at the end of the 19th century

The experiment did not last long. The church proved to be in the wrong place for the Greek community; the Bishop of London expected the Orthodox priests to conform to the rites of the Church of England; and a case of embezzlement by one of the congregation embroiled the archbishop in unsuccessful litigation, which soon acquired an unhelpful political dimension. The Greek community gave up the church in 1682. For most of the eighteenth century, the congregation worshipped at the Russian chapel, which was under the control of Greek priests. For many years, the Greek Church in Soho (the name stuck, though the congregation had long since departed) was rented by the Anglican parish of St Anne to the French Huguenot community, then to Calvinist Independents, before being finally converted for Anglican usage in 1850. The building was demolished in 1935, its site now being occupied by Foyles bookshop. Its memory survives in the name of Greek Street.

 

**********

 

Commerce underpinned more systematic efforts to establish relations between the churches. The Levant Company’s chaplains in the East became a particular source of information and communication between the Anglicans and the Orthodox. In the second half of the century, two of the chaplains at Constantinople, Thomas Smith (1668-1670) and John Covel (1670-1676), were theologians and would go on to publish books that aimed to project authoritative views about the Orthodox Church. Runciman tells us that Smith’s account is ‘well-informed, frank but fairly sympathetic’; Covel’s much less so.[4] But this process of mutual enquiry, while slow to yield real fruit, had taken off in earnest in the first part of the century, when a correspondence began between George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cyril Loukaris, the so-called ‘Calvinist’ Patriarch of Alexandria. In 1617, the archbishop invited the patriarch to send four Greeks to England to study theology at Oxford, at the expense of the Crown. The first to arrive was Metrophanes Kritopoulos, from Verroia, who studied at Balliol from about 1621 and would himself become Patriarch of Alexandria, in 1634. 

 

Such experiments continued under subsequent hierarchs. Under William Laud’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, a Cretan called Nathaniel Kanopios also studied theology at Balliol, from 1637-1648. He is famous for introducing the English to coffee, which, like Oxford students ever since, he used to brew up every morning in college. Because of his closeness to Laud, the Puritans forced him to leave Oxford, but he made a success of his ecclesiastical career, becoming in the course of time Archbishop of Smyrna.

 

Gloucester Hall, Oxford

By the time that Archbishop Georgirenes was being forced to abandon his Greek Church in Soho, relations between the Orthodox and the theological authorities in Oxford had matured sufficiently to lead to an ambitious and radical proposal. Sometime around 1682, Georgirenes wrote to William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to propose a permanent scheme for educating a dozen Greek theological students at Oxford. At that time, Gloucester Hall in Oxford was essentially defunct (penniless and student-less); its principal, Benjamin Woodroffe, therefore took up the Greek suggestion with enthusiasm and offered Gloucester’s premises for a model Greek College. The scheme was to be funded by the Levant Company and the students chosen by the patriarchs of Antioch and Constantinople in alternation. The surprisingly enlightened scheme got off the ground and the first students arrived in 1698. But it proved short-lived and foundered on problems that sound all too modern: the Levant Company disliked paying for it (of what commercial use were these graduates?) and in 1705, the Phanar refused to send any more students owing to the ‘irregular life’ that some of them were living in London. Clearly, the attractions of the capital were more compelling to some than the grind of theological study in Oxford. 

 

*********

 

These exchanges and contacts had done much to create opportunity to deepen mutual knowledge between the churches of each other’s doctrinal and ecclesiological principles. But a little knowledge, coupled with the practical failures of the church- and college-building schemes, proved to be too much. The florescence of interconfessional relations in the seventeenth century is of great historical interest but left no real ecumenical legacy. For much of the eighteenth century, contacts between the churches cooled. It took the creation of the Greek state and the ecumenism fostered by the Oxford Movement in the Church of England to reawaken mutual interests, in the nineteenth century. And the process of creating effective institutional ecumenical structures didn’t really begin until the twentieth century. In the final piece in this blog, I will take a look at the activities of a Greek hierarch whose leadership of the English church, a thousand years before Archbishop Georgirenes arrived in London, really did leave a legacy that lasted many centuries and is still felt in the Church of England today.

 

John Kittmer

Feast of the Venerable Bede

25 May 2021

 

[1] This quotation comes from the only English edition (Greek text plus English translation) of Noukios’ travelogue: J.A.Cramer (ed.), The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius of Corcyra (London: Camden Society, 1841): 74-75. 

 

[2] This quotation is taken from an accessible, modernised transcription of the diary: John Mole (ed.), The Sultan’s Organ: The Diary of Thomas Dallam, 1599 - London to Constantinople and Adventures on the Way (London: Fortune Books 2012): 24-25.

  

[3] Robert Liddell refers to this in The Morea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958) 69. His source is an early travel-book by an English merchant: Bernard Randolph, The Present State of the Morea (London: Wm. Notts et al. 1689³). Sir Henry Hyde would later be appointed Charles II’s Ambassador in Constantinople, but at the request of the Commonwealth Government he was sent back by the Sultan to England, convicted of treason and executed in 1650.  

 

[4] The standard account on which I have largely relied is by Runciman. For this reference, see Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): 292-293.