— ARCHBISHOP DAMASKINOS OF ATHENS AND ALL GREECE —
‘That scheming Prelate’
When His All Holiness, the Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch, the nominal leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians wants to enter his residence in the impressive St George’s compound in Istanbul, he has to do so through a side door. The main gate, named for St Peter, has been welded shut since 1821. The reason for this seemingly self-defeating act of home improvement is that the site saw, on the Easter Sunday of that year, the judicial murder of the patriarch of today’s predecessor, Grigorios V. Having celebrated the solemn Orthodox liturgy for Easter, Grigorios, still wearing his patriarchal vestments, was dragged from the cathedral on the orders of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II, who was furious at his failure to suppress his fellow Greeks as they rebelled against Turkish rule. The Patriarch was taken to the gateway, where a rope had been looped over the lintel, and was there hanged. His death shocked and angered the Greek population, leading him to become a symbol of Greek refusal to give in to oppression. When Greek forces went into battle for their freedom (an enterprise in which they were, ultimately, successful), many of the soldiers carved the name ‘Grigorios’ on their swords.
In 1943, some one hundred and twenty-two years after Grigorios’s execution, another figure of the Greek episcopate faced the very real threat of death at the hands of a furious foreign occupier. The committed Nazi general Jürgen Stroop, who, since his rather embarrassing dressing-down at the hands of Bishop von Galen of Münster in 1934, had risen to become the Head of the SS and Police service in Greece, was adamant that the Archbishop of Athens needed to be shot. Stroop had discovered that the prelate – Damaskinos Papandreou – in his role as both de jure religious and de facto political leader of Greece, had published a letter protesting the deportations of Jews from Thessaloniki to Poland. The letter contained the following paragraph:
According to the terms of the armistice, all Greek citizens, without distinction of race or religion, were to be treated equally by the Occupation Authorities … In our national consciousness, all the children of Mother Greece are an inseparable unity: they are equal members of the national body irrespective of religion or dogmatic differences. Our Holy Religion does not recognize superior or inferior qualities based on race or religion, as it is stated: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek’ (Gal. 3:28) and thus condemns any attempt to discriminate or create racial or religious differences.
Damaskinos sent the letter to the collaborationist Prime Minister but also ensured that it was disseminated as widely as possible, including having a copy delivered to Stroop’s desk when he arrived in Athens in the September of that year. It is one of the only formal protests from a figure in authority that explicitly calls out the Nazi extermination of European Jewry. Stroop was livid and contacted Damaskinos, threatening to shoot him personally if he continued his advocacy for the Jews. With icy calm, Damaskinos composed a short reply to Stroop, which he, again, ensured was publicised. It read:
According to the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church, our prelates are hanged; not shot. Please respect our traditions.
Stroop may not have fully appreciated the reference that the Archbishop was making, but the message was clear: the Greeks, and their Church leaders in particular, were not going to give in. Damaskinos’s life was spared. Once again, the devout Nazi had been humiliated by a priest of a religion he viewed as weak and degenerate. Once again, an Archbishop had stirred up resistance among the people of Greece.
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Where had Damaskinos got such courage? It might have had something to do with his upbringing. He was born Dimitrios Papandreou on 3rd March 1891, in Dorvitsia, a tiny village nestled among the mountain passes of the Aetolian region, Greece’s Wild West. The people of Aetolia had a long-running reputation for being tough – ancient Greek historians considered their guttural pronunciation to be a sign of their semi-barbaric nature, as too was their insistence on eating all of their food raw. By the time of the future Archbishop’s birth, cooking may well have reached the mountains of Aetolia, but many other comforts had not. The Papandreou family were desperately poor, living a life of rural hardship dictated by the seasons and weather, in a manner not dissimilar to their grunting ancestors of yore. This was no barrier to Dimitrios, however, who showed himself to be both bright and ambitious.
By the time he was twenty-five, he had distinguished himself as a soldier during the Balkan Wars as well as read for degrees in both law and theology (the perfect combination of subjects, one might observe, to enable him to have an answer for everything). The following year, 1917, he was ordained, when, as was Orthodox practice, he took a new name, Damaskinos, as a mark of his devotion to the example of St John of Damascus (Johannes Damaskinos in Greek). John was a not an easy-going saint. He spent most of his public career as a thorn in the side of his rulers. Both the Christian Emperor and the Muslim Caliph conspired together to frame John for attempted treason, resulting in one of his hands being cut off, only for it to be miraculously restored as a sign of his innocence. He spent the rest of his days in a monastery, churning out letters and theological tracts designed to wind up those in power. It would be difficult to think of a more perfect patron saint for the prickly and precocious new priest.
The Aetolian’s tough character was evident early on; not long after his ordination to the priesthood, the holy man was sent to sort out a most unholy row at the mountaintop monastery of Mount Athos. Three different national groupings had monasteries there, namely Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbians. They were doing what religious factions do best and falling out with each other in the most spectacular style, mostly about who took precedence over whom. Damaskinos arrived, banged their heads together and forced the warring monastics to sign a charter promising to behave in a way more befitting their calling. Such was his success at Athos that, barely five years after his ordination, Damaskinos was made a bishop, taking over the see of Corinth at the tender age of thirty-one.
His first trial as bishop was to come in 1928 when an earthquake struck Greece with Corinth at its epicentre. Although relatively few people died in the disaster, more than fifteen thousand were left homeless. The bishop leapt into action, organising a fundraising campaign for those affected. This was not, however, a case of upping the donations into the collection plate for the diocesan congregations; Damaskinos instead embarked on a global fundraising initiative, including a tour of America, all of which managed to raise the necessary funds. The American way of life had caught the young bishop’s attention and he had seen the difficulties that the Greek community in the United States was having in maintaining its traditions. It was particularly unclear exactly who had religious jurisdiction over this burgeoning group of Orthodox faithful (over half a million Greeks arrived on the shores of the USA between 1890 and 1924). After a brief return to Greece, Damaskinos accepted a role as ‘Exarch’ of America, which, in practice, found him engaged in activities not dissimilar to those he had performed at Mount Athos. He arrived in New York in May 1930 and spent just under a year touring the country assessing what needed to be done. After a suitable number of heads had been knocked together and a new, competent leadership was installed, he returned to Greece in 1931. His reputation as Holy Orthodoxy’s premier problem-solver meant that, after more successes in his diocese, on 5th November 1938 he was elected Archbishop of Athens and All Greece.
His election was controversial. On 4th August 1936, after an inconclusive election followed by months of political intrigue, Ioannis Metaxas, who had been sworn in as Prime Minister that April, launched a coup, supposedly to counteract planned industrial unrest. Metaxas banned political parties and gave himself the title of ‘Leader of Greece’ (though he also liked to be referred to by the bizarre title of ‘First Peasant’). Greece’s political landscape, which had never really been stable since the assassination of King George in 1913, was rocked again and a regime that used a number of the tropes of Fascism began to take shape. Metaxas, naturally, was adamant that there should be no opposition to his new regime, especially from the Church. He had wanted his candidate, a career diplomat named Chrysanthos, to be elected, but the Church’s bishop-electors failed to play ball and selected Damaskinos instead.
Metaxas was furious and, after a month of wrangling, succeeded in getting the election overturned and Chrysanthos installed. Damaskinos refused to acknowledge Metaxas’s jurisdiction over the Church and merrily continued to sign himself as Archbishop of Athens and All Greece on his correspondence. Metaxas, not a man renowned for his sense of humour or patience, became even angrier and exiled Damaskinos to the island of Salamis in the Aegean. Like a beardy episcopal Icarus, Damaskinos had flown high when young but had now crash-landed; doomed, it seemed, to spend the rest of his days looking out at the sea where so much Homeric heroism had been acted out, wondering why his chance to be a Greek legend had been so cruelly cut short.
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It is a truism that we all make mistakes; acting in haste and repenting at leisure unites humans of all languages and cultures and is a trope repeated at every level – from individual errors to blunders by whole nation states. In April 1941, as the Germans finally managed to break Greek resistance and sweep into Athens, they made a mistake, which they, and their SS hero Jürgen Stroop, in particular, would come to bitterly regret. In early July, a figure made his way across the rocks and scrub that surround the Faneromeni Monastery on Salamis. It was a messenger from Athens come to inform the most high-profile of the monks there (and the only one there against his will) that he was once again Archbishop of Athens and All Greece. Chrysanthos’s association with the government that had tried, albeit futilely, to resist Hitler and Mussolini made him unacceptable to the occupiers and so they allowed the Church to send word for Damaskinos to return as leader of the Church, working on the logic that he was their enemy’s enemy. They were to discover just how flawed that logic was.
Damaskinos’s full honorific included the title Archbishop of All Greece’. This was an aspect of his role that he took incredibly seriously; he did not consider himself to be (as the Nazis almost certainly did) some sort of Hellenistic Brahmin, concerned only with the maintenance of private worship for his own caste. On the contrary, Damaskinos believed that he was called to be the spiritual leader of all Greeks, regardless of whether they elected to attend Church. Indeed, with the absolute collapse of any other authority figure, he felt that his calling extended to being their effective political leader as well. Such an attitude set him on a collision course with the authorities. The Greece over which he was now indisputably Archbishop was in a desperate situation. The Axis occupiers were treating the country as a resource ripe for pillaging. They demanded extortionate contributions from farms and businesses in order to feed their armies and, by the autumn of 1941, famine had struck. By December 1941, the Red Cross estimated that nearly a thousand people were dying from hunger in Athens every day. The occupying forces continued to take what they needed and did practically nothing to assist the starving Greeks.
Damaskinos immediately set to work, calling on his old fundraising contacts in Britain, America and Turkey to help alleviate the ravaging hunger that was afflicting his compatriots. The fact that, by December 1941, Germany was at war with both the USA and Britain didn’t deter him. Eventually, he and his fellow Orthodox bishops managed to get some food through to the general population, often arranging for supplies to be smuggled over the border with Greece’s old enemy, Turkey.
As the Nazi campaign on the Eastern Front began to eat up more and more men, Berlin pressured the Greek collaborationist government to conscript men into military units to provide what was essentially slave labour for the mines, factories and farms that made the push towards Moscow possible. Throughout 1942 and into 1943, Damaskinos helped to coordinate and gave support to widespread strikes, which brought Athens to a standstill and convinced the Germans that a collaborationist regime that could barely police its own backyard would hardly be capable of furnishing the Wehrmacht with soldiers to defeat the USSR.
His actions in the strike and the famine earned Damaskinos the respect of the Greek people, both the devout and the less than godly, as well as the ire of the Germans, but it was, however, to be in 1943, when the Nazis set in motion the Holocaust in Greece, that Damaskinos’s true hour of leadership was to come. His letter of March 1943, in which he quoted St Paul in stating that Jews and Greeks were one, had been prompted by the mass deportation of Jews in Thessaloniki, where both the city and the wider region were under German control.
The Nazi occupation saw the arrival on Greek soil of two figures particularly committed to the Final Solution. One was, of course, Jürgen Stroop, a man who, as we have seen, Damaskinos lost no time whatsoever in riling up. The other was Dieter Wisliceny, a hateful slab of a man who had only two masters: his stomach, and Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the extermination of European Jewry. At the end of September, Wisliceny ordered the Chief Rabbi of Greece to assemble a ‘Judenrat’ – a Jewish council – that was the inevitable precursor to deportations. By manipulating these councils, the Nazis routinely managed to squeeze money and resources out of Jewish communities with a promise of better treatment before deporting them to death camps anyway, with the inevitable excuse that the council itself was to blame for poor leadership. Chief Rabbi Barzilai was asked to form this council and to provide a full list of the members of the community in Athens. Having heard stories from the rest of Europe, he did no such thing, going instead to his old friend Archbishop Damaskinos for advice.
Damaskinos encouraged his Jewish friend to flee to the countryside, where resistance groups had managed to make the mountain passes and glades no-go areas for Nazi patrols, promising to do what he could. This the Rabbi did, burning all his documentation before he left. Damaskinos acted quickly; while Wisliceny pressured the Rabbi to form the Judenrat, Stroop had set 9th October as the day when the Jews of Athens had to report to the Nazis (perversely, it was the date of the Jewish feast of the atonement, Yom Kippur). The Archbishop called in another friend, the Athens police chief Angelos Evert, who was already treading a dangerous tightrope between maintaining contact with the government-in-exile and not getting shot. As the police chief entered nervously (the Archbishop was not exactly the person to be visiting if you were trying to maintain the illusion of neutrality), Damaskinos announced, in his booming voice, ‘I have taken up my cross and spoken to the Lord; I have made up my mind to save as many Jewish souls as possible.’ And so, with minimal discussion, it was decided; Damaskinos would instruct his priests to produce fake baptismal certificates, and Evert would instruct his officers to produce fake identification cards, all with the intention of providing cover for those whose lives were threatened by the Nazis. Over twenty-seven thousand such documents are thought to have been issued over the course of the following year.
As his letter showed, Damaskinos was not the man to limit himself to covert operations. Deep in his bones was a love for the drama of the Orthodox liturgy – this was a man who knew the value of a public display. He sent out a letter to clergy across Greece, insisting that they preach to their congregations on the absolute need to help one’s neighbours. Orders went around the nation’s monasteries and other religious houses to take in and hide Jews, especially children, if they came knocking. Damaskinos was determined that the Nazis would know exactly who was behind the efforts to defy the Führer’s orders. This decision came with a great deal of risk – hundreds of clergy were arrested and executed for their efforts. It was not a decision that Damaskinos had taken lightly. That said, the chance to show up Stroop again may well have played a part in his course of action – he was almost daring the SS man to try and shoot him again. When Yom Kippur came, barely two hundred of the city’s thousands of Jews turned up to register themselves. Once again, the great swooping figure in black had humiliated the zealous Nazi officer.
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Across Greece, men and women looked to their Archbishop and followed his example. The island of Zante, now better known for acute adolescent alcohol poisoning than acts of heroism, became the place that was to carry out Damaskinos’s order to the full. The island’s mayor, one Lucas Carrer, was instructed to provide a list of the names and addresses of the two hundred and seventy-five Jews who lived there so that they could be rounded up and deported. The mayor was loath to do so and, being a good Orthodox believer, he went to the island’s bishop, Metropolitan Chrysostomos. Inspired by his superior in Athens (and with that particular air that Orthodox clergy seem to have that, as one observer put it, ‘God is standing directly behind them with a cocked revolver’), Chrysostomos took control of the situation. He immediately told Carrer to burn any documents that explicitly identified the island’s Jews by their ethnic background before toddling down to the mayoral officer to reason with the German commander. The bishop rehearsed all the arguments that Damaskinos had made in his letter about the brotherhood of Jews and Greeks; all of which fell on deaf and unsympathetic ears. Exasperated, Chrysostomos grabbed a piece of paper from the desk, scrawled something onto it and thrust it into the hand of the SS officer. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘is the list of Jews you required’, and stormed out. When the paper was uncrumpled, it was revealed to have just two names on it: Lucas Carrer and Metropolitan Chrysostomos. The two proceeded to arrange hiding places for those at risk, playing dumb when the SS came calling. The Germans, frustrated at this show of Greek intractability, eventually gave up their hunt. Every single one of the island’s Jews survived.
It was a similar story on the island of Volos, where Bishop Joachim and Rabbi Pesach conspired to hide over seven hundred Jews. When the bishop was questioned by the Nazis, he had only one answer, which he repeated whenever he was asked about the whereabouts of his fellow islanders: ‘I am a Jew.’ Damaskinos’s message had finally got through, with hundreds of lives saved. The killings, however, continued, and, furious that the Archbishop had robbed them of prey, Stroop and Wisliceny finally had Damaskinos put under house arrest, and toyed with deporting him to a concentration camp. Even the problem-solver extraordinaire was only human in the scope of what he could do; by the time the Nazis, pressured by British and American advances in France and Russian advances in the east, finally evacuated Greece on 12th October 1944, over sixty thousand Jews had been murdered. In Thessaloniki, where evacuations had first taken place and where German control was tightest, nearly 90 per cent of the city’s Jews died, with only one family in the entire city surviving the Holocaust without losing a single member. By contrast, in the rest of Greece, numbers, while still shocking, were much lower, due, in no small part, to the stand taken by the hardy cleric from Aetolia.
The end of Nazi occupation was not, however, the end of Damaskinos’s time as a leader of his Church and people. The British arrived in Athens just two days after the German withdrawal, and a whole new stage of the struggle to shape the future of Greece began. Different partisans with wildly different political viewpoints (from Communists to reactionary monarchists) began to fight Allied forces and one another for control of the bruised and battered nation. With the King still in exile, the army obliterated and the democratic politicians in disgrace, it was clear that there was only one figure who could possibly unite the divided nation. Damaskinos accepted the title ‘Regent’ in an attempt to make it clear to the Greek people that his political powers were temporary (although he did, for a brief period in 1945, appoint himself Prime Minister as well, in an attempt to break a particularly intransient period of political deadlock). The great solver of problems was now in charge of the very sizeable problem that was post-war Greece.
You might have thought that his consistent anti-German stance throughout the war would have earned Damaskinos the affection of the Allies. However, tales of the Archbishop’s ability to be pugnacious, prickly and downright pig-headed hadn’t only reached Berlin and Rome, they’d made their way to London, Washington and Moscow too. Allied leaders resented having to deal with the man whom Churchill called ‘a pestilent priest’ and ‘a relic from the Middle Ages’ – they were trying to make a new world in the ruins of the old one and couldn’t see a role for the guttural Aetolian utterances from the tall, bearded figure swathed in black. Inevitably, however, he earned their respect, with Churchill being the first to capitulate.
On Christmas Eve 1944, Churchill visited Athens in an attempt to coordinate the Allied response to the increasing hostilities that threatened to spill over into civil war. He stayed on HMS Ajax and invited Damaskinos aboard for talks. Prior to the Archbishop’s arrival, Churchill had been full of vitriol about ‘that scheming prelate, more interested in political power than the life hereafter’. However, after a couple of hours secluded with the cleric, even Britain’s petulant prime ministerial bulldog was purring and addressing his Greek counterpart as ‘Your Beatitude’. Diplomatic incident was avoided (although it came close when a group of sailors briefly mistook the Archbishop for one of their fellow mariners dressed up as a wizard for their Christmas fancy dress party) and so Damaskinos was left to rule Greece until the return of King George II. He spent his period in power desperately trying to calm tensions and find a peaceful solution to the civil war – particularly condemning the practice that had arisen among the partisans of kidnapping children as hostages. In 1946, he gave political power back to the newly returned King. By the end of May 1949, he was dead, having only just turned fifty-eight. Behind the cool façade and the quick tongue, the efforts of the war had left him broken in spirit and in health. Now that it was over, he was finally able to let go.
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Winston Churchill was undoubtedly a man given to occasional hyperbole. His pre-meeting judgement of Damaskinos, however, does contain in it some truth. ‘A scheming prelate, more interested in political power than the life hereafter’ may seem harsh, but it’s hard to think of Damaskinos himself as taking it as anything other than a compliment. Undoubtedly, he was a figure of great intelligence and, if that could be used to hoodwink (with an admirable panache) the blockheaded minions of a Fascist regime then it’s difficult to blame him for doing so. The second part of Churchill’s comment is, perhaps, the more interesting one. There are myriad theological opinions on how the here and now and the hereafter ought to interact, especially when it comes to what occurs in the political sphere. Damaskinos found himself embroiled in a situation where his choice to act politically was not a power grab by a crazed clericalist but the only intervention possible to save thousands of lives. His response to Stroop’s threat was not just a spicy bon mot – he was aware of the effect the death of Grigorios had had over a century before and he knew that his actions were capable of inspiring just as much bravery from the people of Greece.
Damaskinos was a wily operator, a problem-solver, a fighter and a quick wit. But, above all, he was a man of a very profound faith, who believed in what he called ‘the Holy religion’. That Holy religion informed him not to, in his own words, ‘recognise superior or inferior qualities based on race or religion’, and that is where Churchill’s dichotomy was false – his interest in political power was entirely determined by his views on the life hereafter. To him, the saving of others was a matter of his own salvation as well. Damaskinos was nothing if not clear-headed – he knew what he needed to do to attain the heavenly life he professed belief in and, in his curt response to the ridiculous Stroop, he made perfectly clear which was his preferred way of getting there.