Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
At the time of Dimitraki's birth Kastoria and the many villages near the lake had been under Turkish rule for over five hundred years. Greek language and custom survived this long domination only because the Greek Orthodox Church kept Hellenism alive. The Orthodox Church was secure in Kastoria, the seat both of the civil government and of a Metropolitan Bishop.
The Turkish rulers at the Porte in Constantinople delegated to the Church authority to govern and administer the Christians of the Balkans. Of the Patriarch and his hierarchy they expected obedience, payment of taxes, and submission to exploitation of their flock. The Ottoman overlords did indeed consider their Christian subjects as sheep, or rayahs, the flock, non-Moslems "... whom the sultan protected from wolves and fleeced."(19)
Because of its far-reaching civil authority over all the millet-i-Rûm(20) (the Eastern Orthodox of the Balkans), the Patriarchate became more powerful than it had been in the Byzantine Empire.(21) In 1776 the Patriarchs of the Bulgarians and the Serbs lost their positions, churches and monasteries. The Patriarch in Constantinople absorbed their autocephalous jurisdictions.
The Patriarch, his immediate circle, and many of the leading administrators and men of commerce in Constantinople were Greek. They had authority, position and wealth, and owed it all to their masters the Ottomans, who preferred to have the details of administration and taxation of their subjects managed by the Phanariotes.(22) As corrupt as some clergy and bishops were, and as poorly educated and lacking in knowledge of their religion and its history, against all odds and in the absence of any social or economic development, the church was able to preserve for Hellenes the Greek language, the Orthodox faith and the spirit of Hellenism.
Unfortunately in its zeal to promote all things Orthodox, Greek and Hellenic, the overbearing Patriarchate, through its Archbishops, Bishops and clergy, imposed the Greek language and even Greek identity on the peasants of Serbia and Bulgaria. The Bulgarian people near lost their heritage as by the end of the eighteenth century they identified themselves as Greek to foreign travelers.(23)
Consciously undertaken or not, the result of actions of the Greek Patriarch nearly eradicated the language, culture and ethnicity of Serbians and Bulgarians in the Balkans and proved to be a source of hostility and violence.
The Patriarch appeared to be working hand-in-glove with revolutionaries like the intellectual and well-connected Greek, Rigas Velestinlis, who in the late nineteenth century advocated a Balkan-Asian State with a culture based on Hellenism, using Greek as its language.(24) His early organizational efforts were rewarded when the Porte ordered his execution. Strangled to death, he and seven members of his group were thrown into the Savas River at Belgrade. Among them were two brothers from Kastoria: P. and J. Emmanuil.
In the nineteenth century, the Romanians of Moldavia, the Serbians and the Bulgarians regained their pride through study of their history and use of their language. The outcome was a rebirth of their national identities.
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