The Greek Orthodox Church in America: A Modern History by Alexander Kitroeff

Author:Alexander Kitroeff [Kitroeff, Alexander & Kitroeff, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, United States, General, Religion, Christianity, Orthodox, Christian Church
ISBN: 9781501749452
Google: -vqzDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell
Published: 2020-06-15T13:19:11+00:00

Chapter 8

Church and Homeland

“Ethnarchy,” according to the archdiocese’s theologian Stanley Harakas, “occurs when the highest ecclesiastical leader of the church in a given area assumes political leadership… . This rarely practiced institution occurs only in periods of crisis, when lay civil leaders cannot, because of extraordinary reasons, exercise normal political powers.” Thus, “When only a Church leader seems to be able to embody the identity of the people of the nation, the hierarch may assume political and government leadership by general consensus.”1 Not all prelates of the Greek Orthodox Church play an overtly political role, much less that of ethnarch. In his reflection on the ethnarchy principle, Harakas provides two examples of ethnarchs in the twentieth century: Archbishops Damaskinos and Makarios. Damaskinos, the metropolitan who arrived in the United States to resolve the difficulties the church was experiencing in the 1920s, was archbishop of Athens and of Greece during World War II and served as regent (head of state) from the time Greece was liberated from Axis occupation in 1944 until the return of King George in 1946. Makarios, the leader of the autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, served as the first president of the Cyprus Republic between 1960 and 1977. Scholars who have studied Makarios’s role in the 1950s, when the Greek Cypriots launched a struggle to put an end to British colonial rule and to unite their island with Greece, agree that he played an ethnarchic role. Makarios led the Greek Orthodox Church’s effort to position itself as the leading vehicle of the national aspirations of the Greek Cypriots.2 And Makarios’s political language throughout the 1950s and the 1960s was inflected by a markedly religious imagery.3

While the Greek Orthodox Church has not acknowledged Archbishop Iakovos’s role in shaping diplomatic relations between the church and the United States as a form of ethnarchy, the archbishop earned that title in the eyes of many of the faithful on both sides of the Atlantic. And there are certainly parallels to be drawn between Iakovos and the best example of a Greek Orthodox ethnarch in the twentieth century, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus. When Iakovos was twelve years old and living on the mostly Greek-populated island of Imvros (present-day Gökçeada) in the northern Aegean, he witnessed the raising of the Turkish flag that signaled that the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 had awarded the island to Turkey. For the young Iakovos, seeing the Turkish flag flying over his island was a traumatic event, and it remained etched in his memory and stayed there because of the mistreatment of the ethnic Greeks by the authorities. Years later, that memory would animate Iakovos’s keen sense of injustice and his solidarity with the ethnic Greeks on Cyprus and Istanbul when they would be targeted by Turkey in the decades from the 1950s onward.

Next to that personal investment, what also shaped Iakovos’s leadership in forging close ties with the homeland was the worsening of Greek-Turkish relations in the 1960s and the 1970s. In Istanbul itself and in

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