LITMIR.BIZ

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a huge desk over which looms a huger potted plant, stops me with a highly inhospitable outstretched palm of the hand (in Greece the palm is usually only shown in anger; when this happens the gesture, known as the moudza, becomes an insult grievous enough to provoke a fight.) I elect to ignore the affront and retreat apologetically. Seeking my fortune at office number four, I peer around the frame of the open door. “What do you want?” rasps a slightly lesser presence, whom I’ve disturbed in the midst of a series of calls from the six telephones I manage to count on his desk. With obsequious wringing of hands I explain my case in the manner of a humble petitioner. I am favored with a reply. “Come to the Basilica this evening. You can meet professor Papadopoulos of the Theological School,” he hisses. “After five.” A phone—which one?—rings loudly. The audience is over.

      On my way out, a painting displayed prominently in the hallway catches my eye. Done in the neo-Byzantine style affected by a certain nativist school, it depicts Salonica’s religious and intellectual heritage against the background of a cityscape painted in the perspectiveless manner of a religious icon, the size of the figures depicted determined not by their nearness or distance in vanishing-point perspective but by their hieratical importance. Philip of Macedon and his illustrious son Alexander occupy the left quadrant; in the upper right-hand corner are the smaller figures of Aristotle and Democritus, identified in the stylized orthography of the Byzantine alphabet; more prominent is Saint Paul, who introduced the doctrine of Christ to the city’s ever-skeptical Jews. At the center of the composition, set against a view of the Salonica International Exposition and the White Tower, are Saint Demetrius himself, the city’s youthful warrior patron, and Saint Gregory Palamas, mortal foe of those fourteenth century radicals the Zealots, and one of the more controversial figures in late Byzantine Orthodoxy. At the top of the painting, overlooking city and port, are Jesus Christ and His Holy Mother, the Panaghia. Mother and Son loom almost as large as Alexander. Almost, but not quite.

      In its methodical, triumphant subversion of Rome, Christianity rejected, then attempted to obliterate the Olympian pantheon of ancient Hellas, replacing the fractious, randy, unpredictable cohort of gods and heroes with an austere and omnipotent Father as whose viceroy the Emperor would rule. It also looked with extreme suspicion on ancient Greek science, art and philosophy, with its emphasis on the autonomy of the human spirit. Later, however, a shift took place. Latter-day icon-makers, following the lead of the Church itself, appropriated portions of the pagan heritage and incorporated them holus bolus into theologically incoherent but intellectually provoking—dare I say charming?—images depicting the ancient Athenian philosophers as forerunners of Christianity. As for Alexander, who died in the Orient shortly after declaring himself a Persian God, the process of co-option is so opaque as to defy explanation, notwithstanding the syncretic theories so dear to the hearts of religious scholars. Still, Megalexandros (as Greeks familiarly call the semi-barbarous world conqueror whom they claim as their own), that mainstay of folk song and legend, could hardly be absent from the pantheon. For without him the Greek claim to Macedonia would flounder and sink. And we are, lest it ever be forgotten, in Macedonia.

      That evening, slightly after five o’clock, I make my way toward the Basilica office through a dense crowd of worshippers lined up to kiss the miraculous icon. There, a lone white-bearded pope is leafing furiously through a tattered telephone directory. I clear my throat, cough respectfully. He looks up. “What is it?” he barks. “Can’t you see I’m busy?” Courtesy toward foreigner visitors was once tantamount to sacred law in Greece. That was before tourism. I’m looking for the professor, I explain, attempting to make my voice as humble as possible. Wasted effort. Waving the phone book in my direction, he shouts: “Out there, behind the altar. Now leave me alone!” I exit hastily. The priests may well represent the order of the sacred realm to the uncomprehending faithful; but these robed functionaries are more like the frocked equivalent of their secular colleagues, the men with the reptilian stares, hunched backs and tobacco-stained fingers who have encrusted the outlet pipes of the Greek state like exponentially expanding zebra mussels, and whose acutely self-protective mentality and nepotistic ardor has infected every cranny of public life.

      Working my way cautiously through a scrum of clergymen jostling for position, for surely nothing enhances prestige and career prospects quite like an appearance inside the Holy of Holies alongside the archbishop, I approach the side-door to the altar. Providentially, a monk who is possibly even an anchorite, perhaps even, given his courtesy, a latter-day stylite, volunteers to seek out the professor for me. Three minutes later he emerges, accompanied by a man wearing a conservative dark suit. Professor Papadopoulos, I presume. I introduce myself, and we set an appointment. Byzantine chanting, sweet and melodious and cloying like warm, overripe peaches, echoes through the Basilica.

      The next day, Saint Demetrius’ eve, dawns fresh and bright. Salonica’s protector has interceded to procure optimum weather conditions. This is the day when the Saint’s icon departs the Basilica for its triumphant march through the city streets escorted by detachments of Greek soldiers in full battle dress, bayonets fixed to their rifles, followed by sailors, and elite commandos in camouflage suits. As an Air Force brass band strikes up a slow march, the bells of Saint Demetrius’ burst into exited tolling. The effect is deeper than merely auditory. It sets the viscera ajar. Clouds of incense waft across the plaza, dissolving in bright sunlight, as the icon and its escort of high clergy emerge from the west portal. From the balconies of the surrounding apartment blocks the neighbors look on; a little boy waves a Greek flag from side to side. Now the parade forms up on Saint Demetrius street, headed by the brass band which is blaring out a dirge-like processional that sounds more German than Orthodox. Not the least contradiction of the day’s festivities is that modern Greece’s martial musical tradition was founded by the Bavarian—and Catholic—princes who were imported to rule the country after the European powers had decided to rescue the floundering 1821 mutiny against the Ottoman state.

      The parade offers something for everyone, prefiguring the full-scale public ceremonies of the next two days. Groups of school children in starched uniforms march past, followed by monks and nuns carrying lighted candles, pre-adolescent girls in traditional regional costumes of the kind now only encountered in amateur regional folk-dance ensembles, and grizzled men representing Macedonian fighters in their full dress of black kilts and crossbuttoned vests. Then comes the clergy, arrayed in the fullest splendor of its festive crimson and gold vestments, moving with the majesty of its station, while close behind it, propped atop a Jeep-drawn caisson, follows the holy icon, followed by the silver-plated box containing the saint’s remains. The Metropolitan himself, Panteleimon II, surrounded by the mayor, the prefect and the minister of Macedonia and Thrace, brings up the rear, beard flowing luxuriantly as, with his shepherd’s gold cross, he blesses the flock lining the shady side of the street.

      “WHEN THE CHRISTIANS BUILT CHURCHES on the sites of pagan sanctuaries, incorporating the old capitals and columns in their naves,” writes Roberto Calasso²⁹, they were, like Heracles and the Nemean lion, killing the monster to incorporate it in themselves, taking its place. Such is the career of Saint Demetrius, a resurrection in Christian garb of the cult of the Cabiri, Salonica’s semi-divine protectors in pagan times. These Cabiri—a nonGreek word, notes Robert Graves, thus of non-Greek origin—were the servants of Persephone, bringer of destruction, with whom Zeus had secretly begotten his son Zagreus. They were lesser deities, worshipped in grottos and caves, whose initiates wore pointed hats of the kind affected by the wily Odysseus. Their cult, which may have arisen in the islands of the northern Aegean, spread to the mainland in Thrace and Macedonia, sending down deep roots in the city founded by King Cassander when he took the sister of Alexander the Great, Thessaloniki, for his wife in 316 B.C., naming it after her. There, they became the patrons of navigators, miners and metal workers, and were worshipped as staunch defenders of the city. Not without cause. Had not these same holy ancestral gods turned back the great Gothic attack on Salonica in 268 A.D?³⁰

      When the Romans came, incorporating Macedonia into the Empire after the battle of Pydna in 168 B.C., they established public baths on the site of the Basilica where an earlier temple to the cthonic Cabiri may well have stood. In these baths, four hundred years later at the beginning of the fourth century, a certain Demetrius, Roman citizen and minor official, was slain by order of the Roman Emperor Galerius. Demetrius had been arrested several days earlier

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