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Salonica Terminus. Fred A. Reed
Читать онлайн.Название Salonica Terminus
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isbn 9780889229907
Автор произведения Fred A. Reed
Жанр История
Издательство Ingram
A few years later Galerius, implacable tormentor of Christians, proclaimed a policy of religious tolerance which was later endorsed by his successor Constantine. A small church was built atop the grave site, which incorporated into its foundations a grotto from which—shades of the Cabiri—miracle-working myrrh would flow, an unquenchable source of lubrication for the legend. More than one century later, in the middle of the fifth century, a certain Leontius, prefect of Illyricum, is said to have ordered a great basilica to be constructed in the same place, in gratitude for having been cured of a grave illness through the miraculous intervention of the saint.31 Today’s Basilica, which is built upon the shell of the building almost totally destroyed in the great fire of 1917, conserves only fragmentary remains of its vast armature of pictorial decoration. The mosaics, survivals from the earliest structure, illustrate scenes from the life of the Saint himself, clad in a white tunic, often alongside local notables. None depict him in the attitude which, in the later icons by which he is best known, personifies him as Salonica’s protector: the stern-faced horseman slaying an enemy with his lance. It was in this incarnation that he would despatch the putative foes of Hellenic Christendom with grim-eyed satisfaction, and preserve the city from barbarian depredations.
One of the few surviving frescoes curiously illustrates the saint not at all, but the triumphal entry of Byzantine Emperor Justinian II, surnamed “He of the Cut-off Nose,” into Salonica after his defeat of an invading Bulgarian army in 688. That the arbitrary and impulsive Justinian collaborated with the Bulgars to regain his throne in 705 and wrought terrible vengeance on the adversaries who had earlier truncated his nose and ears is beside the point. The fresco symbolizes, claim its modern Greek explicators, less the triumph of Justinian II, an embarrassingly violent tyrant by any other name, than that of Hellenism over those traditional race enemies, the Slavs, all with the divinely inspired assistance of Saint Demetrius.32 Thus is a wildly sanguinary Emperor retroactively press-ganged into the service of national-religious mysticism. That Justinian II and the other rulers of Byzantium would have considered themselves less as legatees of Hellenism than of Imperial Roman power seems, by comparison, a trifling consideration.
ON THE GREAT FEAST DAY devoted to its namesake a powerful current of devotion ripples through the Basilica, invisible yet palpable, like the unseen forces—the hand and the eye of God—which seize and guide the hand of the iconographer. In the bright sunlight on the sidewalk outside the church I encounter art historian Haralambos Bakirdzis, a professor at the University of Thessaloniki. After I explain what has brought me to Salonica, and to Saint Demetrius’ on this day, professor Bakirdzis invites me into the shady interior of the church, showing me through the plaza portal as though welcoming me into his own home. Reasonably enough, for the saint’s house, in the hearts of Salonica’s devout Greek citizens, has always been the ultimate refuge, and the saint, the protector of the communal hearth and miraculous talisman when outside forces threatened.
“The rationalism of the West makes it hard for you to understand Byzantium,” Bakirdzis says with a self-assured smile as we move down the high, colonnaded nave, now hazy with a fragrant cloud of incense. I want to ask him why, if Byzantium so confounds the rational, do the fabulators of modern Greek identity insist that it be seen as an integral part of the unbroken cultural continuum leading from the ancient Athenian heritage of democracy, philosophical inquiry and, yes, rationality, to the present day. But at that precise instant, as if on cue, the holy icon sweeps into the church, its round of the city completed. The air has grown hot from the crush of bodies and the thousands of flames from the votive candles which candle-lighters clad in blue coveralls snatch away and discard as soon as they are lighted to make way for the next.
The existence of Saint Demetrius, explains the professor as we settle into two of the high-backed pews that line the side walls of the Basilica, is truer than any reality. “He cannot be grasped by rational means, and if you try to do so, you will be making a big mistake. You see,” he whispers, leaning toward me, “the icon truly is Saint Demetrius, as well as being his depiction.” In vain I search for a hint of irony in his words: I find none.
Like every Orthodox church, which not only replicates by visual means the heavenly order, beginning with Christ Pantocrator high in the dome, and descending through concentric rings of the Holy Family, the Archangels, the saints and the holy martyrs, the Basilica physically contains and embodies that order as well. “The Byzantine esthetic is based on replication,” he explains. “Not on the search for originality. How else can you explain its remarkable life-span? There was no such thing as ‘intellectual property’ in Byzantium; the orthodox tradition is one of anonymity; the great icon painters never signed their works—those who did were influenced by the West.” As the icon pushes its way through the crowd and up the central aisle, the hymn of Saint Demetrius rings out, and professor Bakirdzis sings along in a mellifluous tenor voice. When the silver-plated casket containing the saint’s remains wheels into view, he turns to me, perhaps a touch archly: “That’s for you rationalists. We don’t need it.”
Now his holiness Pantaleimon, the Metropolitan of Salonica, mounts his pulpit: “Saint Demetrius will defend his city against all those who covet it, against all those who plot to destroy it. He will support us in our great struggle to protect our identity as Greeks and as Macedonians,” he thunders, ever responsive to the political imperatives of the hour, and the great church reverberates. To climax his homily, jarringly yet refreshingly coherent in its incoherence, the Metropolitan leads the congregation in singing the Greek national anthem, a stirring hymn to secular freedom written by the early nineteenth century poet Dionysios Solomos, a free-thinking bard from whose oeuvre religion is famously absent. Here, in the temple of timeless nonrationalism (for none of the three great monotheistic religions can be accurately described as irrational; only romantic nationalism, the ill-begotten offspring of their union with the Enlightenment, can make such a claim, and it too is a false claim) echoes the incandescent voice of the doctrine of secularity and of the emergent nation-state—“Hail, hail Liberty!”—against a background of imperial, supranational, divine dispensation which simultaneously symbolizes and embodies the true and only heaven.
The Metropolitan’s sermon, in its barely concealed clash of symbols, invests the painting I’d encountered at Dioscean headquarters a few days earlier with sudden rhetorical depth. Greece, like the cityscape of Salonica, can be depicted in neo-Byzantine style, as a paradox: a full-fledged member of the European Union in which putatively non-rational Orthodoxy is the official religion, a religion so powerfully established, so deeply rooted in popular consciousness, that in the colloquial idiom “Christian” is taken to mean Greek. Furthermore, the Church enjoys promiscuous familiarity with the corridors of secular power, particularly in the aftermath of the collapse of “real socialism” in the Balkans and the powerful upsurge of national and religious sentiment that has flowed (or been pumped) in to fill the void.
Communism in Bulgaria and ex-Yugoslavia, not to mention tiny Albania, stifled religion and suffocated national impulses beneath a cloak of ersatz internationalism. In Greece, however, the Orthodox Church acted not only as handmaiden of state repression during the bitter civil war, but gave fervent blessing to the seven-year “Greek Christian” regime of the colonels. Had it bargained away its soul, or was it simply acting in its own, historic interests? More to the point, how had these historic interests become one with the modern Greek state?
Modern Greece, the creation of Western Europe in its war of attrition against the Grand Turk, has been a curious hybrid from birth. A Europeanized intelligentsia insisted that the new state be organized on the Jacobin model, leaving little room for religion, much less a state church. But its revolutionary thrust had been blunted by the Congress of Vienna, in 1814-1815, which enshrined the regime of hereditary monarchies and decreed the restoration of the pre-1789 status quo. The Greek uprising against the Ottoman