LITMIR.BIZ

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faith’ before retiring to the solitude of an inaccessible cave high above the Aliakmon river. Nikanor also built a monastery nearby, and in his will urged the monks to refrain from begging for alms without permission, not to mix with those of ‘another faith’ and to avoid seeking justice in Turkish courts, stipulations which suggest the extent to which monks and other pious Christians were usually interacting with the Ottoman authorities in one way or another.⁴²

      In fact, the very manner in which the Church’s ecclesiastical hierarchy was brought within the Ottoman administrative system added to Christian woes. Patriarchs paid an annual tribute to the Porte and acted as tax-collectors from the Christians. When one sixteenth-century Patriarch toured the Balkans, Suleyman the Magnificent ordered officials to summon the metropolitans, bishops and other clerics to help him collect ‘in full the back payments from the past years and the present year in the amounts which will be established by your examination.’ In the early eighteenth century, the city’s kadi was told to help when it turned out that ‘Ignatius, the metropolitan of Salonica, owes two years’ taxes and resists fulfilling his obligations towards the Patriarchate.’ Fiscal and religious power were separated in both the Muslim and the Jewish communities [where rabbis were salaried employees of their congregations]; for the Orthodox they overlapped, damaging the clergy’s relations with their flock.⁴³

      The buying and selling of ecclesiastical favours and offices did not help either: in the seventeenth century alone, there were sixty-one changes of Patriarch. Most Metropolitans of Salonica had run up debts to get into office, and one of the earliest records to survive in the city’s archives is a 1695 Ottoman decree from the Porte on behalf of a Christian money-lender ordering Archbishop Methodios to pay what he owed him. The problem travelled down the hierarchy. One priest demanded to be paid before he would read the sacrament to a dying man; others were accused of taking payment to hear confession. The more their seniors took from them, the more the priests required.⁴⁴

      Money also explained the endless tussles between Salonica’s religious leaders and the lay council of Christian notables, the archons, which supposedly ran the non-religious side of community affairs. When the archons demanded control over management of the city’s charitable Christian foundations, the Patriarchate angrily told them ‘not to involve themselves in priestly affairs’. ‘There is order in everything,’ they were rebuked, ‘and all things in the world, heavenly and mundane, royal and ecclesiastical and civil, right down to the smallest and least important, have their order before God and before men, according to which they are governed and stand in their place.’ The message was simple: there was no way that ‘lay people’, whatever their motivations, would be allowed to ‘become rebels and controllers of church affairs’. Ironically, the main defence against the rapacity of the clergy were the Ottoman authorities themselves. In 1697 Salonica’s Christians complained directly to the Porte about the demands of their bishops, and the kadi was instructed to look into the matter. Twenty years later, their anger was so great that they even got the local Ottoman officials to throw one archbishop in jail until he could be removed.⁴⁵

      Three hundred years after the conquest, the city was still suffering from a dearth of priests, and lay figures regularly performed ecclesiastical duties. ‘Not many years ago,’ reports the Jesuit Father Souciet in 1734, ‘a lay figure married with children not only had charge of the revenues of the archbishop but acted even as a kind of vicar, giving the priests permission to celebrate and confess, and preventing them as and when he saw fit. I am not even sure he did not claim to be able to carry out excommunications.’ The underlying problem was economic, for until the commercial boom of the mid-eighteenth century, the Christians of the city were, on the whole, of modest means. Only a few descendants of the great Byzantine families still lived there; most were artisans, shopkeepers, sailors or traders.⁴⁶

      For them, faith was not really a matter of theology. Poorly educated, few could bridge the gap between the complex formal Greek of the church and the language of daily life, which for many Orthodox Christians was often not Greek at all, but Slavic or Vlach. ‘The priests and even the pastors – the metropolitans, archbishops and bishops – are extremely simple and unlearned men, who do not know the Hellenic language and have no explanations in the vulgar tongue, so that they don’t know and don’t understand anything they read,’ noted a visiting Ukrainian notable. ‘The people don’t know anything at all except the sign of the cross [and this not everyone]. When we asked them about the Our Father, they would answer that “this is the priest’s business, not ours.”’⁴⁷ Sometimes this uncertainty could be taken surprisingly far, as when a young Greek village priest asked whether Jesus was really God [though perhaps the questioner had been influenced by the scorn with which both Muslims and Jews treated such a claim].⁴⁸

      On the other hand, Salonica’s Christians were deeply attached to their traditional customs – especially fasting, about which they were extremely conscientious – and to the observance of local festivals, which were celebrated vigorously in the city and the neighbouring countryside, combining spiritual and commercial satisfaction. On Saint Dimitrios’s day a majestic service was attended by all the suffragan bishops. There was also a rapidly developing cult of Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century archbishop of the city, whose mystical and political views had made him a highly controversial figure in his lifetime. To the surprise of visiting Christians, who knew him for his much-disputed theology, his memory was revered as that of a saint and his mummified body, laid out on a bier, attracted increasing numbers of worshippers.⁴⁹

      Orthodox Christians were constantly reminded that theirs was a second-class faith: they were not allowed to ring church bells or even beat wooden clappers to bring the faithful to prayer. Yet so far as the Ottomans were concerned, they were a people of the Book and one distinctly superior to the Catholic Franks. During the long wars with both Venice and Austria, Catholic missionaries were accused of leading the local Orthodox astray, and introducing them to ‘polytheism, cunning and craftiness’. When an early eighteenth-century visitor discussed Christianity with one of Salonica’s mollahs, the latter told him ‘that the three faiths, the Papist, the Lutheran, and the Calvinist are the worst, while the Greek is better than all.’ According to him, many of the town’s Muslim scholars studied the Gospels in Arabic and valued the Greek Church above the rest because ‘the Greeks don’t depart from evangelical teachings and from church traditions and … they don’t introduce anything new into their religion or remove anything.’ The very conservatism denounced by visiting Jesuits was thus understood and appreciated by Muslims.⁵⁰

      This sympathy, however, had its limits. The primacy of the ruling faith was axiomatic, and any public assertion of the superiority of Christianity over Islam was punished with severity. But even here Ottoman and Orthodox interests fitted strangely together, since the church, itself founded through an act of martyrdom, regarded the public suffering of new martyrs as a way of demonstrating the tenacity of Christian belief. Priests or monks instructed would-be candidates who then presented themselves to the authorities, or carried out acts designed to lead to their arrest, dragging crosses through the streets, or loudly insulting Mohammed. Seeing apostates – in particular – return to the fold was, wrote one priest, ‘as if one were to see spring flowers and roses bloom in the heart of winter.’⁵¹

      Those who died for their faith were the popular voice of spiritual protest – the senior church hierarchy, by contrast, were servants of the sultan – and their deeds were carefully recorded by monks at the time. Even today modern editions of these ‘witnesses for Christ’ circulate within the Orthodox world, with stories which are well worth reading for their unexpected insights into Ottoman religious culture. Like most Christians in Salonica, the city’s ‘neo-martyrs’ were humble

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