Letter

Published by Ekathimerini.com, October 10, 2005

Letter from Thessaloniki

Myths and legends

Despite Herodotus having said, “Of old, the Hellenic race was marked off from the barbarian as more keen-witted and more free from nonsense,” modern Greeks insist on loving myths and received ideas which quite often coincide with nonsense.

Take for instance most of what was written last week in the local press on those modern Turks who must have inherited the Ottomans’ performance after Byzantium’s fall. That glorious Byzantium which many consider the last custodian of Greek heritage, destroyed — alas — by the barbarous Turks. For a moment, the trepidation of a threatening Islam seemed to have been reborn.

Now that membership talks with Turkey and the European Union are a fact, the question that Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper once asked readers of the New Statesman seems to be a useful one to pose again now: “As a living political system, was the Byzantine Empire, at least in its decline, really better than the Ottoman Empire in its heyday?”

Sure enough, Professor Trevor-Roper indicated that his own answer to the question was negative. Nevertheless, he has not been the only one to answer in such a way. In his recent book “Salonica, City of Ghosts,” Mark Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, notes, “Written off as an embarrassment by later Greek commentators, the pro-Turkish current in late Byzantine politics was a powerful one as the Ottomans could be seen as protectors of Orthodoxy against the Catholics.” Well, the Turks were not so bad to us after all.

It is a fact that at the time of Byzantium’s fall, the Turks, though cruel conquerors, were sensible governors. Unlike the Roman Catholics, they did not persecute others for their religion. The last emperor (Constantine XI)’s chief minister Lucas Notaras’s celebrated remark “Better the sultan’s turban than a cardinal’s hat” speaks volumes.

It is also a — hardly mentioned — fact that by submitting politically to the sultan, the Greek Church was able to survive until the present day, while the Hellenic community, the “Romioi,” though politically enslaved, continued to maintain its identity in a way that may have proved impossible had the Westerners once more “saved” Constantinople.

So, the question that arises now as Turkey is approaching Europe remains: Can Turks and Westerners live together?

“After the fall of the Byzantine Empire Turkish dominion did not forcibly interrupt a historical evolution. On the contrary, it constituted itself an element of continuation,” Professor Phaedon Maligoudis of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki noted in an article published in Eleftherotypia on May 12.

Yet a myth is a myth and the strong tendency to glorify Byzantium at the expense of the Ottoman Turks is a question that has troubled many scholars.

I have just finished reading Leon Sciaky’s evocative “Farewell to Salonica,” the autobiography of a Jewish boy growing up under Abdul Hamid in this city which at the turn of the 20th century was a vibrant world of varied peoples. Regrettably not any more.

There Sciaky reports: “The Turks never made an effort to assimilate the non-Muslims, neither did they attempt to impose upon them their own Koranic laws. Each people had its own courts in which disputes between coreligionists were settled according to its own laws, and each levied taxes to defray the cost of its schools, charitable institutions, and government.”

Very much indeed within the EU spirit of sympathy and tolerance. How much like that 20-year-old sultan, Mehmet II, known as The Conqueror, who approached in a similar way the problem of governing his new subjects. The most open-minded monarch for his age revived the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which had presided over the Orthodox Church from Constantinople since the fourth century. These are historical facts that are helpful to be considered by God-respecting Greeks, as well as the fact that Christians are still considered “people of the Book.” Aren’t Abraham and Mary revered by Muslims as well? They sure are.

Also Jesus, “on whom salvation be poured,” as one Ottoman decree described him, is one of Islam’s greatest prophets.

However, recreating the past hardly contributes to illuminating such present actions as Ankara’s stubborn refusal to recognize Cyprus, an EU member.

Of greater significance is the likelihood this process will re-establish Constantinople’s chief legacy to the world under the Byzantines and under the Ottomans — as a great international capital which, in true EU spirit, will continue to ignore rigid national, cultural, social and religious boundaries and act again as an open door between Islam and Christianity — or will it give credit to traditional stories that have no proven factual basis, as most thesauri define myths?



Volume 7 Number 41 - Tuesday, October 11, 2005	A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY