Читать книгу Salonica Terminus - Fred A. Reed - Страница 8

THE SALONICA SEA FRONT functions simultaneously as the city’s focus and as a powerful dilatory organ which concentrates in one energy-charged space a succession of coffee-shops, bars, sweet emporiums, amusement parks, ice-cream parlors, pop-corn and toasted nut wagons, self-propelled sandwich outlets, strolling balloon and souvenir hawkers. When the weather is fine, the broad promenade is thronged with well-dressed peripatetic philosophers of a certain age who gesticulate more energetically than they walk, with youthful joggers, bicyclists, with groups of townspeople simply enjoying the cool, damp air; gulls, pigeons, and further offshore, cormorants. There is something romantic, even erotic—metaphorically at least—about this boundary zone where the city meets the sea, where the hot concrete and asphalt meld into the enveloping liquid embrace of the waters.

Further east, the paved promenade gives way to a narrow, weed-grown sidewalk; the perspective of Salonica Bay to a succession of water-sport installations, marinas and boat clubs, and then, to rows of psarotavernas where, later in the evening, the good burghers will repair for a meal of mussels stuffed with rice, fried baby squid, grilled shrimp and tangy cabbage salads laced with hot pepper, washed down with raki or dry white wine from the vineyards of the Halkidiki peninsula, in the shadow of Mount Athos.

It is here, along the sweeping arc of the sea-front that I found myself strolling briskly, of a cloudy evening in early April. A moist southerly breeze was blowing, but not strongly enough to ripple the foul smelling, viscous water lapping against the quay. Freighters, their bows and sterns aglow, rode low at anchor, silhouetted against the darkening sky.

My destination that April evening was the home of Tolls Kazantzis, the man who for me personified Salonica. In the spring of 1994, the face of the city, while unchanged, had become subtly unrecognizable. I was on my way to present my condolences to his widow, for Kazantzis had died on Christmas day, 1991, from acute internal bleeding brought on by chronic liver disease, his death precipitated by an exhausting series of public lectures in Athens on—what else?—Salonica’s literary heritage and tradition. This was my first trip back to the city he loved so ardently; the city he, unlike many locally-born authors, refused to abandon for the blandishments and the notoriety of the Athenian literary whirl.

Mirror—and sculptor—of Salonica’s identity, its literary tradition springs from a devotion to the particular: to the sweep of the water-line separating sea from land, to the forested hills that ring the town, to the fragility and violence of its history, and to the ephemeral yet enduring nature of its Greekness. Few writers captured these particulars better than Kazantzis, and no one defended them more pugnaciously, researched them more exhaustively, wrote of them with greater insight, affection and sharp-edged irony:

When the wind blows from the south clouds fill the sky. Then, for a few hours, the wind will stop before the rain begins or the Vardari picks up. Whenever the south wind stills, a choking stench rises up from the water. Half the town or more, as far as Koulé-Café and Tsinari, reeks like an open cesspool. But in spite of the thick cloud cover, there are moments when the sun glints through.

On just such an afternoon you may find yourself sitting in a deserted coffee-house at the corner of Apostle Paul and Saint Demetrius streets, just across from the Turkish consulate and Kemal’s house, and the waiter will come up to you. “Tripe soup and coffee don’t really taste good unless they stink a bit,” he’ll say, to head off the observation you were about to make about the half-washed cup.

Still, up from the water rose the stench and me, I was fresh out of observations. Just as I was in no mood to share my thoughts with the shoeshine boy who, as he had buffed my shoes earlier, grumbled on about how prices were going up. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it up to here with concierges and the people who run the sidewalk kiosks Now the shoeshine boys are trying to find out what’s on our minds? What else were we supposed to tell these “specialists” so they could figure out what we were thinking? Subjecting our political beliefs to a kind of urinalysis, that’s what it was. So much for concierges and kiosk proprietors and, nowadays, shoeshine boys . . .

—Tolis Kazantis,

Our last meeting had taken place in Salonica a few months prior to his death. I was passing through the city on a reporting expedition to eastern Thrace, the home of Greece’s Turkish minority. In a smoke-filled café—not literary cliché but inescapable reality, for in winter Greek cafés are, by definition, smoke-filled—Kazantzis regaled me with a rapid-fire succession of stories mixed with hair-raising inside information about infiltration of the minority community in Thrace by the Turkish secret police. This he had gleaned from a distant relative who worked for the Greek intelligence service while ostensibly teaching in a high-school attended by Turkish minority students. But all I could see were his burning, sunken eyes, his drawn face, the furious intensity of his gestures as he fired up one cigarette after another, all the while assuring me with the pride of perversity that he was under strict doctor’s orders not to smoke. The Tolis Kazantzis I knew did not, I was certain, consciously seek death. But the man sitting across from me seemed to have accepted, in his innermost soul, that death was hard upon him, seemed to have decided to hasten its coming. The cutting force of his hands with their abrupt movements, and the fervid brilliance of his eyes spoke it though he did not.

In mourning, her black hair brushed austerely back, Kazantzis’ widow Fani greets me at the door and shows me in. Her eyes have the grief-charged depth of the lamenting Holy Mother in a Byzantine icon but her strong hands are composed, calm. In a halting but firm voice she describes his last days, sparing little detail. I suppose this is what I’ve come to hear: the account of how an avoidable death became inevitable. And if his death was avoidable—if he had only stopped smoking, stopped drinking—why had Tolis Kazantzis defied good counsel? I wondered as I listened.

Perhaps to every man there comes a moment when it becomes clear that life cannot continue. Then he must carry out the bidding of a mysterious voice deep within him. Tolis Kazantzis had done that voice’s bidding. His wife, children and friends buried him in the snow and biting cold on Christmas day, in the heart of the brief Salonica winter. That same day the lead item on the Athens television news featured homeless animals.

A FLOCK OF DIGNITARIES FLUTTERS to and fro outside the Basilica of Saint Demetrius, the glint of Greek full-dress military uniforms vivid against the phalanx of Orthodox clergymen in their black robes, cylindrical hats and full beards. From lamp-posts, flags and bunting in the national colors droop limply in the windless dusk. Police vans have blocked traffic on the street in front of the basilica, home and stronghold of Salonica’s patron saint. Around the entrances squadrons of officers, walkie-talkies in hand, hover alertly, as if expecting a riot to break out at any moment. Any large gathering of Greeks generates a charge of excitement, a human magnetic field that crackles like static electricity in an overheated, dry room. But neither a civil servants’ strike nor a student demonstration—public manifestations which attract anarchist violence as over-ripe fruit draws wasps—is in prospect. The evening’s emanations are peaceful ones.

Inside the Basilica the dignitaries and the faithful have congregated to welcome a miraculous icon of the Holy Virgin transported for the occasion by Greek naval vessel from the island of Patmos to commemorate the feast of Saint Demetrius, holy martyr, warrior, and protector of the city. I select a vantage point near one of the side doors from which I can observe the worshippers as they shoulder their way into the church. Many are welldressed young people and prosperous householders; several are exquisitely groomed women of the kind that turn heads on Tzimiski Street, the city’s main shopping thoroughfare. The response of the multitude signifies this: faith has not yet been narrowed to a dark corridor inhabited by the old, the poor and the uneducated. Like a subterranean current it flows through public—and private—life, rising to the surface on the great festivals and saints’ days, converging in seamless symbiosis with secular power. A blend of liturgical chanting, incense and pious intensity seems to radiate from the Basilica on this warm, humid evening. Was this the elusive sense of the sacred, a notion now floating in semi-respectability on the fringes of Western public discourse, an unavowed inversion of the world cult of the Golden Calf? Would I come upon a link, no matter how tenuous, no matter how deeply embedded in the interstices of collective memory, between the veneration of Saint Demetrius, the Orthodox Church as Authority and Hierarchy, and the resurgent, aggressive nationalism of the Greek state, very much on display this evening? That was another tale, one of the tales I had come to Salonica to hear told. Naively, as I was to discover.

Next morning, at the offices of the Metropolis, the Salonica Archdiocese, my pursuit of the tale began. Perhaps the better to ensure a near organic link between those heavenly Siamese twins of nationalism and religion, the offices are situated just around the corner from the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. Only a few paces separate these two supposedly anachronistic but cantankerous survivors amidst the maelstrom of free-market glitz that would represent the city’s contemporary identity, yet fools no one.

Despite the sanctimonious atmosphere, the place exudes a bureaucratic mustiness as unmistakable as its precise composition is complex: a faintly acrid odor of sweat and oft-worn clothes, rancid floor wax, mothballs, stale cigarette smoke and the cloying scent of false piety. The plastic flowers, crimson carpets and gilt-tipped furniture set up a jarring counterpoint to the expeditiously authoritative, pursed-lipped air of the bearded holy fathers I encounter as they scurry up and down their corridors, heads thrust forward like foraging ravens. Of course, Saint Demetrius’ Day is just around the corner and the offices are busy. Still, would it be possible to speak with someone about him, I enquire of a young pope working at a computer in a room labeled ‘Public Inquiries.’ “Office number one or number four,” he snaps back without lifting his head. “Knock and go right in.”

I knock at the door of office number one and enter. At the far end of the room the secretary, a ruddy-faced pope ensconced behind 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 for participating in an illegal gatherings of a subversive group, the Christians. Then, in a gladiatorial combat in the arena the Emperor’s favorite, Lyaeus, had been killed by a Christian called Nestor who had been blessed, the Roman police soon learned, by the imprisoned Demetrius who now stood exposed as ringleader of a plot. Aggrieved at the death of his protégé and humiliated by the victory of the subversives—a victory which had pleased the crowd in the arena too much for the emperor’s taste—the emperor ordered the two upstarts killed by spear in the baths. That night, a handful of Christians buried their martyrs where they had perished.

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 state which broke out in 1821 only to be almost obliterated by the victorious Peloponesean campaign of Ibrahim Pasha in 1824, was rescued in extremis when a French-British-Russian fleet destroyed the Turkish armada at Navarino. The European victors, not the tattered and beaten Greek insurgents, would set the terms for the new state’s existence.

Hardly a democracy on the exalted Athenian model, the new country was ruled by the youthful Prince Otho of Bavaria, overseen by a Regency Council established by the protecting powers. One of the first initiatives of the tiny, poverty-stricken, debt-ridden state was to have the Church of Greece declared independent from the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the rock of faith upon which Orthodox religious identity had endured and thrived throughout the four hundred years of Ottoman rule. Where the Church of Constantinople ministered to the spiritual needs of a huge, multi-lingual and pluri-national flock spread across the Balkans and the Middle East, the newly founded Church of Greece was, from the beginning, the prisoner of the autocratic, Bavarian-ruled Greek state. The breakaway, which was denounced by the Patriarchate, touched off violent reactions among the religious conservatives who hewed to the strict traditions of Orthodoxy. Canonical communion between Constantinople and Athens was restored in 1850, but by then the Church of Greece had been totally converted to the secular values of nationalism, and transformed into an arm of the state, becoming the spearhead of the aggressive, irredentist ideology which has dominated Greece ever since.³³ The greater tragedy lay in the gradual conversion of the supra-national Patriarchate, under the influence of Athens, into an agent of Hellenization. From there, it was a slippery slide into the morass of national-religious identity. The Serbs, the Bulgarians, and ultimately the Macedonians insisted on asserting their own national-spiritual autonomy from Constantinople. The stage was set for the fragmentation of the Balkans along the historic and cultural fault-lines, what Thierry Hentsch calls the “imaginary frontiers” whose bloody fissures, zigzagging through Bosnia, Kosova and Albania, gape open still.

Late that evening I return to Saint Demetrius’, drawn by the market atmosphere. More than a simple religious feast, the Saint’s day marked the end of the trading and agriculture season throughout the southern Balkans. Salonica itself had been, for centuries, the site of a market fair which drew merchants from as far away as Serbia, Italy and Asia Minor, an event which lives on, some claim, in its latest reincarnation, the Salonica International Trade Fair. On the broad portico in front of the church, ill-shaven, dark-skinned men with strange accents sell tiny Greek flags and balloons; stooped old women in tattered black dresses beg in the shadows, repeatedly invoking the grace of God, the Saint and of thee, most merciful passer-by. Mercifully, the passers-by drop coins into her gnarled hand. Saint Demetrius’ at night is redolent with beeswax and incense; for an instant I catch a whiff of rosewater, as if to underline the underlying community of devotion which, like the dark sea depths of the Mediterranean, unites Christianity with Islam, the invisible former inhabitant of this space.

PROFESSOR PAPADOPOULOS IS PRIMED for our meeting, a meeting for which I contrive to be precisely on time at nine o’clock one crisp morning. I’ve barely managed to sit down in his office in the Theology Faculty of the University of Thessaloniki before he plies me with books on—what else?—Saint Demetrius. No other saint in Orthodoxy has generated such a rich and extensive literature. All its religious tendencies claim him as their own, he volunteers. Even the quietists—the Hesychastes—a shadowy movement of fourteenth century mystics who fought a bitter and ultimately victorious battle against the ideas of the Western European renaissance. But, I insist, I want to know the professor’s own views on the saint’s identity; is he truly present in the icon, as professor Bakirdzis claimed the day before, or is the representation a symbolic one. Yes, yes, he reassures me, there is an identity of the two, the saint and his icon, in the sense that the icon leads you directly to the worship of the sacred. Professor Papadopoulos’ true interest is less the icon, more its hidden—and, he would argue, truer—essence. “Only when the Son of God becomes human,” he assures me, can He be depicted in His visible dimension. The icon, he explains, provides the agency.

Once the leap of faith has been made, worship through icons or the remains of saints provides solutions to the problems of life, he asserts. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?” he says, looking at me from under bushy, arched eyebrows. “We venerate the images of the saints because they express man’s material nature which in turn is created by God.” By now the professor is in full flight, and I’m nodding and muttering uh-huh as my pen scratches furiously across the pages of my note-book. “Science can only deal with what is materially existent. But religion deals with the immaterial. Studying religious objects like icons leads us to knowledge of God. But this is not science. You know, the work of Orthodox icon painters is a form of prayer; the painter is preserving the spirit in the work. Without faith, it’s impossible to depict the sacred, impossible to touch it.”

Professor Papadopoulos’ formula is both reassuring and troubling. The theoretical principal may be, from the theological point of view, unassailable. But when we come to an examination of cases, it is not always clear what exactly is the spirit preserved in the work and how it is apprehended by the faithful who look upon it. In the icon I have in mind, the one which best embodies the faith of the Salonicians, their protector Saint Demetrius, astride his rearing stallion, plunges a lance into the thorax of a bearded man who twists on the ground, teeth gnashing in finely drawn and exquisite agony.

Who is the bearded man that he should have so infuriated the saintly martyr? Greeks and Bulgarians both agree: the victim is a Bulgar. What they do not agree upon how he should be named.

In 1207 the Tsar of the Bulgars, Kalojan—John the Good—laid siege to Salonica, then a Frankish duchy. Those were dark days for Byzantium. Popish schismatics—the drunkards, master pillagers and freebooters who called themselves the Fourth Crusade—fresh from their conquest of Constantinople in 1204, defiled the throne and carved up the Byzantine dominions. Kalojan, his pride piqued at having been brushed aside like a vassal by the Latin conquerors, entered into a contre nature alliance with the Greeks. Restoring the offended glory of Orthodoxy may indeed have been the Tsar’s prime motivation. More probably, he longed to wear the crown of the Basilieus and had aimed for the main chance: establishment of a Bulgarian empire at Constantinople.³⁴

Short-lived and tenuous, the alliance crested with the battle of Adrianople, where the Greco-Bulgar armies under Kalojan routed the Crusaders. Soon thereafter the alliance collapsed, and the Tsar turned vengefully on his erstwhile comrades-in-arms, who had meanwhile thrown in their lot with the Greek-speaking Empire of Nicea, in Asia Minor. He took to styling himself Romaioctonos, the “Roman Slayer.” In none too subtle a manner the nickname scornfully reminded the Byzantines that they would pay one day for the exploits of Basil II, known as Bulgaroctonos, the “Bulgar Slayer.” As for the Greeks, they called him—inimitably—Skyloïoannes, “John-the-Dog.”

Despite the population’s lack of enthusiasm for their current overlords, the Franks, the siege of Salonica dragged on, and as it did, the Tsar’s patience began to wane. Kalojan, relates a chronicler called Stavrakios, impudently implored Saint Demetrius to deliver the city to him, for which he would cause a great monastery to be built. Long converted to Orthodoxy, the Bulgars had come to venerate Saint Demetrius as ardently as they longed for his city. Were they to capture Salonica, the mounted saint would be theirs, blessing their military virtues and dreams of empire. Providentially, however, Kalojan was murdered in his tent by a rival. For the Greeks the Tsar’s death had clearly been the work of the saint himself, determined to protect his city from the Bulgars. Saint Demetrius, not a rival, had entered Kalojan’s tent and dispatched the presumptuous monarch while he slept.³⁵

One can understand the frustration of the Bulgars—and their intense desire to lay hands on the icon which was, lest we forget, simultaneously the saint himself. Demetrius alone, so it seemed, had blocked their path when in the early years of the seventh century they swept into the southern Balkans from the steppes of Central Asia in the footsteps of their Hunnish predecessors, determined to build an empire of their own. All they lacked was a respectable capital city. Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, engrossed in plans for his campaign against the Sassanids in Persia, could not come to their aid. The people of Salonica were abandoned to their own devices. Repeatedly, relate the Miracles of Saint Demetrius, the monkish compilation of his life and posthumous achievements, the saint sallied forth from the citadel resplendent in his white tunic to rescue Salonica and repulse the besiegers. But while the Bulgars and other marauding Slavs never succeeded in establishing a toe-hold within the city, later waves of invaders—Franks, Venetians and Turks—displayed a curious immunity to the saintly proscription.

The Slavs’ failure to capture Salonica came to haunt them, and sowed the seeds of Great Bulgarian and Great Serbian designs on the city. But hypersensitivity to their presence still rules Greek historiography, and occupies the conceptual core of the country’s reaction to the existence of a Slav-speaking Macedonian national minority within the country’s boundaries, and to the creation of a state called Macedonia on its northern border.

BY THE FOLLOWING DAY Salonica’s defender has vanished, retreated into the gilded unidimensionality of his icon, no longer the horseman who appears on the ramparts to rally the troops, repulse the barbarian Slavs and save the city in its hour of need. A more contemporary warrior deity—national security—which brooks no uncertainty, no theological disputation, has usurped his place as the Greek armed forces stage their annual march-past of military preparedness to mark another, more recent anniversary: the rejection of fascist Italy’s 1940 ultimatum by the equally fascist Greek government of the day. The ensuing war, brief and bitter, was the country’s last victorious encounter on the battlefield against an external foe. When Hitler dispatched Panzer divisions and SS units in overwhelming strength to rescue his hapless Italian ally, the Greek forces, their morale sapped by pro-Nazi commanders, were forced to surrender.

After a late and raucous night with writers Yorgos Skabardonis and Christos Zafiris, men whose passionate avocation is the micro-history of their home town, I was in no mind for an early wake-up call. But a roar shook me from sleep and to my feet at the crack of dawn. Dashing to my front window, the one which overlooks the White Tower, I saw phalanxes of tanks and armored personnel carriers careening full bore down the corniche in the pre-dawn mist. “Doesn’t bother us a bit, as long as they only come out on national holidays,” a friend joked later. “But if you hear that sound on a normal work day, it just might be a coup d’État.” A reminder that Greece, for all its democratic patina, has spent much of its brief national life as a succession of military dictatorships, the last of which collapsed ignominiously in 1974.

Several hours later the same fire-snorting dragons come roaring back along the same broad boulevard—slower this time, but with the same bellychurning roar—escorting folklore groups in regional costume, ranks of school children, the Salonica police and fire brigade, and detachments of military cadets, soldiers, sailors and commandos, while Mirages and F-16s scream overhead at low altitude. Then come the same brass bands which had performed in the Saint Demetrius’ day parade, this time belting out jaunty military marches. The musicians are true to counter-type: plump flutists, thin men stooped under fat tubas, and a French horn player with artsy flowing auburn hair.

After the parade, the citizens in their tens of thousands stroll homeward along the corniche in brilliant late-October sunlight, past an impromptu seafront bazaar staffed by men and women of dark complexion shouting the quintessentially Balkanic “ande ande” (“hurry hurry,” or “step right up”) as they hawk bargain glassware; cheap socks and underwear; peanuts, pistachios, roasted chickpeas and sunflower seeds; souvlaki and ice-cream; miracle spot removing fluids and soda pop which may well be the same stuff in different bottles.

On the eve of the long holiday weekend it was unlikely that many Salonicians had Saint Demetrius on their minds as they rose at dusk from their late-afternoon siesta, sipped a long, lingering coffee, then fanned out toward the tavernas that line the seashore or dot the walled precincts of the upper town, and thence to the city’s throbbing, smoky night-clubs, discotheques and strip joints. Everyone knows danger is remote. The display of military might which had rumbled past the reviewing stand earlier in the day has been, after all, enough to give pause to Greece’s Balkan opponents. More than enough to dissuade any cheap regional reincarnation of Saddam Hussein. Tirana and Skopje and Ankara, watch yourselves, was the parade’s underlying message, a judicious admixture of barely sublimated aggressivity and confidence. Perhaps overconfidence.

Greece’s tug-of-war with Europe—with the world at large—over the name and symbols of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia has revealed a deep-seated emotional sub-stratum which, once activated, is creating a dynamic all its own. The universe, in the southern Balkans, is not unfolding as it should, and although the smoke and blood and misery of Bosnia are well over the horizon, the re-emergence of powerful national and religious currents is now a fact throughout the region. Greek youth—who this very evening will be thronging the night clubs and the pinball parlors—have grown plump and indolent, addicted to motorcycles and a diet of cigarettes, fast-food and late nights spiced with random hooliganism. They would make a poor match for the tough, wiry, hungry mountaineers or shanty-town dwellers of Albania or Turkey, should push ever come to shove. Once again the Salonicians may have to summon Saint Demetrius to defend the city.

ANOTHER FINE NOVEMBER DAY I SET OUT on a whirlwind tour of Salonica’s Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches, attaching myself to a group of freshfaced and earnest Princeton University graduate students. Their professor, Slobodan Curcic, a Serbian Byzantinologist has graciously permitted me to tag along. Distances are short and the walking is easy as we hasten from one impromptu lecture hall to the next through the city’s compact central core where the remains of its Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman past are concealed. There is not a moment to spare for wandering down a winding lane, for turning right when we should turn left: time is of the essence. Professor Curcic has drawn up a militarily precise schedule of on-the-spot lessons to be given by local art historians and archeologists, each designed to tease a deeply concealed meaning from these historic relics, like garlic snails to be extracted from their shells with a combination of sharp forks and strong wrists.

Our first stop is Panaghia Halkeon—Our Lady of the Brass Founders—named for the craftsmen whose workshops have been located in the area for more than two millennia. The tiny church lies below street level just off the Via Egnatia, Salonica’s historic main thoroughfare. Founded in the eleventh century, the church is built entirely of fired brick and mortar, materials of extraordinary plasticity and endurance. But beneath the building, we learn, lies a vaulted sub-structure: perhaps catacombs dating from the Roman period, perhaps even a Cabirian shrine from post-Alexandrian days when the cult, dear to metal workers, thrived here. The void below ground has caused the church to settle, explain the specialists. Even as we speak ultra-sound mapping techniques, they claim proudly, are being used to chart these spaces. Technology is expected to shed new light on the subterranean mysteries and allow the church to be stabilized.

Previous attempts to clean the exquisite frescoes that coat the inside surfaces of the dome and walls have, however, a rather more cautionary tale to tell. Experts of a previous generation used an abrasive powder to cut through the grime of centuries, scouring the delicate paintings and forever altering their intense colors. Will the perspicacity of today’s experts, technically competent men and women who seem quite unmoved by the holy precincts in which they wield their disincarnate technique, prove to be substantially greater? Their exemplary discipline may have blinded them to the dimension of faith without which these monuments are little more than predictable compositions, the mere sum of their physical components. Sophisticated though soulless constructs of brick, mortar, wood, mosaic and pigment. Don’t, whispers an inner voice. Do not attempt to open the vaults, do not listen to the seductive ping-pinging of the ultra-sound sensors. Leave the concave inner spaces to the sacred mysteries which may inhabit them still, but which will surely flee if exposed to the cruel light of scientific inquiry, to the polluted air of the late twentieth century. For though we may have abandoned the gods—the Cabiri and the saints—they may not have irrevocably abandoned us.

Time to move on, says professor Curcic, glancing at his watch. The group rushes off breathlessly, notebook pages flapping, toward Aghioi Apostoli—The Church of the Holy Apostles—all that remains of the late Byzantine monastic complex abutting the city’s western ramparts. Ranks of brooding, peeling apartment blocks, their balconies hung with laundry, leer down at the church, whose once ample courtyard now opens only onto the weed-grown remnants of the cyclopean walls. That such a space has endured is nothing short of miraculous. What little of the Byzantine city survived the great fire of 1917 was all but obliterated by the construction boom of the mid ‘20s‚ when hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees from Asia Minor sought shelter and work, transforming the remains of the Jewish-Ottoman city of Selanik into Salonica, “poor mother” of the ingathering of the Greeks, metropolis of the scorned and the downtrodden, a seed-bed for communist agitation. The coup de grace was administered by the second boom, which was touched off by the Colonels’ junta. Architecturally, Salonica is their legacy: an anarchic gimcrack hodge-podge of concrete, speed and acquisitiveness which surpasses in its caricatural excess even the matrix from which it sprang.

As it was a monastic property, the Holy Apostles’ was one of Salonica’s wealthiest churches. For this reason its frescoes and mosaics—for both techniques were used in this graceful building erected in the waning years of the Byzantine Empire—bear the scars of time and human depredation, the worst of which came at the hands of fellow Christians: Catholics, schismatics, barbarians. In 1185, marauding Normans from Sicily sacked Salonica. A detailed account of events by Eusthathios, the Archbishop who witnessed its capture, survives in the form of a funeral oration for the sufferings of the city brimming with indignation at the abandonment of the defenseless citizenry by the Byzantine military who had been sent to rescue them in their hour of need.

. . . now the city, after our opponents had burst into it, was subjected to the usual ravages of war. Our own men . . . fled without turning round, with no exceptions except for a few who could be counted easily. (. . .) The barbarians, having filled the whole city, beginning with the eastern gates, now mowed down our men and heaped up those sheaves in many stacks to make the fodder beloved of Hades . . . no house could be found in which mercy was shown to the inhabitants.36

The Normans, who Greek historians of today liken to the Nazi occupiers of 1941-1944, stripped the icons and wall paintings of the Holy Apostles’ of their gold leaf and melted it down as booty before departing. The great mosaics were added later, on the eve of the Turkish conquest when, under the Paleologue dynasty, religious art reached new summits of expressiveness. In their fluid, harmonious interplay of form and color, the works resemble those of the anonymous masters who created the masterworks of the Monastery of Chora, in Constantinople, the pinnacle of late-Byzantine iconography.

The Holy Apostles’‚ like most of Salonica’s main churches, was transformed into a mosque by the conquering Ottomans who, it is said, methodically pock-marked fresco-bearing surfaces to prepare them for a coating of new plaster which would hide the religiously offensive images. Or so the resident byzantinologist suggests, although it was common enough Byzantine practice for church frescos to be plastered over to provide a fresh surface for an improved version of the religious scenes depicted, to make room for a portrait of the church’s benefactor, or to display its patron saint in a more flattering or martial light. Providentially, the church’s mosaics, while superficially damaged, are intact. They are breathtaking.

The Ottomans must have been, in the eyes of Salonica’s pious Orthodox population, a reincarnation of the iconoclasts, the image-smashers they had despised. The city of Saint Demetrius owed its reputation as Protector of the True Faith to its staunch opposition to the Iconoclast movement that swept the Empire in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The iconoclasts, driven by the hot winds of emergent Islam (a chronicler of the imagesmashing emperor Leo III called him “the Saracen-minded”³⁷) denounced the veneration of images as idol worship, and sought to strip the church walls bare. For more than eighty years, divided by a brief interval of icon-worship, their writ was law until rescinded by the “restoration of orthodoxy.”

Leo’s motives for attacking images are as obscure as the history of the movement he led, since the victorious icon-worshippers violently suppressed its works. Some historians speculate that the Emperor, an Easterner himself, wished to accommodate the Jews and the Muslims, the better to convert them; others claim he wished to remove education from the hands of the clergy, attack the entrenched feudal power of the monasteries and so consolidate secular rule—a “progressive” reformer far ahead of his time. His much excoriated successor Constantine V Copronymus (“he whose Name is Excrement”) was a model of intolerance who sought to smash not only all depictions of the sacred, but the monastic orders which had perverted and commercialized them. But no religious strictures, no public humiliation of monks could overcome the deep-rooted semi-pagan attachment of the simple folk to the images which depicted, while at the same time they embodied, the saints and holy martyrs, themselves re-embodiments of the ancient cthonic deities of the earth and sky and sea. In 787, the seventh and last ecumenical council of the Eastern Church was convened. At its final meeting, in Constantinople, it reinstated image worship and pronounced anathema on those who refused to accept its fiat. In Salonica, stronghold of a monastic power that would violently reassert itself centuries later in the struggle of the Hesychastes against the Zealots, there was rejoicing.

As the victorious Ottomans consolidated their rule over the second city of Byzantium, the venerated images, the mosaics were once again covered over. But the plaster of the devout conquerors preserved many from destruction. When revealed by cautious restoration, the brilliant reds and golds shone forth in unadulterated glory, as they do to this day in the Church of the Holy Apostles, preserve of the specialists, ignored by the feckless, impious man on the street for whom only the warlike Saint Demetrius holds attraction.

Feeling a touch feckless and impious myself, I sit down in the shade on a low wall as the group hurtles off to its next destination. Salonica’s past is mute, but not of its own volition. No, it has been all but reduced to silence. What remains of its voice is obscured by the ambient cacophony of traffic resounding in the narrow streets. So if you think you hear a whisper—perhaps it was only the afternoon breeze off the water humming through the high embrasures of a church wall, or the flutter of women’s voices from a neighboring balcony—stop to listen.

A MONTH LATER—it’s early December now but the weather is indolent and tepid—I embark on one of my periodic forays into the upper town, crossing the Via Egnatia and Saint Demetrius street. Leaving Kemal’s house behind I amble uphill along the cobbled lanes past the compound of the church of Saint Nicholaos Orphanos, a walled, weed-grown garden-oasis, thick with cypresses and orange trees, in the heart of the city. This afternoon my destination is the Acropolis, the walled citadel crowned with its lowering Byzantine-Ottoman fortress, perpetual refuge of the city’s defenders, ultimate rampart against invading barbarians. Here, more than anywhere else in Salonica, the two empires converge, dominating the skyline to this day.

Derelict land occupies much of the space within the citadel precinct: A no-man’s-land of thistles and wild grass, a neutral zone littered with halfdecomposed garbage and discarded plastic water bottles. Along the far borders of this inhospitable ground, as though far enough removed from the shadow of the fortress to avoid its contagion, stands a scattering of modest dwellings, some of them built right into the inner walls of the citadel, survivors of the first wave of refugees which settled in Salonica after being uprooted from Anatolia in 1922. Suddenly there is a rush, more felt than heard, of many small wings. A flight of trained pigeons circles overhead, then homes in on a courtyard. I mosey over to the fence and strike up a conversation with the householder, a stocky, balding man who doubles, he explains, as pigeon trainer. “It’s the only hobby we can afford up here,” he says, waving his hand about him in a half-circle. “And we can always eat ‘em if we have to.”

We exchange a few words of regret at the Swiss army’s decision to disband its carrier pigeon corps, and I wander upward, scuffing along the weedclogged footpaths which ring the fortress. Two adolescent boys lounge on a stone wall—surely an early Byzantine relic—puffing cigarettes and talking soccer. The sky has clouded over; dampness rises from the ancient earth. The late afternoon has turned distinctly melancholy. The hour is propitious for my encounter with the Zealots, here on the ground where they made their last, heroic stand.

TOLIS KAZANTZIS, WHO LOVED TO TELL STORIES that cut sharply against the grain of authority, stories that probe like a scalpel for posturing and hypocrisy, first told me of these hard-bitten communalists over a late-night meal in one of the psarotavernas that line the shore. Impossible to remember how we’d gotten onto the subject. The meal had ended, our table was littered with fish bones, bread crumbs and olive pits; bits of spicy cabbage salad floated in watery puddles of oil and lemon dressing, our stubby wine glasses were smudged with finger prints. The naked fluorescent tubes overhead gave the taverna’s walls a sepulchral dinginess. In spite of the liver disease that would soon kill him, my host was already into his fifth or sixth cigarette of the evening. Half-obscured behind the cloud of slow-rising smoke, his deepset eyes gleamed as he leaned forward: “Did you know that the first bourgeois revolution in Europe happened right here in Salonica? 450 years before the French Revolution. If you don’t understand the Zealots, you can never understand our city.”

Kazantzis’ three sentences were enough to set me off on my own quest for the Zealots of Salonica. But, three years later, as I strolled across the grassy slopes of the citadel, I could find not a trace of those mysterious proto-communists, precursors of proletarian revolt who overthrew the ruling nobles and administered the city for nearly five years during the fifth decade of the fourteenth century. No commemorative plaque marks their passing. Like the Iconoclasts five hundred years before, the Zealots have been relegated to the near oblivion of the footnotes by the academic establishment and its handmaiden, mainstream historiography. As with the Iconoclasts, no primary sources survived their demise and ideological defeat. What little is known of them can be inferred only from the writings of their foes. All the more reason to search out their invisible traces.

Like the Iconoclasts, whose purpose was the suppression of the visible appurtenances of worship, the elimination of dross so that only the pure metal of spirit would remain, the Zealots, whose proclaimed mission was civil equality—a program as radical in 1342 as it is today—left no monuments. Nothing but a vague rejection, as diffuse as it was intense, of injustice; a tradition of popular resistance that would emerge in the last years of Ottoman rule in the form of the Fédération socialiste, and find its most recent incarnation in the combative working-class movement of the 1930s. Though my rendez-vous would have to be an imaginary one, I was determined to see it through. Its premise was presumptuous of course. Was it an enterprise in futility, like the attempt of the visionary poet Angelos Sikelianos to resuscitate a corpse?³⁸ Probably. But though the task was impossible, it had to be attempted.

The Byzantine Empire had painstakingly reconstituted itself after being hacked apart by the Crusader hordes more than one hundred years before. Once again the basileus reigned, heir to Rome, over the southern Balkans from the Adriatic to the Bosphorus. But the respite was short lived. Civil strife and the rise of a mighty Slav kingdom under the Serbian kral, Stefan Dusan, eroded the Byzantine domains, until by the mid-fourteenth century Constantinople’s writ extended—politically and militarily—no farther than eastern Thrace and the region surrounding Salonica.

All but abandoned by the capital, the second city of the empire had become, out of cruel necessity, a semi-independent city-state which relied on the acumen of its traders and on the skilled hands of its workmen for its prosperity. Though the Byzantine empire was shrinking rapidly into terminal decline, Salonica remained a commercial powerhouse. Toward it, by land and by sea, flowed the raw materials, agricultural products and finished goods of the Slav-speaking Balkans, Albania and Thessaly. There they would be sold then transshipped to the ports of Western Europe and the Middle East, most of it in Genoese vessels. Venice’s chief rival in the bitter competition for Mediterranean trade had won the favor of the ruling Paleologue dynasty. The old Roman Via Egnatia which passed through the city remained the only practicable overland route from the Adriatic to Constantinople, but it was plagued by political instability, and had long been superseded by the sea routes.

Trade, Salonica’s lifeblood, reached its peak during the yearly festival of Saint Demetrius. Greek traders who had settled in the farthest-flung corners of the once-great realm of the Eastern Roman Empire—Asia Minor, Syria, Cyprus and the marshy lands of the Danubian delta—congregated at the lateOctober fair, rubbing elbows with Slav, Spanish, Italian and French merchants. There were to be found, in rich variety, oriental spices, dyestuffs, carpets and aromatic plants; fine silks and rough Bulgarian goat-hair cloth; woven fabric from France, Flanders and Tuscany; silver and gold thread from Lucca, Genoa and Venice; Italian, Cretan and Greek wines; aromatic soaps from Ancona and Puglia; figs from Spain and nutmeats from Naples; olive oil from Sicily and the Morea, laudanum from Cyprus and precious gum mastic from Chios, the orange blossom isle.³⁹

The wealth which trade brought to the city created a commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. Artisans, sailors, indentured laborers and slaves made up the bulk of the inhabitants, most of whom were then Greeks and Slavs, along with smaller Jewish and Armenian minorities. Its reputation for cosmopolitan diversity was upheld by a foreign colony of Genoese, Venetians, Spaniards, and perhaps even a few Turks, though the Ottomans had yet to begin their westward thrust which was to redraw the boundaries of the entire region. Salonica’s large population and special status within the empire—its official designation was “great city,” a title to which only Rome and Constantinople could lay claim—had also assured it virtual administrative autonomy. Unlike the patriarch and the emperor, their absolutist masters in Constantinople, the archbishop and the governor ruled on sufferance of the people. While artistic activity, scientific inquiry, philosophical and theological disputation flourished in the absence of direct imperial control, so also did class conflict, which found expression in bitter political and religious controversy. In the mid-fourteenth century these latent conflicts finally flared up, culminating in the political and religious crisis which sealed the fate of the Byzantine state and the future of Eastern Orthodoxy.

The counterweight to Byzantine Salonica’s ostentatious prosperity and cultivated elegance was widespread—extreme poverty, the sort of situation which the dominant class, the landed nobility, was only too happy to perpetuate. This it accomplished by the usual application of force, and through the ideological ministrations of the ecclesiastical elite and the monastic establishment whose land holdings made it an economic power in its own right. The nobles ruled as absolute masters; their pride in the aristocratic lineage which bestowed on them the right to rule was exceeded only by their scorn for the upstart traders, the nouveaux riches who had begun to challenge their lordly prerogatives. And all the while, the common folk chafed under a crippling burden of taxation and repression. Contemporary chronicles speak of public torture of those courageous enough to protest social and economic injustice. Protests against usury were frequent, eloquent and vain. Before the tribunals only the voice of wealth could be heard. All was governed by one of the periodically recurring variants of the inevitability doctrine which counseled passive acceptance of poverty, exclusion, dispossession and social disintegration—exactly as it does today. It was only a matter of time before the ambition of the emerging bourgeoisie and the misery of the impoverished free citizens and slaves would coalesce into an explosive combination of hatred and hope.

The life of a city—of a nation, a people—is infinitely more than the blindly colliding freaks’ ballet of market forces, those immutable laws which, intone the high priests of the World Church of Economic Determinism, regulate the universe. So it was with Salonica, where against a background of incipient revolt fueled by mass deprivation, a philosophical and intellectual renaissance was in full flower, nourished, as was its coeval counterpart in the West, by the study of the ancient Greeks in all their subversive, polymorphous humanist perversity. The city considered itself the home and hearth of Hellenism, the Athens of the age, a beacon for philosophers, artists and rhetoricians. Any aspiring philosopher, be he native Salonician or visitor, Greek or non-Greek, was free to open schools, to teach, to propound radical interpretations of religious dogma and to challenge the assumptions of the age. Into this atmosphere of intellectual and political ferment strode an itinerant Calabrian monk named Barlaam, ostensibly to study eastern mysticism, but whose real aim was to preach ideas inspired at once by ancient Athens and the West of the early Renaissance. Barlaam’s message not only contested the ideological dominance of the monkish conservatives; it implicitly challenged the material prerogatives of the religious establishment. He was a dangerous man with a dangerous message.

To speak today of Byzantine argument is to conjure up images of tortuous complexity, convoluted abstruseness and hairsplitting hyper-subtlety. The Hesychaste controversy which came to a climax with the arrival in Salonica of Barlaam had the makings of all this, and more. Yet the dispute which swirled around the doctrine of monastic quietism contrived to become the vehicle for an intellectual, religious and social debate which engaged the greatest spirits of the age and mobilized the forces of the Empire. Prior to the fourteenth century the term Hesychaste, derived from hesychia, the Greek word for silence, had designated those monks who lived a life of devout contemplation, remote from the rough and tumble of the real world. “The highest, most sincere, and most perfect prayer of the perfect Hesychaste,” writes a historian, “is an immediate intercourse with God, in which there exist no thoughts, ideas, images of the present or recollection of the past. This is the highest contemplation—the contemplation of God one and alone, the perfect ecstasy of mind and withdrawal from matter.”⁴⁰

But in the second quarter of the century the practice abruptly redefined itself, combining the pursuit of punctiliously subtle doctrinal affairs with the adoption of meditative techniques reminiscent of those employed by Oriental mystics or Islamic Sufis, and probably influenced by them. It was only natural that Salonica, a mere day’s journey from the powerful monastic enclave of Mount Athos, would early on feel the impact of the newly revived quietist doctrine, which centered on the obscure but contentious question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit and sought to obtain for its followers a momentary vision of the uncreated light which Christ’s disciples are said to have beheld on Mount Tabor.⁴¹

Barlaam the Calabrian would have none of it, and launched an energetic polemical exchange with the chief of the quietists, Gregory Palamas, a native of Constantinople who began his monastic progress on Mount Athos in the early years of the century. Palamas was a rarity: an articulate mystic whose irreproachably saintly behavior and life of personal privation attracted followers as much as did his beliefs. But in Barlaam he met his match. The Calabrian was a master theologian, with supreme oratorical gifts and a biting tongue. He heaped ridicule on the Hesychastes, attacking them in public meetings as parasites. They, he thundered, to the delight of Salonica’s pugnaciously free-thinking citizens, were heretics who were attempting to obtain knowledge of God through mystical techniques which contradicted the Greek heritage of rational examination and logical discourse. No, fired back Palamas, reason is powerless to grasp the verity of God. Only by purification of the heart through ascetic contemplation can the believer attain to divine light, source of all truth.⁴²