Within the motion pictures, it’s referred to as a Mexican standoff—a confrontation the place no aspect can win. Typically, it’s portrayed as enemies pointing weapons at one another. Different occasions, it’s two armies poised to assault each other, however there isn’t any path to victory for the aggressor.
This time, the drama performs out in Greece, on the holy mountain of Athos, a sacred web site for Japanese Orthodox Christians and residential to twenty monasteries and about 2,000 monks. A kind of spiritual communities, the Tenth-century Esphigmenou Monastery, homes 118 monks in open battle with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and who, in keeping with Greek courts, have been illegally squatting there since 2002.
The dissident monks name themselves Real Orthodox Christians to distance themselves from the Orthodox mainstream from which they’ve splintered. They subscribe to an uncompromising fundamentalism, have rejected a number of of the Japanese Orthodox saints, refuse to acknowledge the Greek Orthodox Church’s Revised Julian liturgical calendar adopted 100 years in the past—and they’re armed.
In 2002, the break-away monks have been deemed “schismatic,” a situation below which, in keeping with the Greek Structure, they’d not be permitted on Mount Athos. In 2005, the Ecumenical Patriarch referred to as for his or her elimination.
With explosives and weapons, the holdouts have resisted a number of makes an attempt to evict them. The Greek police, eager to impact a easy evacuation in order that the monastery could be occupied by the New Esphigmenou Brotherhood arrange by the Ecumenical Patriarch, are stymied. On July 16, they despatched a letter to the Holy Group of Mount Athos, the executive authority of the area, requesting extra police and heavy autos “to ensure that our service to reply instantly and with operational precision to a request submitted by bailiff for the execution of evictions in areas of the Athonian State.”
The occupiers, more and more reduce off from the world—ships that offer different monasteries have refused to cope with them—hung a black banner atop their gate that sports activities three skulls, three knives and crossbones—and a Greek Orthodox cross. Encircling the picture are three phrases, “Orthodoxy or dying!” in Russian and Greek. The phrase, coined in 1972 when the group severed its ties with the Ecumenical Patriarch, has since been banned as extremist materials in Russia for over a decade.
The Real Orthodox Christians issued an announcement drawing an ethical equivalence between any police motion in opposition to the monks (which hasn’t occurred but) and the blockade of Gaza.
“The reference to a adequate variety of policemen for an extended time frame, foreshadows an try to dam the Monastery for a few years with the purpose of handing over the Fathers from the specter of hunger,” the group mentioned. “This plan would represent a grave violation of primary human rights. After the worldwide outcry over the blockade of Gaza, to which worldwide humanitarian support is distributed, the attainable creation of a blockade heart in Greece goes to discredit the nation worldwide.”
It’s a lose-lose scenario for the police. In 2006, following an try to evict the squatters, media photographs of bloodied monks being dragged out by uniformed officers shocked the overwhelmingly religiously Orthodox Greek public. Seven years later, the police, in one other try, have been rebuffed with Molotov cocktails and different weapons.
The insurgent monks are led by Archimandrite Methodius, an inflammatory determine whose antisemitic rants included the risk that if Jews complained that Hitler killed them, they need to watch out {that a} Greek Hitler doesn’t rise at some point.
Sentenced by a Greek courtroom to twenty years in jail for throwing a Molotov cocktail at police in the course of the 2013 eviction try, the sentence was then commuted to lower than six years.
Methodius says that any try to take away his order and his monks constitutes spiritual persecution and that any intervention by the police would create new martyrs.
“We’re able to defend the monastery to the dying; that is our religious homeland. Right here we have been born spiritually, and right here we are going to die,” he mentioned of the approaching third police try at eviction. “If the fathers of the monasteries and the police come right here to make Greeks struggle in opposition to Greek monks, they need to rethink. Whatever the end result, allow them to come. Will the monks merely stand by if an officer assaults certainly one of us?”
Father Bartolomeos, the abbot of the New Esphigmenou Brotherhood mentioned, “Greek police ought to have acted way back. It’s their constitutional obligation to guard Mount Athos, which is a part of Greece.”
It’s an issue. The practically quarter-century-long drama of the courts and police making an attempt and failing to dislodge Methodius and the insurgent monks has offered persevering with fodder for the Greek media.
Samuel Noble, a scholar of Orthodox Christianity at Aga Khan College in London, has identified the fragile steadiness of energy at stake. There’s the brothers’ defiant siege mentality and the tenuous thread of autonomy from the Greek authorities loved by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which administers the area.
“Athos is tremendous autonomous in two methods. It’s autonomous relative to the Greek state in that the Greek state touches it very, very gently,” Noble mentioned. “After which there’s a level of autonomy relative to the remainder of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. So something that touches on Athos touches on this type of double autonomy that they’ve. And so making an attempt to do one thing is admittedly troublesome since you don’t need to upset both their particular relationship with the Greek state or their particular relationship with Ecumenical Patriarchate.”
As of this writing, the police have made no transfer.
Picture credit: Monastery Athos Greece by volos. CC BY-NC 2.0.
