COMERFORD WAY: Patrick Comerford’s online journal on Anglicanism, theology, spirituality, history, architecture, travel, poetry, beach walks ... and more
Saint Pancras Old Church, London … a warm welcome for two visitors last week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
Patrick Comerford
Walking between Euston Station and King’s Cross, many people are struck by Saint Pancras New Church and its two sets of caryatids, inspired by the Erechtheion on the Acropolis, and its vestibule and tower inspired by the Tower of the Winds in Athens.
The church was completed 200 years ago in 1822, to serve what was then a fashionable end of Bloomsbury and with seating for 2,500 people. It cost £76,679 to build, making it the most expensive church to be built in London since the rebuilding of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
When Saint Pancras New Church opened in 1822, Saint Pancras Old Church, about 900 metres away, fell into disuse, and it was virtually in ruins by the 1840s. However, the industrial expansion of London brought in a new population, and the Church underwent a complete restoration in 1847-1848.
Inside Saint Pancras Old Church, London, facing east (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
Last week, while two of us were visiting London, we received a warm welcome from the Team Rector, Father James Elston, and many of the parishioners.
The Parish of Old Saint Pancras was formed in 2003 and its boundary stretches from Euston and King’s Cross in the south to Camden Lock in the north. It includes Saint Pancras Old Church and three other churches, Saint Michael’s Church, Camden Town, Saint Paul’s Church, Camden Square, and Saint Mary’s Church, Eversholt Street, Somers Town, which is closed for urgent repairs.
Saint Pancras Old Church has the appearance and atmosphere of a much-loved country church in the heart of London. It stands as witness to the enduring faith for which its young patron, Saint Pancras, died in 304.
The shrine of Saint Pancras was installed in the church in 1978 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
The little hillock on which the church now stands rose above the flood valley of the River Fleet. Historians suggest a Roman encampment was based here, sloping down towards King’s Cross and Euston. The hill may have been the site of a rural shrine that was later converted to Christian use, making Saint Pancras Old Church one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in London.
Local lore claims Saint Pancras Old Church is, perhaps, even the oldest church in England, possibly dating back to the early 4th century. Many accounts date it to 313 or 314.
Inside Saint Pancras Old Church, London, facing west (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
Although little remains of the original medieval church, the church has been on this site since the 11th or 12th century. By the 11th century, Saint Pancras was in the demesne (or domain) of Saint Paul’s, and the Domesday Book records in 1085 Walter, a canon of Saint Paul’s, who was attached to Saint Pancras.
The church was ruinous in the 13th century, and a survey in 1297 noted that ‘the churchyard is befouled by animals.’
The church was rebuilt in the 14th century, and half abandoned in the 16th century. But it seems to have escaped the ferocity of the Reformation; legend holds that Saint Pancras Church was a favourite of Elizabeth I, who allowed the Latin Mass to continue there, and the memorial to her cook can still be seen on the south wall.
The reredos was designed by Arthur Blomfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
The church was restored in the 17th century. But during the English civil war, it was used as a barracks and stable for Cromwell's troops. Before the troops arrived, the church’s treasures were buried and lost.
By the 18th century, its primary use was as a burial ground, as well as a place to go for a quick wedding, with no questions asked. For this reason, probably, a pregnant Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin were married there in 1797. She was buried in the churchyard later that year shortly after the birth of her daughter, the future Mary Shelley.
Saint Pancras New Church opened in 1822, and Saint Pancras Old Church fell into disuse. By the 1840s, it was virtually in ruins. The industrial expansion of London, however, meant that Saint Pancras was in a fully populated area, and in 1847-1848 the church underwent a complete restoration.
The Norman door at the west end of Saint Pancras Old Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
The architect AD Gough wanted to renovate the church in line with its 12th century foundations, adding new windows and doors, a new north vestry and dismantling the 13th century west tower, adding a new bell tower on the south wall instead.
During these works, many of the items lost in the Cromwellian era were recovered, including a sixth century altar stone said to have been used by Saint Augustine of Canterbury, an Elizabethan silver chalice, an Elizabethan or Jacobean flagon and an Elizabethan paten that is used to this day at the Sunday Mass.
The Saint Pancras Old Church two of us visited last week is largely the result of the restorations of 1847, 1888 and 1925. The reredos is by Arthur Blomfield (1888), and was restored to its original position beneath the East Window in 1985. The carved panels from the old pulpit are ascribed to a pupil of Grinling Gibbons.
Saint Pancras Old Church retains a relationship with Saint Paul’s Cathedral to this day: the Dean and Chapter are the patrons, presenting a new priest whenever a vacancy arises.
The Soane Mausoleum was designed by Sir John Soane … did inspire Gilbert Scott’s design of the telephone box? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
The burials in the churchyard include Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the parents of Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the author of Frankenstein.
The Soane Mausoleum was designed by Sir John Soane, the celebrated architect of the Bank of England, following his wife’s death. Soane’s monument looks for all the world like a telephone box, yet it predates the telephone box by almost a century. That design competition in the 1920s was won by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of George Gilbert Scott, who designed the Saint Pancras Hotel. As a trustee of the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Soane’s design from a century earlier must have rung a bell.
Charles Dickens refers to Old Saint Pancras Churchyard in his Tale of Two Cities (1859).
Thomas Hardy placed the headstones around ‘Hardy’s Tree’ in Saint Pancras Old Churchyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
Sadly, the churchyard is about to lose the Hardy Tree, which is being felled due to disease. The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) once studied architecture in London from 1862-1867 under Arthur Blomfield.
When the railway line was being built over part of the original Saint Pancras Churchyard in the 1860s, Blomfield was commissioned to supervise excavating 10,000 graves. The task fell to his protégé Thomas Hardy, who placed the headstones around the ash tree that became known as Hardy’s Tree.
Although the churchyard closed to burials in 1850, the Burdett Coutts Memorial Sundial was erected in 1877-1879, at the behest of Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Her sister Clara married the Revd James Drummond Money (1800-1875), who was one of predecessors as Vicar of Askeaton in 1830-1833. Clara and James were the parents of Francis Burdett Thomas Nevill Money-Coutts (1852-1923), later the 5th Baron Latymer.
The ornate gothic sundial records on each side many notable figures who were buried in the churchyard and their professions, including French émigrés from the time of the Revolution.
The two sets of caryatids at Saint Pancras New Church were inspired by the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
As for Saint Pancras New Church, which opened 200 years ago in 1822, it was designed by a local architect William Inwood and his son Henry William Inwood, who based their designs on the Erechtheion on the Acropolis, while the vestibule and tower were inspired by the Tower of the Winds in Athens.
The two sets of four caryatids are carved and draped female figures, used as pillars to support the entablature above their heads. They stand above the north and south entrances to the crypt.
They were modelled by John Charles Felix Rossi (1762-1839), but differ from the originals in that each one of these holds an empty water ewer and an inverted, extinguished torch, as a symbol of their standing guard over the crypt.
The massive figures are of terracotta, cemented together round pillars of cast iron. A close inspection reveals the marks where the sections of each caryatid were joined. The need to move them in sections led to the stories that when the statues arrived to be put in place, they were too tall to fit into the gap that they were to fill in the porticos. It is said the only way to install them was to either cut away or leave out the midriff of each figure.
Although some of the statues look squat when viewed from certain angles, others look serene and elegant. It all may be a matter of perspective.
Sadly, the metal clamps in the statues are now corroding, expanding and cracking the structure. A radar survey assessed the extent of the metal fractures last year (2021), and this will inform a planned restoration project.
The Revd Anne Stevens has been the Vicar of Saint Pancras since 2012. She was ordained in 1991, and has worked in parishes in Greenwich and Battersea, as a chaplain of Trinity College Cambridge, and as the Director of Reader Training in the Diocese of Southwark.
The regular services at Saint Pancras New Church include the Sunday Choral Eucharist at 10 am and a mid-week Holy Communion at 1.15pm on Wednesdays.
The Caryatids on the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens inspired the two sets of caryatids at Saint Pancras New Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
I was hoping to spend these two weeks at the Country Inn Hotel in Kalithea on the Kassandra peninsula in Halkidi
Patrick Comerford
I should be in Dublin Airport right now, waiting for Flight FR 1390, leaving Dublin at 7:45 this morning and arriving Thessaloniki 13:40 Greek time this afternoon [24 September 2020].
I was planning to spend these two weeks in Greece, staying at the Country Inn Hotel in Kalithea. Instead, this is one of the very few years since the mid-1980s that I have not visited Greece at least once a year, if not more. Earlier in the year, I had planned to be in Crete for Greek Easter, but now both of those plans have been cancelled because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
I have been in Thessaloniki many times, and was looking forward to not only enjoying walks through the city, along the seafront and up into Monastery of Vlatadon above the city in the Ano Poli. I had also thought of a visit to Mount Athos, as well as Philippi, Mount Olympus, the royal tombs at Vergina, and sites associated with Alexander the Great.
I was booked into the Country Inn Hotel in Kalithea, 85 km from Thessaloniki, for these two weeks. It stands above Toronaios Bay, overlooking Sithonia.
It looked like a promising base for this holiday in Halkidiki. It boasts of the beauty of the landscape and the sea views, as well as its hospitality and comfort.
The Country Inn hotel is built in a traditional style close to endless beaches with crystal clear waters, enchanting bays, rocky formations and mountains with coniferous trees. There were promises of long country walks, swimming in turquoise waters, and the view of the endless blue of Toroneos Bay.
Kallithea is on the east side of Kassandra peninsula and its name means ‘good view’ because it is built on a steep slope overlooking the sea. Archaeological sites in the immediate area include the sanctuary of Ammon Zeus, dating from the 4th century BC, and the sanctuary of Dionysus and the Nymphs.
Kassandra peninsula is the western-most of the three headlands of Halkidiki. In classical times it was known as Pallene and is said to have been known in ancient times as Phlegra.
The peninsula takes its name from Cassandra, said to have been a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy; her older brother was Hector, hero of the Greco-Trojan war.
In Late Antiquity, the centre of the peninsula was the city of Cassandreia, at the site of ancient Potidaia. A city and a bishopric at Cassandreia was destroyed by the Huns in 539 or 540 AD.
Kassandra was one of the areas that rebelled against the Ottoman Turks in 1821. Because it managed to stop the Turkish army from fighting the rebels in southern Greece, it was burnt from edge to edge. The refugees moved to the islands of Skiathos, Skopelos, Alonissos and Evoia. Noone lived in the peninsula for more than 30 years. But people started to returned once again, and in 1912 it became a part of Greece.
Tourism began to develop in the decades after World War II and the Greek Civil War, and developed rapidly, in 1980s, becoming the primary part of the economy of the peninsula.
A major forest fire on 22 August 2006 that affected the central and the southern parts of the peninsula. There was a heatwave that day, when temperatures soared to almost 40 C. Several houses were destroyed including villas and hotels, and one campground disappeared, along with many areas of natural beauty.
The forest fire lasted for almost five days and devastated the economy and the peninsula. But the forests began to recover in recent years and oday, the beaches of Halkidiki are among the most beautiful in Greece – 46 have Blue Flags, including the beaches of Afytos and Kallithea.
I was planning to return to Ireland on a flight from Thessaloniki to Dublin at the end of next week, on Friday 4 September. Instead, I am going to spend much of this week and next week on a road trip through many parts of Munster and south Leinster, including some of my favourite places in Ireland and places that have played key roles in my life story.
But more of that later today as I set out on the first stage of this road trip.
I was looking forward to two weeks at the Country Inn Hotel in Kalithea on the Kassandra peninsula in Halkidi
‘Visiting various projects in Athens has helped inform my own work’ … the Revd Kirrilee Reid (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
In recent days, the British media – particularly the ‘red-top’ tabloids and popular news channels – appear to be devoting undue attention to people crossing the channel between France and England, seeking refuge and asylum.
It is not illegal to cross the Channel, as many British tourists must realise today as they seek to return hastily from France this weekend to avoid self-isolation for 14 days.
Nor is it illegal to seek refuge or asylum – it is a right guaranteed in international law , and a right that does not have to be claimed in the first country a migrant arrives in, despite the language used in many media reports.
These reports are timely. They distract from the British Government’s abysmal handling of the crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic, and at that the same time they whip up populist demands for Britain to take a harder line in the ‘Brexit’ negotiations, which are going nowhere apart from descending into a vortex, and the consequent economic depression that is a consequence of both scenarios.
There was a glimpse into the level of incompetence among British politicians this week when the British Immigration Minister, Chris Philp, in a live press conference in France, said ‘France and Germany’ were working together in the spirit of co-operation. He quickly corrected that to say, ‘France and the United Kingdom,’ and then asked at the live press conference to ‘record that bit again.’
One commentator has compared the distraction created by hysterical reports on boats and people in the English Channel to bear-baiting – a distraction in which innocent victims allow cruelty to be played out without attending to the real wrongs in society.
The atmosphere being created deliberately is so horrific that racist postings on social media are becoming widespread throughout Britain, and have moved beyond low-level racism to something that is disgusting yet tolerated.
I am a member of Facebook group in one English town where one poster constantly posts images of people in boats in the English Channel, with captions he claims are merely joking. Anyone who criticises him and those who support him is subjected to low-level bullying, being dismissed as humourless ‘snowflakes,’ and even become the targets for outright, vulgar abuse. I am related to one of the oldest families in that town (not Lichfield, I hasten to add, in case anyone is mislead), and if I am treated like that I can only begin to imagine how unwelcome some of the newest families in that town have felt this week.
We just have to step back a few decades and imagine how we would have responded to similar postings if Facebook existed in the 1930s and 1940s, and the butt of sick humour was people packed into trains, with comments about gas chambers.
I have an imaginative sense of humour, and I hope I am not so precious about myself that anyone might think I am a snowflake. But racism is ugly.
Indeed, the language being used in the right-wing media today about distressed people caught in the Channel is very similar to the language used in the mid-1930s by the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, about German Jews seeking asylum in Britain while the press barons supported the Hitler and the Nazis.
I have been told that ‘racism is in the eye of the beholder.’ But that is to blame the person who speaks out against racism for its existence in the first place. No, racism is created by the perpetrator, not by those who object to it.
As the writer Sophie Williams points out in the Guardian Weekend today, when someone says something like ‘I’m not being racist, but …’ the answer simply is ‘Yes. You are. Stop it.’
To argue with any proposition is to begin with the potential concession that your opposite number may have some germ of truth in what they have to say, and to accept that as you both listen and debate you may have to modify, if not change, your views.
The word ‘snowflake’ is a pejorative term coined by the so-called alt-right to dismiss people they seek to marginalise and that they categorise as being on the far-left. But racism is and should be opposed by all decent people, from left to right, irrespective of political views or loyalties. To categorise people who speak out against racism as humourless, left-wing ‘snowflakes’ seeks not only to blur the difference between humour and abuse, but to shift the centre ground of politics, so that the extreme right claim the ground of once-acceptable decent Tories, which is already happening in the Conservative Party under Dominic Cummings, and everyone else is portrayed as being further left than they are. Listen to the language Trump uses today about ordinary, centre-ground Democrats.
There is no arguing about racism or with racists. Racism is wrong. It is ugly. There is nothing to concede. Full Stop. Otherwise we are on the road to Auschwitz and Dachau.
And so, earlier today, as I was putting the finishing touches to intercessions for use in the churches in Askeaton and Tarbert tomorrow morning, I was please to read next week’s intercessions in Pray With the World Church, the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).
The prayers for 16 to 22 August take the theme ‘From Calais to Athens: Refugee and Migration Initiatives.’ This theme is introduced by the Revd Kirrilee Reid, Chaplain and Refugee Projects Officer in northern France.
She writes:
‘In February I travelled to Athens to share in the refugee ministry of the Anglican Church in Greece.
‘The refugee context in Greece is similar in many ways to that of Calais. Generally, refugees have been travelling for some time, often crossing the Aegean to one of the islands and eventually arriving on the mainland. Indeed, many have been in the camps for years. But Calais, unlike Athens, is very much a transitory place.
‘I was hosted by the Chaplaincy in Athens and we were able to spend some quality time together sharing our experiences, discussing local responses and supporting each other in our respective ministries.
‘I was nourished by my time spent building new connections. Visiting various projects in Athens has helped inform my own work. One conversation that we shared in over the week was about how easy it is to become so immersed in the needs in front of us that we forget to speak out and challenge governments to change the way they operate. The current situation with refugees and migrants is untenable and unsustainable. There is a need for creative global solutions.’
The prayers for this coming week pray:
Sunday 16 August: (10th Sunday after Trinity)
Lord God of wilderness, wave and wind,
you travel with wanderers of the world.
Stay close, we pray to all who live with loss,
in terror and adrift,
and spur us on to build a world where
there is truly room for all. Amen.
Monday 17 August:
Let us give thanks for the Anglican Church in Greece and pray for its ministry to refugees in Athens.
Tuesday 18 August:
Let us pray for the chaplaincies across Europe who are reaching out to refugees and migrants trying to make new homes for themselves and their families.
Wednesday 19 August:
Let us pray for more creative global solutions to be found to address the challenges refugees face.
Thursday 20 August:
Let us pray that refugee camps all over the world will have access to medical care to deal with the threat posed by Covid-19.
Friday 21 August (International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism):
Let us pray for peace and comfort for everyone who has been affected by acts of terrorism.
Saturday 22 (International Day Commemorating the Victims of Violence Based on Religion or Belief):
Let us pray for an end to all forms of religious persecution and sectarianism.
‘Let us give thanks for the Anglican Church in Greece and pray for its ministry to refugees in Athens’ … the USPG Prayer Diary … Saint Paul's Anglican Church, Athens (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The monument to Kostas Georgakis in the centre of Corfu … his death 50 years ago inspired protests throughout Greece against the colonels (Photograph: Patrick Comerford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
Later this summer, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Kostas Georgakis (1948-1970) should not be forgotten. This Greek student set himself ablaze early on 19 September 1970 in a square in Genoa as a protest against the colonels’ junta in Greece, and he eventually inspired protests across Greece that led to the fall of the regime.
Kostas Georgakis (Κώστας Γεωργάκης) was born on 23 August 1948 and grew up in Corfu in a family of five. His father was a self-employed tailor and both his father and grandfather had fought for Greece in World War I and II.
He was a bright schoolboy at the Second Lyceum in Corfu, and in August 1967, a few months after the colonels’ coup on 21 April, he went to Italy to study engineering and geology in Genoa. He year later, he joined the Center Union Party of Georgios Papandreou.
In an anonymous interview with a magazine in Genoa on 26 July 1970, Georgakis revealed how the junta’s intelligence had infiltrated the Greek student movement in Italy. He traced how the junta intelligence had set up the National League of Greek students in Italy, infiltrating Greek student groups in major universities.
But the Greek secret service got a recording of the interview and were able to identify Georgakis. Soon after, he was attacked by members of the junta student movement.
He was still a third year student when the junta revoked his student exemption from conscription and bullied his family into stopping his monthly allowance. It was retaliation by the junta for his growing profile in resistance to the colonels and in the Italian branch of PAK, the Panhellenic Liberation Movement set up in exile by Andreas Papandreou in 1968.
Fearing for his family in Greece, Georgakis decided to make an act to raise awareness in the West about the political crisis in Greece. He filled a canister with petrol, wrote a letter to his father and said farewell to his fiancée Rosanna.
Around 1 a.m., early in the morning of 19 September 1970, Georgakis drove his Fiat 500 to Matteotti Square. According to street cleaners working that night near the Palazzo Ducale, there was a sudden bright flash of light in the area at around 3 a.m. At first, they did not realise that this was a burning man. As they got closer saw Georgakis burning and hear him shouting: ‘Long Live Greece,’ ‘Down with the tyrants,’ ‘Down with the fascist colonels,’ ‘I did it for my Greece.’
The street cleaners said Georgakis refused their help and ran away when they tried to put out the flames. They could smell his burning flesh and said it was something they would never forget, but that Georgakis was one in a million.
Georgakis died nine hours later, at around noon. His last words were: ‘Long Live Free Greece.’
In his final letter to his father, he wrote:
‘Forgive me for this act, without crying. Your son is not a hero. He is a human, like all the others, maybe a little more fearful. Kiss our land for me. After three years of violence I cannot suffer any longer. I don’t want you to put yourselves in any danger because of my own actions. But I cannot do otherwise but think and act as a free individual. I write to you in Italian so that I can raise the interest of everyone for our problem. Long Live Democracy. Down with the tyrants. Our land which gave birth to Freedom will annihilate tyranny! If you are able to, forgive me.’
In a letter to a friend, he wrote: ‘I am sure that sooner or later the people of Europe will understand that a fascist regime like the one based on Greek tanks is not only an insult to their dignity as free men but also a constant threat to Europe ... I do not want my action to be considered heroic as it is nothing more than a situation of no choice. On the other hand, maybe some people will awaken to see what times we live in.’
His father arrived to find his body was completely carbonised from the waist down, up to a depth of at least 3 cm in his flesh.
His death caused a sensation in Greece as the first clear expression of the depth of resistance to the junta. The junta and its Foreign Ministry feared his death would be compared to the death of Jan Palach in Prague the previous year, and they were worried about the impact on Greek tourism.
At Georgakis’s funeral on 22 September 1970, Melina Merkouri held a bouquet of flowers as she led an estimated 1,500 or more people with flags and banners accompanying his body from the hospital to the grave.
Stathis Panagoulis – a brother of the poet Alexandros Panagoulis who attempted to assassinate the dictator Georgios Papadopoulos – did not turn up to give an expected funeral address.
The speakers at a press conference after his funeral included Ioannis Leloudas, living in exile in Paris, and Professor Christos Stremmenos, a future Greek ambassador to Rome, who read a message from Andreas Papandreou.
The junta delayed the return of his body to Corfu for four months, citing security reasons, fearing demonstrations and inventing bureaucratic obstacles. Eventually, the junta secretly sent a ship to Italy to take his body back to Corfu. On 13 January 1971, his body was transferred to the Astypalaia, owned by the Greek shipping magnate Nikolaos Vernikos-Eugenides. The ship left for Piraeus on 17 January.
His body was buried secretly in the Municipal Cemetery in Corfu the following day. A single police cruiser accompanied the Georgakis family, who were taken by taxi to the cemetery.
In 1972, Greece tried to block the worldwide distribution rights of Gianni Serra’s planned Italian film about his life, worried it would be show by the BBC and on German, Scandinavian and US television. The junta feared the film would inspire anti-junta protests, like those inspired by the 1969 film Z by Costa-Gavras.
A plaque in Matteotti Square, where he died in Genoa, bears an inscription in Italian: La Grecia Libera lo ricorderà per sempre, ‘Free Greece will remember him forever.’ It quotes his words: ‘I cannot but think and act as a free individual.’
The City of Corfu has dedicated a memorial in his honour near his home. The monument was created gratis by the sculptor Dimitris Korres.
The inscription in Greek on the plaque reads: ‘Kostas Georgakis, Student, Kerkyra 1948-1970 Genova. He self-immolated in Genoa, Italy on 19 September 1970 for Freedom and Democracy in Greece.’
The lower part bears his words: ‘I cannot but think and act as a free individual.’
The story of Georgakis remains unique in Greece, and his death is seen by many as an act of self-sacrifice in a spirit of dynamic protest. He is the only opponent of the junta to have decided to die by suicide in protest against the regime, and is one of the most important acts of resistance acts of the time.
He inspired many student protests that followed, including the Athens Polytechnic uprising in November 1973 that eventually paved the way for toppling the regime.
‘I cannot but think and act as a free individual’ … the inscription on the monument to Kostas Georgakis in the centre of Corfu (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The great church of Aghia Sophia became a mosque when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and became Istanbul (Photograph: Conference of European Churches)
Patrick Comerford
There has been a strong reaction throughout Greece and throughout the Orthodox world to a decree by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey yesterday (11 July 2020), ordering the conversion of Aghia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque after a court annulled a 1934 presidential decree that made it a museum.
Shortly after a Turkish court issued a long-anticipated decision, Erdogan issued a presidential decree transferring the management of the cathedral from the Ministry of Culture to the Presidency of Religious Affairs, paving the way for its conversion. Erdogan has been a major proponent of the move.
In a televised speech yesterday (10 July 2020), Erdogan said Aghia Sophia will open for Friday prayers later this month (24 July).
The Director-General of Unesco last night expressed deep regrets at the decision, saying it was made without prior discussion.
Aghia Sophia is part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul, a property inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Audrey Azoulay of Unesco said ‘Aghia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece and a unique testimony to interactions between Europe and Asia over the centuries. Its status as a museum reflects the universal nature of its heritage, and makes it a powerful symbol for dialogue.’
She said this decision raises the issue of the impact of this change of status on the property’s universal value. States have an obligation to ensure that modifications do not affect the Outstanding Universal Value of inscribed sites on their territories. UNESCO must be given prior notice of any such modifications, which, if necessary, are then examined by the World Heritage Committee.
The last Divine Liturgy was served in Aghia Sophía (Άγια Σοφία) in Constantinople on Tuesday 29 May 1453. But it was disrupted by the Ottoman slaughter of all who were present in the Great Church that day.
Aghia Sophia was the cathedral of Constantinople until it was captured and desecrated by the Ottomans in 1453 and turned into a mosque. But it became a museum in 1935, and since then, all worship – Christian or Muslim – has been prohibited there.
There are many Greek legends about the Fall of Constantinople. It was said there was a total lunar eclipse on 22 May 1453, and that it was seen as a harbinger of the fall of the city. Four days later, the whole city was covered in a thick fog, which is unusual at this time of the year in the Eastern Mediterranean. When the fog lifted that evening, a strange light was seen above the dome of Aghia Sophia, and from the city walls lights were seen far out to the West, behind the camp of the besieging Turks.
Some people who saw it interpreted the light around the dome as a sign of the Holy Spirit departing from Aghia Sophia.
According to tradition, the Divine Liturgy in Aghia Sophia on Tuesday 29 May 1453 was being served by two priests, one Orthodox and one Roman Catholic, as Constantinople fell to the besieging Muslim forces. When the Ottoman invaders approached the altar, the south wall of the church is said to have opened at the touch of an angel and at his direction the priests miraculously passed through the wall, with the Holy Gifts in their hands. The door that had appeared in the solid wall closed behind the priests and reportedly will not appear again, nor will it opened again, until the interrupted Divine Liturgy can be resumed. It is said that when that day comes, the priests will re-enter through the same doorway through which they disappeared.
A similar legend says that when the Ottomans entered the city, an angel rescued the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, turned him into marble and placed him in a cave under the earth near the Golden Gate. There he awaits being brought to life again.
Inside Aghia Sophia … the Liturgy of Saint John John Chrysostom became the liturgical norm in the Church of Aghia Sophia in Constantinople
The fall of Constantinople and the legends that have grown up about it provide many of the images in the anonymous Greek poem translated by Constantine A Trypakis in The Penguin Book of Greek Verse as ‘The Last Mass in Santa Sophia’:
Σημαίνει ὁ Θιόϛ, σημαίνει ἡ γῆ, σημαίνουν τὰ ἐπουράνια,
σημαίνει κ’ ἡ Ἁγιὰ Σοφιά, τὸ μέγα μοναστήρι,
μὲ τετρακόσια σήμαντρα κ’ ἑξηνταδυὸ καμπάνεϛ,
κάθε καμπάνα καὶ παπάϛ, κάθε παπὰϛ καὶ διάκοϛ.
Ἡ Δέσποινα ταράχτηκε καὶ δάκρυσαν οἱ εἰκόνεϛ.
<<Σώπασε κυρὰ Δέσποινα καὶ μὴ πολυδακρύζειϛ,
πάλι μὲ χρόνια μὲ καιρούϛ, πάλι δικά σαϛ εἶναι.>>
God rings the bells, the earth rings the bells, the sky rings the bells,
and Santa Sophia, the great church, rings the bells:
four hundred sounding-boards and sixty-two bells,
a priest for each bell and a deacon for each priest.
To the left the Emperor was chanting, to the right the Patriarch,
and from the volume of the chant, the pillars were shaking.
As they were about to sing the hymn of the Cherubim,
and the Emperor was about to appear,
A voice came to them from heaven, from the mouth of the Archangel:
‘Stop the Cherubic hymn, and let the holy elements bow in mourning.
The priests must take the sacred vessels away,
and you candles must be extinguished,
for it is the will of God that the City fall to the Turks.
‘But send a message to the West, asking for three ships to come,
one to take the Cross away, another the Holy Bible,
the third, the best of the three, our Holy Altar,
lest the dogs seize it from us and defile it.’
The Virgin was distressed, and the holy icons wept.
‘Hush, Lady, do not weep so profusely;
‘After years and after centuries they will be yours again.’
The beautiful interior of the Church of Aghia Sophia in Thessaloniki ... its design is a replica of the great Aghia Sopha in Byzantium (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The poem achieved great popularity during the Greek War of Independence and may have been the most popular demotic song among Greek-speakers in the 19th and early 20th century.
The song became the anthem of the so-called Megali Idea (Μεγάλη Ιδέα), and its emotional themes were echoed in influential literary circles. Nikos Kazantzakis made it the climax of his play Constantine Palaeologus, which he wrote in 1944 while Greece was under Nazi occupation.
The play concludes with the two last lines from another version of the poem:
Σώπασε, κυρα Δέσποινα, μὴν κλαῖς καὶ μὴ δακρύζεις·
πάλι μὲ χρόνους, μὲ καιρούς, πάλι δικιὰ μας θά ’ναι!
The references in the poem to the numbers of tocsins, bells, high priests, priests, and deacons do not reflect historic reality. On the other hand, the Greek in this poem, interestingly, has just one word to express the phrase ‘fall to the Turks’ – τουρκέψῃ (turkepsi!). It says a lot about daily life in the last days of the Byzantine Empire: ‘Yet another turkepsimoment!’
And there are echoes here of how the protesters in Istanbul in 2013 embraced a jibe from the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. When the demonstrators first took to the streets, he branded them çapulcu, or looters – the insult also means marauders or bums.
But Erdoğan’s jibe backfired. Protesters in Istanbul and other Turkish cities embraced the word as their own. They labelled themselves proud çapulcu and even coined an English verb, capuling (pronounced chapulling, with the emphasis on the second syllable). Students sleeping under the plane trees in Gezi Park named their makeshift camp Capulistan, with signs proclaiming: ‘Capul residence.’
Erdoğan’s jibe gave a new word to the Turkish and English languages
It is commonly believed that the last Divine Liturgy in Aghia Sophia in Constantinople was served on 28 May 1453. However, a report in a newspaper in Iraklion in Crete on 3 June 1998 claimed the last Divine Liturgy in Aghia Sophia actually took place on 19 January 1919, and was celebrated by Father Lefteris Noufrakis (1872-1941), a priest from Alones in Rethymnon, Crete.
He was a military chaplain in the second Greek army division that later took part in the Asia Minor campaign and in allied expeditionary force in Ukraine in 1919. On its way to Ukraine, his division briefly stopped in Constantinople, which was occupied by the allies after the end of World War I.
The ship carrying the division anchored in the open sea, Father Lefteris and a small group of officers boarded a small boat and a Greek-speaker took them to the City and led them along the shortest path to Aghia Sophia. The door was open and all entered with reverence and made the sign of the cross.
Father Lefteris quickly identified the location of the Sanctuary and the Holy Altar. Finding a small table, he put it in place, he opened his bag, and took out everything needed for the Divine Liturgy. Then he put on his stole and began: ‘Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and forever, and unto the ages of ages.’
‘Amen,’ responded Major Liaromatis, and the Divine Liturgy at Aghia Sophia began.
The Divine Liturgy proceeded as normal, and after 466 years was celebrated in Aghia Sophia once again according to the rubrics of the Orthodox Church.
As Aghia Sophia began to fill with Turks, Father. Father Lefteris was not daunted and continued. The Gospel was followed by the Cherubic Hymn by Major Liaromatis, while Father Lefteris placed the antimension on the table for the Proskomidi.
As he Liturgy reached its most sacred point, with an emotional voice Father Lefteris said: ‘Your own of Your own, we offer to You, for all and through all.’
At the end, the Greeks knew they were in danger, left, and headed for the waterfront, where a boat was waiting to take them safely to the Greek warship.
Later, the allies protested strongly to the Greek Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who was forced to reprimand Father Lefteris Noufrakis. But secretly he contacted him and ‘praised and congratulated the patriot priest, who even for a short time brought Aghia Sophia to life, the most sacred dream of our Nation.’
Onchan Head in the 1960s … my first experience of staying in an hotel and ‘island hopping’ (Photograph: Wikipedia / Dr Neil Clifton)
Patrick Comerford
I am still wondering whether I am going to get to Greece later this year. Any possible government announcement about an ‘air bridge’ has been postponed once again.
Ryanair keeps advertising that it is flying to Thessaloniki. Although I booked this journey late last year, all does not seem secure. Even if an ‘air bridge’ is agreed between Ireland and Greece, am I going to feel reassured enough to go ahead with a planned holiday in Halkidiki in late August and early September?
I mused, until a few days ago, that the ‘R’ factor in Greece is lower than it is in Ireland, and that perhaps I would feel as safe there – if not safer – than in Ireland.
But the arrival of people like Stanley Johnson, and his casual, Trump-like – well, Johnson-like – response to questions, makes me wonder what if … what if, later this summer, the beaches of Greece become like the beaches at Bournemouth and Southend?
Of course, the expectation of the journey has its own pleasure that does not actually depend on arriving at the destination. As the Greek poet CP Cavafy says in his poem Ithaka:
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
But, as I thought about these prospects in recent days, I realised that it was 55 years ago – probably this month, although I am unsure – that I first ever went ‘island hopping’ or stayed in an hotel.
It was 1965, July or August, and I was a 13-year-old who had just realised the fun and joy of being a teenager by the sea.
My father normally took a house in the summer months on the east coast, within commuting distance of Dublin and close to a golf course, so that he could commute to work in the day, and spend the evening playing golf, leaving us to our own devices and creative imaginations throughout those long, balmy days. I still remember episodes in Bettystown, Kilcoole and Termonfeckin that I am sure my parents were never aware of.
But, for some reason, there was a change of locations 55 years ago, and we all caught the ferry to the Isle of Man and spent that family holiday in an hotel in Onchan, overlooking Douglas Bay.
I cannot remember the name of the hotel, but I can remember it was at the end of a terrace of Victorian buildings, above the rocks of Onchan, and I can remember some of the hotel’s guests or residents. There was a veteran from the Battle of El-Alamein, fought in 1942 who entertained me with stories of Monty’s Eighth Army and how they defeated Rommel’s Desert Rats. It was only 23 years earlier, so he may have been only in his early 40s, perhaps even in his late 30s. But, as my father played golf and my mother played bridge, he brought many of my comic-book stories to life.
There was a couple who were convinced that two jobs were safe in life: the binman’s and the milkman’s. Who could invent a machine that would walk up the garden path, take the empties and replace them, or bring the bin down to the waiting cart. I can’t imagine they were recommending a career path for a young teenager; nor could they predict the future … although I only know that with the benefit of hindsight.
Keith was a boy of my age from Haywards Heath. I think his father was a vicar or a lay reader, and he took me to Saint Catherine’s, the Anglican parish church, with its beautiful rood screen and Celtic crosses – this is where Captain William Bligh married Elizabeth Betham.
Keith and I kept in touch with each other for a long time … well, at least until the following Christmas.
I took a delight that only teenage boys appreciate in the local names, such as Windy Corner, Molly Quirk’s Glen, and The Butt, I visited the TT course and saw some of the practice runs, I almost frightened myself when, after pretending I was older, I tried mini-kart at the Onchan Pleasure Park, where I also went boating, I searched for tail-less Manx cats and tried to send others in search of three-legged Manx residents.
I made my own way by bus to other towns on the island, including Castletown, Peel, Port Erin, Laxey and Ramsey, and Tynwald, and spent hours on the promenade and the beach at Douglas. On a more serious note, I was introduced to the horrors of the Holocaust at Madame Tussaud’s in Douglas.
Mutiny on the Bounty had been a hit film three years earlier (1962) and Lord of the Flies (1963) was still showing that summer.
It was the year of the Selma and Montgomery marches, the year TS Eliot died, the year Liverpool beat Leeds 1-0 in the FA cup final. The Rolling Stones could get no Satisfaction, Bob Dylan went electric and had a hit with ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ Elvis Presley was crying in the chapel, the Beatles played at Shea Stadium, Petula Clarke was downtown, the Beach Boys wanted help from Rhonda, Kathy Kirby and Butch Moore sang in Eurovision in Naples, and the Seekers knew they would never find another you.
Ted Heath became the Tory leader, George Papandreou was sacked in move that would later turn into the colonels’ coup, Sean Lemass had led on, draft cards were being burnt across America, Vatican 2 was coming to an end, WB Yeats was reburied, and Kenneth Tynan, briefly director of Garrick Theatre in Lichfield, used the ‘F’ word on British television.
Lady Penelope and Thunderbirds were about to go, and I was still reading the Eagle, Look and Learn and Lion. But I was maturing in a way I did not yet understand. If my accent was a little too English for a teenager in Ireland, I was sent to Ballinskelligs in the Kerry Gaeltacht the following year. That was the ‘Summer of Love’ and there I would read Anne Frank’s Diaries and Catcher in the Rye, have my first smoke, and face the challenge to go ‘skinny dipping.’ From there I was sent on to boarding school in Gormanston.
My world was changing, and the Isle of Man – with its hotel whose name I have forgotten, and the temptations of ‘island hopping’ – was playing a part in those changes.
A horse-drawn tram on the seafront in Douglas (Photograph: Tripadvisor)
The Basilica di San Nicola in Bari … said to hold the relics of Saint Nicholas or ‘Santa Claus’ (Photograph: Wikipedia)
Patrick Comerford
Another planned city break has been lost this week due to the lockdown introduced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ryanair is advertising that Italy is ‘open’ from 1 July, but I was supposed to fly to Bari this afternoon [15 June 2020], with plans to stay in Bari for a few days this week and to travel throughout Puglia.
I had bought and read the guide books, and my plans included visiting the churches, spending time by the olive-green seas, enjoying the food of southern Italy, and visiting Lecce, the ‘Florence of the South,’ and some of the other beautiful towns of Puglia. I also planned to go in search of Jewish Bari too, and there were plans too to visit Alberobello and to stay overnight later this week one of the Puglian trulli or roundhouses.
Puglia is the ‘heel of the boot’ on the map of the Italian peninsula, and Bari, on the Adriatic sea, is the main city of the region. It is the second most important economic centre of mainland southern Italy after Naples, or the third after Palermo, if the Sicily is included.
This is a university city and the city of Saint Nicholas, and Bari was known to the Greeks as Βάριον and to the Latins as Barium. I was particularly interested in Bari because it was once part of Magna Graeca and the Greek-speaking world in classical times. It remained part of the Byzantine Empire until the Saracen invasions, and the church in Bari was a dependency of the Patriarch of Constantinople until the 10th century.
Greek people have been living in southern Italy for thousands of years, initially arriving in southern Italy in waves of migrations, from the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily in the 8th century BC to Byzantine Greek migrations in the 15th century.
The Griko people (Γκρίκο), also known as Grecanici, are ethnic Greeks in Apulia and Calabria. They are believed to be descended from the Greek communities of Magna Graecia, although some scholars prefer to argue that they are descended from Greeks who arrived during the Byzantine period, or even as late as the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans.
Although most Greek people in southern Italy became entirely Italianised over the centuries, the Griko community preserved its Greek identity, heritage, language and distinct culture. However, exposure to mass media has progressively eroded their culture and language in recent decades.
The two distinctive Greek dialects, known as Katoitaliotika (‘Southern Italian’) and Grecanika, are mutually intelligible to some extent with Standard Modern Greek. The Griko language is classified as severely endangered, as the number of speakers has declined in recent decades. Today it is spoken by about 20,000, mainly elderly people.
The Italian-American singer Tony Bennett is descended from a Griko family. His father John Bendetto emigrated from the Griko town of Podargoni to the US, and Tony Bennett was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in New York in 1926.
Before the East-West Schism, the Grikos were Catholics who adhered to the Byzantine Rite. Greeks from southern Italy in the Church included Pope John VII, Pope Zachary and Antipope John XVI. Today, most Griko people are Catholics.
Bari’s most famous saint, of course, is Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas of Myra, also known as Saint Nicholas of Bari. Early traditions say Saint Nicholas attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325, an legend says struck the heretic Arius across the face.
Saint Nicholas was first buried on the island of Gemile or ‘Saint Nicholas island,’ near present-day Fethiye. His body was later moved to Myra (present-day Demre), but when the city was captured by the Seljuk Turks in 1087, a group of merchants from Bari removed his body from the church and took it to Bari, where it is now enshrined in the Basilica di San Nicola.
With the cancellation of this week’s flights, I suppose I shall have to wait until Christmas before I see Saint Nicholas of Bari again.
Saint Nicholas Church on Gemile Island … was this is true burial place of Saint Nicholas of Bari? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Mauthausen on 5 May 1945
Patrick Comerford
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Mauthausen on 5 May 1945. The end of the Holocaust and of World War II 75 years ago has brought a number of anniversaries and commemorations this year, including the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau (27 January), Buchenwald (11 April), Bergen-Belsen (15 April), Sachsenhausen (22 April), Dachau (29 April), Ravensbrück (30 April), Mauthausen (5 May) and Theresienstadt (8 May).
For some years now, I have been distressed by images on television news and in every newspaper of the refugee crisis in Greece and other parts of southern Europe and the Mediterranean.
The images of frightened children clinging to each other or bewildered parents, and of vast numbers of people on railway tracks or being held back as razor wire is rolled out, or clambering onto overcrowded trains heading north from the Balkans to Austria or Germany all bring back haunting images of World War II and the concentration camps.
How does the world fail to see the irony that this continues on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II?
Who is listening to these children? Who hears their cries? Who sees the tears and the fear on their faces?
As I think of their plight, I have been listening once again to the words and the music of The Ballad of Mauthausen, a cantata written by Iakovos Kambanellis and Mikis Theodorakis 55 years ago in 1965, 20 years after the end of World War II.
The Greek playwright Iakovos Kambanellis, author of ‘Mauthausen’ … is regarded by many as the greatest Greek playwright of the 20th century
The Ballad of Mauthausen (Η Μπαλάντα του Μαουτχάουζεν) is based on the experiences of the Greek playwright Iakovos Kambanellis (Ιάκωβος Καμπανέλλης, 1922-2011), who wrote four poems that Mikis Theodorakis (Μίκης Θεοδωράκης) set to music.
Kambanellis was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, and novelist, best known as a screenwriter for films, including Stella (1955), directed by Michael Cacoyannis. It was first written the script as a play, Stella With the Red Gloves, based on Carmen, but was never produced on the Greek stage because of its sexual frankness. The film, shot in the streets of Athens, follows a singer (Melina Mercouri) who refuses to marry her lover and begins a passionate affair with a football player. The film made a star of Melina Mercouri and boosted Greek cinema’s international reputation.
Kambanellis was born on 2 December 1922 in Hora on the island of Naxos. He was forced to leave school at an early age and to find work after the family moved to Athens, but he continued his studies at an evening technical school. He was arrested in 1942 after attempting to flee Nazi-occupied Greece, and was sent to Mauthausen in Austria, where he spent the rest of World War II.
The ‘Stairs of Death’ in Mauthausen
Mauthausen-Gusen was about 20 km east of Linz in Upper Austria. Unlike Auschwitz, it was not an extermination camp, but countless people were murdered and died there in horrific circumstances. There the Nazis forced their victims to work in a stone quarry, hauling large pieces of rock and stone up the ‘Stairs of Death’ along steep and uneven ramps. The Jewish prisoners there included Simon Wiesenthal, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romanies and Spanish republicans. Between 240,000 and 320,000 people, including Jews, intellectuals, and people classified as political undesirables,’ were murdered in Mauthausen.
Kambanellis owed his survival in Mauthausen to the protection of a Philhellenic German prisoner who assigned him to the architectural drafting office, where additions to the camp were designed.
Mauthausen was the last of the concentration camps to be liberated in May 1945. Kambanellis was not a Jew, and he was free to return with the other Greek prisoners to Greece. But knowing there were Greek Jews who dreamed of reaching Palestine, he elected to stay on in the camp until the last Greek Jew left.
Interviewed later in life, he said: ‘I don’t want to make myself into a hero. What could I do? I saw the eyes of the sick, of the weak, of the abandoned; could I have said okay, fine, I’m leaving now? I was their friend.’ He admitted he was deeply envious of them ‘because we all went back to an old world and we were scared of it. We couldn’t, after those three years, go back to the world of the past, of before the war. And they went to a new, virgin, country and started a new world in Palestine.’
On his return to Greece, Kambanellis began writing a newspaper column in Athens before turning to the theatre and film.
A recurring feature of his work is the use of multiple, often unexpected voices. He attributed this to the years he spent in Mauthausen, listening to the voices of nameless sufferers. His success as a writer seemed miraculous to him and perhaps contributed to his unique blend of realism and mysticism.
His most successful play, Our Grand Circus, was staged in 1973 at the height of the colonels’ dictatorship. Weaving history, myth, and the traditional shadow puppet theatre with folk motifs, the play ridicules the heroic view of Greek history favoured by the colonels, rewriting Greek history from a left-wing perspective.
By calling the performances a circus and transforming his bleak view of the regime and of Greek history into a series of amusing vignettes, he escaped the strict censorship of the time. Our Grand Circus broke all box-office records and made Kambanellis a popular symbol of resistance.
He wrote the scripts for about a dozen films and directed two of them. He died in Athens on 29 March 2011. He is regarded by many as the greatest Greek playwright of the 20th century.
Mauthausen, his only novel, is a memoir recalling his experiences in the concentration camp. It was first published 55 years ago in Athens in 1965 and has been translated into English and German. At the same time, he wrote the Mauthausen Cantata with a setting by his close friend Mikis Theodorakis, when his publisher suggested that they publish their works together.
The book and the music were born in an incendiary political and cultural milieu in Greece. Two days after its first performance, all music by Theodorakis was banned from Greek state radio. Within two years, the military had seized power and the colonels silenced Theodorakis and many other voices for seven long years.
Kambanellis was inspired by a photograph of an unknown girl which he found in the camp and which he kept with him.
The memoir begins in the camp and the neighbouring villages in the weeks immediately after their liberation. The horrors the inmates have seen and have suffered are recalled by the author and the woman he falls in love with, a Lithuanian Jew, in merciless detail as the lovers exorcise their demons by revisiting the sites of the atrocities they witnessed. When the inmates are gradually repatriated, many of the Jews wait to find a way to get to Palestine.
The best-known song of all, performed by Maria Farantouri, is the first song, Άσμα Ασμάτων (Asma Asmaton, ‘Song of Songs’), which opens with the words:
Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου
με το καθημερνό της φόρεμα
κι ένα χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.
‘My love, how beautiful she is in her everyday dress.’
This first song recalls the poignant questioning of a man who describes how beautiful his beloved is and asks the other inmates if they have seen her. They tell him they have seen her on a long march, standing on a large square with a number on her arm and a yellow star on her heart. Maria Farantouri hauntingly sings the repeated line: ‘No-one knows how beautiful my beloved was.’
This song maintains the poetic structure of the Biblical Song of Songs, until the chilling line, coming as if in response to ‘have you seen him whom my soul loves,’ echoes with the question: ‘Young girls of Mauthausen, Young girls of Belsen, Have you seen my love?’ and the answer ‘We saw her in the frozen square, A number in her white hand And a yellow star on her heart.’
The second song, O Αντώνης (O Antonis, ‘Adonis’) is also known from the score of the film Z. This song tells the story of a Jew who collapses on the ‘Stairs of Death’ at the base of the quarry and is shot by the guard who then orders the Greek prisoner Antonis to lift a double burden or he too will be shot.
Antonis lifts this second rock and defiantly walks on with it. In this song we also hear the stairs being depicted in the introduction to every couplet.
The third song, Ο Δραπέτης (O Drapetis, The Fugitive), is the story of a prisoner who escapes the camp but cannot find refuge in the hostile surroundings. He is captured again and is shot.
The introduction to this song depicts the landscape of Austria with a Mozart-like melody.
In the last song, Όταν τελειώσει Ο Πόλεμος (Otan Teliossi O Polemos, When the War Ends), the poet addresses one of the girls he sees standing by the fence of the female camp and asks whether they can come together when the war is finally over, kiss at the gate, make love in the quarry and in the gas chamber until the shadow of death is driven away.
The song ends with an epilogue, returning to the first song and ending with the plaintive words that no-one knows how beautiful my beloved was.
The instrumentation includes bouzoukis, spinet, electric guitar, baglamas, flute, bass and percussion, all helping to create a desolate yet beautiful atmosphere.
Greek popular music in the 1960s became known all over the world thanks to the scores by two composers in particular, Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis for two popular movies, Never on Sunday (Ποτέ την Κυριακή) and Zorba the Greek. Both worked in the laika tradition of Greek popular music influenced by European melodic form. Each had his own muse or angel in a female singer who interpreted his music – for Hadjidakis she was Nana Mouskouri, for Theodorakis she was Maria Farandouri.
The recording of The Ballad of Mauthausen marked the beginning of one of the most fruitful collaborations in Greek music. Mikis Theodorakis discovered the singer Maria Farandouri when she was a 16-year-old young singer. He is said to have told her at the time, ‘You will be my high priestess.’ Her unique dramatic voice and style complements his music, and it is so productive a partnership that it has lasted for half a century.
Listening to The Ballad of Mauthausen, it is difficult to grasp that this is the voice of a teenager who has just left school, for she sings with a raw force and energy that reaches into the heart and soul with intensity.
Farandouri and Theodorakis had a life-long musical collaboration, intensified by their shared political activism. This album is both a classic and the high point of that collaboration.
Farandouri’s voice is a marvel of depth and beauty, and the songs are among the best by Theodorakis. The power and majesty of his music combined and the soaring beauty of her voice make The Ballad of Mauthausen a profound testament to the power of human resistance to tyranny and oppression.
The most accessible recording by Maria Farantouri (Μαρία Φαραντούρη) is complemented by a cycle of six songs for Farantouri, named ‘Farantouri’s Cycle’:
5, Κουράστηκα να σε κρατώ (Kourastika na se Krato, ‘I Am Tired of Holding Your Hand’).
6, Ο ίσκιος έπεσε βαρύς (O Iskios Epesse Varis, ‘The Shadow is so heavy’).
7, Πήρα τους δρόμους τ' ουρανού (Tous Thromous T’Ouranou, ‘I Took to the Streets of Heaven’).
8, Στου κόσμου την ανηφοριά (Stou Kosmou Tin Aniforya, ‘The Uphill Road’).
9, Το Εκκρεμές (To Ekremes, ‘The Pendulum’).
10, Τ' όνειρο καπνός (Tóniro Kapnos, ‘Dreams Go up in Smoke’).
The Ballad of Mauthausen is a difficult poem to read and a difficult cantata to listen to, and yet it is compelling.
It is difficult to realise how a poet could be inspired to write about love in the all-encompassing atmosphere of evil and death in a concentration camp.
Yet this is the dream of love, and love is the way a great soul not only survives such terror, but finds meaning and triumphs over it.
A sketch by Simon Wiesenthal in Mauthausen for ‘Café As’ … part of an exhibition in the Jewish Museum, Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)
Άσμα Ασμάτων
Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου
με το καθημερνό της φόρεμα
κι ένα χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.
Κοπέλες του Άουσβιτς,
του Νταχάου κοπέλες,
μην είδατε την αγάπη μου;
Την είδαμε σε μακρινό ταξίδι,
δεν είχε πια το φόρεμά της
ούτε χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου,
η χαϊδεμένη από τη μάνα της
και τ’ αδελφού της τα φιλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.
Κοπέλες του Μαουτχάουζεν,
κοπέλες του Μπέλσεν,
μην είδατε την αγάπη μου;
Την είδαμε στην παγερή πλατεία
μ’ ένα αριθμό στο άσπρο της το χέρι,
με κίτρινο άστρο στην καρδιά.
Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου,
η χαϊδεμένη από τη μάνα της
και τ’ αδελφού της τα φιλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.
Ο Αντώνης
Εκεί στη σκάλα την πλατιά
στη σκάλα των δακρύων
στο Βίνερ Γκράμπεν το βαθύ
το λατομείο των θρήνων
Εβραίοι κι αντάρτες περπατούν
Εβραίοι κι αντάρτες πέφτουν,
βράχο στη ράχη κουβαλούν
βράχο σταυρό θανάτου.
Εκεί ο Αντώνης τη φωνή
φωνή, φωνή ακούει
ω καμαράντ, ω καμαράντ
βόηθα ν’ ανέβω τη σκάλα.
Μα κει στη σκάλα την πλατιά
και των δακρύων τη σκάλα
τέτοια βοήθεια είναι βρισιά
τέτοια σπλαχνιά είν’ κατάρα.
Ο Εβραίος πέφτει στο σκαλί
και κοκκινίζει η σκάλα
κι εσύ λεβέντη μου έλα εδω
βράχο διπλό κουβάλα.
Παίρνω διπλό, παίρνω τριπλό
μένα με λένε Αντώνη
κι αν είσαι άντρας, έλα εδώ
στο μαρμαρένιο αλώνι.
Ο Δραπέτης
Ο Γιάννος Μπερ απ’ το βοριά
το σύρμα δεν αντέχει.
Κάνει καρδιά, κάνει φτερά,
μες στα χωριά του κάμπου τρέχει.
«Δώσε, κυρά, λίγο ψωμί
και ρούχα για ν’ αλλάξω.
Δρόμο να κάνω έχω μακρύ,
πάν’ από λίμνες να πετάξω.»
Όπου διαβεί κι όπου σταθεί
φόβος και τρόμος πέφτει.
Και μια φωνή, φριχτή φωνή
«κρυφτείτε απ’ τον δραπέτη.»
«Φονιάς δεν είμαι, χριστιανοί,
θεριό για να σας φάω.
Έφυγα από τη φυλακή
στο σπίτι μου να πάω.»
Α, τι θανάσιμη ερημιά
στου Μπέρτολτ Μπρεχτ τη χώρα.
Δίνουν το Γιάννο στους Ες Ες,
για σκότωμα τον πάνε τώρα.
Όταν τελειώσει Ο Πόλεμος
Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.
Χαρά του κόσμου, έλα στην πύλη
να φιληθούμε μες στο δρόμο
ν’ αγκαλιαστούμε στην πλατεία.
Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.
Στο λατομείο ν’ αγαπηθούμε
στις κάμαρες των αερίων
στη σκάλα, στα πολυβολεία.
Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.
Έρωτα μες στο μεσημέρι
σ’ όλα τα μέρη του θανάτου
ώσπου ν’ αφανιστεί η σκιά του.
Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.
The Song of Songs
How beautiful she is, my love
in her everyday dress
and the little comb on her hair
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful
Girls of Auschwitz
Dachau’s girls
have you seen by chance my love?
We saw her leaving on a long voyage
she was no longer wearing her dress
nor a little comb on her hair.
How beautiful she is, my love
the one pampered by her mother
and her brother’s kisses
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful
Girls of Auschwitz
Dachau’s girls
have you seen by chance my love?
We saw her in the frigid town square
with a number stamped on her white hand
with a yellow star pinned by her heart
How beautiful she is, my love
the one pampered by her mother
and her brother’s kisses
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful
Adonis
There on the wide staircase
the staircase of tears
in Wiener Graben’s deep stone-
quarry of cries and lamentation
Jews and partisans stroll by
Jews and partisans fall down
a rock they carry on their back
a rock a burden cross of death
There comes Adonis and a voice
a voice, a voice he hears
oh comrade, oh comrade,
help me to climb these stairs
But there on the wide staircase
that staircase of tears
such help is taken as insult
such a compassion is a curse
The Jewish man falls on the step
and red bleeds through the staircase
and you young lad come over here
a double rock you’ll carry
A double rock I’ll take, a triple
my name, they call me Adonis
come and meet me if you are a man
at the marble threshing circle.
The Fugitive
Janos Ber from the North
can’t stand the barbed wire.
He takes heart, takes wing
runs through the villages of the valley.
Ma’am, give me a piece of bread
and clothes to change into –
I have a long way to go
and lakes to fly across.
Wherever he goes or stops
fear and terror strike
and a cry, a terrible cry:
Hide from the fugitive!
Christians, I’m no murderer,
no beast come to eat you.
I left the prison
to go back to my home.
Ah, what deathly loneliness
in this land of Berthold Brecht!
They hand Janos over to the SS
They’re taking him, now, to be killed.
When the War is Over
Girl with the weeping eyes,
Girl with the frozen hands.
Forget me not when the war is over.
Joy of the world. come to the gate
So that we could embrace in the street.
So that we could kiss in the square.
So that we could make love in the quarry.
In the gas chambers,
On the staircase, in the observation post.
Love in the middle of noon
In all the corners of death
’Til its shadow will be no more.
Girl with the weeping eyes,
Girl with the frozen hands.
Forget me not when the war is over.
Simon Wiesenthal was a prisoner in Mauthausen-Gusen … a portrait in the Jewish Museum, Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)
The harbour at Rethymnon … I first got to know the writings of Andreas Papandreou on a holiday in the 1980s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
Although the May Bank holiday in Ireland rarely falls on May Day itself – this year it falls on Monday next 4 May 2020 – I could not forget that today is May Day.
In the past, I have found myself, sometimes by accident, in a variety of places on May Day – including Achill, Askeaton, Bucharest, Dublin, London, Madrid, Portmeirion and Rethymnon – and I have written at times on the May Day protests in Thessaloniki that inspired the great epic poem Epitaphios by the poet of the Greek left, Yiannis Ritsos.
After I had completed two of my degrees and stepped down from active roles in the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s, I found myself on an unexpected late summer holiday in Rethymnon, and I remember still how I found books by Andreas Papandreou in a wonderful second-hand bookshop in Souliou Street.
This was before Papandreou had fallen from grace, and I was moved by his account of his resistance to the colonels and their junta. Despite, his sad later days, he remained an inspiration, and when he died in 1996 I contributed his obituary in The Irish Times.
To mark May Day this year, I am offering two poems that have been transformed into rousing songs of the Left in Greece, both set to music by the composer Mikis Theodorakis: Ένα Το Χελιδόνι (‘A solitary swallow’), from Axion Esti by Odysseas Elytis, and Μικρά κι ανήλιαγα στενά (‘In gloomy narrow backstreets,’ or ‘Rain falls on the slums’), by Tasos Livaditis.
Ένα Το Χελιδόνι
Ένα το χελιδόνι κι η άνοιξη ακριβή
για να γυρίσει ο ήλιος θέλει δουλειά πολλή
Θέλει νεκροί χιλιάδες να `ναι στους τροχούς
Θέλει κι οι ζωντανοί να δίνουν το αίμα τους.
Θε μου Πρωτομάστορα μ’ έχτισες μέσα στα βουνά
Θε μου Πρωτομάστορα μ’ έκλεισες μες στη θάλασσα!
Πάρθηκεν από μάγους το σώμα του Μαγιού
Το `χουνε θάψει σ’ ένα μνήμα του πέλαγου
σ’ ένα βαθύ πηγάδι το `χουνε κλειστό
μύρισε το σκοτάδι κι όλη η άβυσσος
Θε μου Πρωτομάστορα μέσα στις πασχαλιές και Συ
Θε μου Πρωτομάστορα μύρισες την Ανάσταση
A solitary swallow and a costly spring,
For the sun to turn it takes a job of work,
It takes a thousand dead sweating at the Wheels,
It takes the living also giving up their blood.
God my Master Builder, you built me into the mountains,
God my Master Builder, you enclose me in the sea!
Magicians carried off the body of May,
They buried the body in a tomb of the sea,
They sealed it up in a deep well,
Its scent fills the darkness and all the Abyss.
God my Master Builder, you too among the Easter lilacs,
God my Master Builder, you felt the scent of Resurrection!
Wriggling like sperm in a dark womb,
The terrible insect of memory breaks through the earth
And bites the light like a hungry spider,
Making the shores glow and the sea radiant.
God my Master Builder, you girded me with seashores,
God my Master Builder, you founded me on mountains.
This first song, ‘Ena to Helidoni,’ was composed by Mikis Theodorakis, using lyrics by Odysseus Elytis, one of the two Greek poets to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Odysseus Elytis was born in Iraklion, the capital of Crete, in 1911, and his poems have been translated into a dozen languages, including English-language translations by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis.
The lyrics are part of his longer poem ‘Axion Esti,’ a major work of 20th century literature. The ‘Axion Esti; reflects humanity’s struggle against the powers of darkness as the poet gives to an imaginary Christian liturgy a context that is revolutionary because of its combination of religious, social, aesthetic and philosophical ideas.
Although this poem can be interpreted as a spiritual autobiography that dramatises the national and philosophical hopes of a highly personal sensibility, it is also read as an expression of the revolutionary spirit in Greece. It was made popular by settings of portions of the poem in the 1960s by Mikis Theodorakis. Because of its lyrics and meaning, this song by Theodorakis became a song protest against the colonels’ junta in Greece in 1967-1974.
This portion of the poem, ‘Ena to Helidoni,’ was inspired by events in the Greek Civil War. The swallow is a metaphor for Greece trying to gain its freedom. But this freedom, the turning of the sun in the poem, takes a lot of work and blood.
This recording was made at a concert in 1977, during the transition of Greece to democracy. This concert brough together three major figures in Greek culture: the composer Mikis Theodorakis, the poet Odysseus Elytis and the singer Grigoris Bithikotsis:
My second choice of a poem and song for this May Day is Μικρά κι ανήλιαγα στενά (‘In gloomy narrow backstreets’ or ‘Rain falls on the slums’) by the poet Tasos Leivaditis, set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, and sung here by the Greek singer Giorgos Dalaras:
Μικρά κι ανήλιαγα στενά
Μικρά κι ανήλιαγα στενά
και σπίτια χαμηλά μου
βρέχει στη φτωχογειτονιά
βρέχει και στην καρδιά μου
Αχ ψεύτη κι άδικε ντουνιά
π’ άναψες τον καημό μου
είσαι μικρός και δε χωράς
τον αναστεναγμό μου
Οι συμφορές αμέτρητες,
δεν έχει ο κόσμος άλλες
φεύγουν οι μέρες μου βαριά
σαν της βροχής τις στάλες
In gloomy narrow backstreets
and the houses below me,
it’s raining in these slums,
and it’s raining in my heart, too.
O lying and unfair world,
you’ve set my heart on fire,
you’re small and have no space
for my tormented sigh.
My misfortunes are countless
no more left in this world,
my days pass by heavily,
just like those drops of rain.
The poem was written by Anastasios-Pandeleïmon ‘Tassos’ Leivaditis (1922-1988), who was born in Athens on Easter Saturday, 15 April 1922. His family came from Kontovazaina in the Peloponnese, and he grow up in Metaxourgeio.
When Nazi Germany occupied Greece in 1941, he abandoned his law studies at the University of Athens and joined the Resistance and the National Liberation Front’s youth organisation EPON.
After the liberation of Greece in 1944, he continued to be politically active on the Left and was arrested. He was released in February 1945, and in 1946, he married Maria Stoupa and published his first poem, Tο τραγούδι του Xατζηδημήτρη (‘Hadjidimitris’ Song’) in the Free Letters, a literary magazine. In 1947, he became involved in publishing the literary magazine Themelio (Foundation).
During the Greek Civil War, he was arrested again in 1948 and exiled to the island of Lemnos. He remained in prison after the Civil War, and was held on Makronisos island, in prison on Agios Efstratios and then in the Hadjicostas prison. He first met Theodorakis in exile and in prison, and he continued to write poetry, including ‘Winds at the World’s Crossroads.’
He was released in 1951 and became a literary critic with the newspaper Avgi (Dawn) until 1967. He was arrested again in 1955 and was charged with incitement to rebellion. The Court of Appeals found him not guilty. The poem that landed him in court, ‘Winds at the World’s Crossroads,’ received the First Prize for Poetry at the World Youth Festival in Warsaw that year.
With the colonels’ coup in 1967, Leivaditis was forced out of work. He started writing in 1969 under pen names for popular magazines despite the political risks this posed for editors.
Leivaditis’ poetry remained largely unknown outside Greece until 1983, when his collection The Blind Man with the Lamp was published in Greece and in English.
Critics say his poetry deals with metaphysical subjects in a way that goes beyond materialism. Recently, Fraser Steel of the BBC, writing in Anglican weekly, the Church Times, in 2016, said his poetry was ‘closer to St John of the Cross’s paradoxical profundities,’ and he wrote of the poet’s ‘experience of God with a directness saved from portentousness by a vein of levity.’
Leivaditis and Kostas Kotzias co-wrote the script for the 1961 movie Synoikia To Oneiro (Neighbourhood of Dreams), directed by and starring Alekos Alexandrakis (1961). The film, with its powerful social message, is set in the impoverished Athenian neighbourhood of Asyrmatos, whose people are trying to escape poverty and deprivation.
The censors delayed the premiere because of its ‘suspicious social content,’ and because the soundtrack was composed by Theodorakis. Yet, despite the censors’ many cuts, the film became a milestone in the history of Greek cinema. Theodorakis wrote the music for the film, and the songs were sung by Grigoris Bithikotsis.
Leivaditis and Theodorakis first met as political prisoners and exile in the 1940s, and continued to work together in song-writing, with the composer putting many of the poems to music, and Leivaditis often accompanying Theodorakis in his many tours, reciting poetry as part of the concert. Leivaditis died in Athens on 30 October 1988.
Giorgos Dalaras is married to his manager Anna Roulas, who was a member of George Papandreou’s Pasok government in 2009-2011. This version was sung by Dalaras at a tribute concert for Theodorakis in the Herod Atticus theatre below the Acropolis in 1995. Two Greek bouzouki players were joined by the Dutch Metropole Orchestra conducted by Dick Bakker, and the clip includes the short dance sequence in the 1961 film. The man at the table is the director and leading actor Alekos Alexandrakis.
