‘Please Respect our Traditions’
THE Archbishop was not so naive as to think letters would achieve much, and took more practical steps too. Amidst the privations of occupied Greece, he raised aid money for Jews, arranged for monasteries to hide their families, and conspired with Angelos Evert, chief of police in Athens, to issue them with some 27,000 false identity cards, while the Church wrote out matching certificates of baptism.
Still, the protest was worth making. Stroop grew redder and redder as Damaskinos read out his denunciation of Nazi policy, until he screamed that Damaskinos deserved to be shot. “According to the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church,” replied the Archbishop drily, “our prelates are hanged and not shot. Please respect our traditions.”*
Damaskinos was arrested in 1944, and noises were made about sending him to the camps. Happily, the war ended first, and such was the Archbishop’s stature that he acted as Regent for King George II until his return from exile in London in 1946.
A reference to the murder of Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople by a Turkish mob in 1821, during the Greek War of Independence. His point was that for all their pretensions and swagger, the German ‘master race’ and their vaunted SS were no better than an Ottoman rabble.