Anathema against Venizelos

On 25 December 1916, or 12 December by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, on the Field of Ares (Pedion tou Areos), a military parade ground in Athens, the Archbishop of Athens, Theoklitos, and the members of the Holy Synod pronounced an anathema, an ecclesiastical curse, on Eleftherios Venizelos. The date of 12 December is given by the Athenian newspapers of the following day, which described the ceremony, and the American journalist Paxton Hibben, who was sympathetic to the king and present on the spot, writes that it took place on the Western Christmas Day. The British publicist George F. Abbott, also sympathetic to the king, gives 26 December. It was the climax of the campaign against the leader of the government in Salonika, against whom a week earlier an arrest warrant had been issued on a charge of high treason.

A Church in schism

The Church of Greece was divided in the same way as the country. The metropolitans of Old Greece, led by Archbishop Theoklitos, sided with King Constantine I, while the bishops of the “New Lands”, annexed in the Balkan Wars and subject to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, supported Venizelos. The Greek canon lawyer Georgios Androutsopoulos writes that as early as the turn of November and December the Synod, on the motion of the Metropolitan of Larissa, Arsenios, called on the government to take steps against the “revolutionaries of Salonika”, “so that the Church should not be forced to resort to the measures provided for by the holy canons”. The royalists also had their own list of grievances: in the lands under Venizelos several bishops loyal to the king had been arrested. Hibben names among them the metropolitans of Drama and Kozani.

After the fighting in Athens on 1 December feelings ran even higher. The royalists were convinced that the Allied landing had been meant as the signal for a Venizelist coup, and the proof was an alleged letter from Venizelos found on General Korakas, which Venizelos called a forgery. The blockade of the coast that the Allies imposed on 8 December cut the country off from grain, and the blame for it was laid on the “traitor” who had brought foreign fleets down on Greece.

The government for and against

The role of the government of Spyridon Lambros is still disputed, because the sources say different things. Androutsopoulos, drawing on the documents of the Synod, describes a day full of hesitation. On 24 December (11 December by the Julian calendar) a delegation of the presidents of associations came to the archbishop and announced that the next day the people would gather on the Field of Ares to cast the stone of anathema at Venizelos, and demanded the participation of the clergy. The Synod agreed. The royal commissioner to the Synod, Michail Galanos, informed the prime minister of this, and Lambros, in a conversation with the archbishop, expressed the government’s wish that the clergy should not take part. On the morning of 25 December Theoklitos wrote to the prime minister that he would comply and would not go himself, and convened the Synod to revoke its resolution. He was then told that the government had no objection and that the archbishop had misunderstood its position. Before the Synod signed the revocation, a delegation of reservists arrived and, as was recorded, demanded “with persistence and insistence” the participation of the clergy. The Synod decided that a refusal might have “incalculable sad consequences” and resolved to carry out its first decision.

Contemporary versions also differ. Abbott and Hibben write that the government banned the demonstration, but nobody paid any attention to the ban. The Foreign Minister, Evgenios Zalokostas, informed the Greek legations abroad on 27 December that the people of Attica had assembled “despite the strenuous contrary efforts of the government”, and that the Metropolitan of Athens had taken part at the request of the associations. The British biographer of Venizelos, S. B. Chester, writes on the other hand that the curse was pronounced with the consent of the royal government.

Stones on the cairn

In the afternoon five carriages brought the members of the Synod and the bishops staying in Athens to the Field of Ares. Hibben estimates that by three in the afternoon some 60,000 people had gathered there. Each brought a stone and threw it on a cairn that was to become a monument of hatred for Venizelos. The Athenian daily Embros reported that the archbishop threw the first stone and pronounced the formula: “On Eleftherios Venizelos, who plotted against the kingdom and the fatherland and persecuted and imprisoned archbishops, anathema.” According to Hibben eight bishops from Old Greece repeated the curse after the archbishop. The journalist remembered an old woman from Attica who carried a large stone from her field and, as she threw it, shouted: “We made him prime minister, but that was not enough for him. He wanted to be king. Anathema!”

Similar ceremonies were later held in Patras and in many towns and villages of Old Greece. At the beginning of January 1917 the Synod informed the Patriarchate of Constantinople that it had “consigned Venizelos to anathema”. Abbott and Hibben saw these gatherings as proof of how far Venizelos had lost the support of his countrymen. The American historian Herbert Adams Gibbons, sympathetic to Venizelos, explained them differently: it was the blockade that made people throw stones, and half a year later the same people were throwing flowers at Venizelos’s feet.

Reaction in Salonika

Venizelos had already survived one anathema. Chester recalls that a similar ceremony had been ordered against him in Crete by Prince George when he was High Commissioner of the island, and that each time the people afterwards prayed for the health of the man who had been cursed. Gibbons writes that on Christmas Day Venizelos received communion in Salonika from priests who paid no attention to the curse, because in Macedonia he was seen as the man who had liberated it from Turkish rule. The bishops of the “New Lands” were in any case subject to the Patriarch, not to the Synod in Athens.

The reckoning came after Venizelos returned to power in June 1917. A decree of July 1917 set up a Supreme Ecclesiastical Court of a dozen or so members, which Abbott regarded as an unconstitutional and uncanonical body, because it also included bishops from the lands subject to the Patriarch, without his consent. In October 1917 the court, presided over by the Metropolitan of Thessaloniki, Gennadios, deposed Theoklitos and Arsenios of Larissa and removed three other members of the Synod from their sees, finding them guilty of “meddling in political disputes” and “religious scandal”. In March 1918 the Cretan Meletios Metaxakis, known for his sympathy for Venizelos, was elected Archbishop of Athens. That was not the end of the dispute: when Constantine returned to the throne in 1920, a royal decree annulled the court’s sentences of 1917, and Theoklitos regained his office and held it until 1922.