THE SPECTACLE of tear gas clouds swirling through Athens on January 20th was as bewildering to many outsiders as the passions behind the huge (and mostly peaceful) protest rally which went before. More bewildering still may have been the presence among the demonstrators of so many black-robed Greek Orthodox clergy.

What prompted the trouble was an internationally brokered compromise agreement over the name of Greece’s northern neighbour, a deal which the leftist government in Athens is now struggling to squeeze through parliament. After three decades of bitter diplomatic standoff, the neighbouring country agreed last June to change its name from the Republic of Macedonia to Northern Macedonia, while the Greek side formally promised to lift its objections to anybody except itself using any version of the M-word. The renamed country also promised to remove language from its constitution which might have implied territorial claims on Greece. The issue was pressing because Greece had said that without a resolution of the name issue, it would veto its neighbour’s admission to the European Union and NATO.

The issue touches on red-hot questions of national identity and history. In its purest form, the Hellenic version of history holds that the word “Macedonia” should only be applied to the northern extremity of the Greek world, from which Alexander the Great sprang up and fought his way from Greece to India, nearly 2,400 years ago. In the Republic of Macedonia that was proclaimed after communist Yugoslavia broke up in 1991, it was counter-asserted that a separate, non-Greek Macedonian identity had existed for many centuries. The new country, and in particular its ethnic majority which speaks a Slavic language very close to Bulgarian, saw itself as heir to that tradition. After the proclamation of the Republic of Macedonia, Greece launched a diplomatic campaign to press the freshly proclaimed country to change its name, arguing that the use of the word Macedonia was an infringement of historical copyright and a potential threat to its territory. But more than 130 countries, including the United States and Russia, still recognised the new state by the name it preferred.

The compromise deal drew sighs of relief in most Western capitals. But for the busloads of people who came down from northern Greece to Athens over the weekend to join the big demonstration, the “North Macedonia” settlement was giving away too much. Since childhood they have been told that the Greek monopoly on the word Macedonia is sacrosanct: watering it down is blasphemy. With little regard for the idea that maximalism can be counter-productive, they are faithfully repeating what they have been taught by their parents, their teachers and above all by their priests, who are particularly influential in that part of Greece.

Indeed, few segments of society have been so resistant to the possibility of making a bargain as the Greek Orthodox clergy. All 22 bishops from the Greek region of Macedonia responded to the compromise deal by saying that it would merely encourage the neighbouring state in its “irredentism” and “hostility” towards Greece, and that any Greek parliamentarians who vote for the agreement will “blacken their names forever”. Anthimos, the ruling bishop of the northern Greek capital of Thessaloniki, has been especially vocal in his view that the neighbouring state should not be allowed to use any version of the name Macedonia.

Why do emotions run so high among the gentlemen in black clothing? Some clergy in Greece would cite the fact that Macedonia is mentioned more than once in the founding text of their faith, the New Testament, whose original version is in Greek. According to the Book of Acts, chapter 16, the apostle Paul had a dream while he was in present-day Turkey in which a Macedonian man begged him: “come over to Macedonia and help us!” As a result, the Christian pioneer made stormy preaching expeditions to Thessaloniki and the nearby town of Veria. As the Greek clergy see things, all that is part of a Hellenic story.

But in fact one does not need to go back to the New Testament, or to the pre-Christian legacy of Alexander the Great, to understand why the Macedonian question has a strong religious dimension. Much more modern history can be invoked.

First, consider the “Macedonian question” that triggered an exceptionally brutal inter-communal conflict across the southern Balkans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was an era when it looked increasingly obvious that Ottoman Macedonia, the lower swathe of the sultan’s remaining European lands, would soon be wrested from Turkish control. This prospect triggered a bitter competition over who would step into the void: Greece, Bulgaria or Serbia. The contest was waged by irregular fighters with little regard for civilian life.

At least on the surface, the conflict was guided not by contending proto-states but by rival bishops, who under the Ottoman order enjoyed huge personal authority. Individuals and communities caught up in the fighting had to make their choice between loyalty to the Bulgarian church and adherence to Greek bishops subordinate to the ancient Patriarchate of Constantinople, based in Istanbul. After 1904, as a guerrilla war intensified, the most visible leader of the Greek cause was a certain Bishop Germanos Karavangelis, who acted with quiet encouragement from a Greek state that hoped the disputed lands would soon be added to its territory. This whole episode is much romanticised in Greece’s literature and collective conscience, and the clergy’s role in galvanising bands of irregular fighters is generally seen as nothing but admirable.



(In the end, after two short bursts of open inter-state warfare in 1912 and 1913, the territory of Ottoman Macedonia was carved up between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, creating borders roughly similar to those of the present day.)

Then switch to another period of bitter fighting in the same region: the Greek civil war of 1946-49, which pitted a communist-led army against pro-government forces backed initially by Britain and then America. A significant segment of the forces fighting on the communist side identified as Slavs; some of these had already taken up arms as part of the leftist-dominated resistance to the Nazi occupation, a cause which straddled the Greek-Yugoslav border. The Greek political right, which included the leaders of the Orthodox church, demonised the communist forces in the civil war as treacherous and territorially ambitious Slavs. Indeed, for conservative anti-communist Greeks of that generation, whether lay or clerical, being anti-Slavic, and equating the Slav neighbours to the north with menacing forms of communism, became almost synonymous with being patriotic. So today, when a right-wing bishop denounces a leftist Greek government for selling out to the northern neighbours, the rhetoric has a familiar ring.

Meanwhile, even among those dreaded communist Slavs, whose official ideology was atheism, some strange manoeuvres were made involving nationalism, religion and clerical politics. The consequences are still being felt in 2019. Communist Yugoslavia, which had broken with the Soviet-led bloc in 1948, generally encouraged its most southerly constituent republic to assert a distinctive Macedonian identity and hence differentiate itself from Bulgaria, which was still loyal to Moscow. As part of that tactic, a self-ruling Macedonian Orthodox church was established in 1967, with the quiet encouragement of the Marxist authorities. Today that church, an heir to that unusual development in inter-communist politics, opposes any compromise with Greece and insists that it will never consider changing its own name.

It is, of course, quite a long time since the cold war and the Macedonian skirmishes of the early 20th century, never mind the apostle Paul or Alexander the Great. So, many might ask, isn’t it time to forgive and forget, especially for leaders of a religion whose ideals include peace, repentance and empathy for others?

On the Greek side, at least, the following might be one answer.

In the course of the 20th century, Greece saw a lot of internal conflict, for example pitting liberals against monarchists, communists against pro-Westerners, colonels against democratic politicians. And in part for that reason, today’s Hellenes tend to idealise the fighting that raged 100 years ago over the future of then-Ottoman Macedonia. It is remembered as a time when all Greeks, from gun-toting bishops to sophisticated diplomats to barely literate peasants, were on the same side, courageously advancing the interests of the nation. And in an era when purely spiritual messages can be hard to get across, the clerics of 2019 seem passionately protective of their share of that legacy.