On the occasion of the opening of the festive year 2021, which marks the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the Greek Revolution of 1821, HB Ieronymos II, Archbishop of Athens and all Greece, addressed the faithful of the Church of Greece and all the Greeks, by means of a message broadcast by all the media of Greece.
Specifically, in his message, His Beatitude stated:
“Greek women and men, my brethren and children in Christ,
May you have a good and blessed New Year. Today is the beginning of the year 2021, during which, despite the healthcare adversities and with respect for the precautionary measures, our entire Hellenism will honour the 200 years from the Liberating Struggle of 1821 for Regeneration. The Church celebrates the Revolution as a spiritual event. It celebrates the Struggle for Independence as an instance of the perennial struggle of the human being against tyranny and servitude, whether external or internal, whether collective or individual.
This is so because, although the Church is aware of the historic events, it chooses, nevertheless, to perceive history in non-geopolitical terms; because it understands the world in eschatological terms. It thinks in terms of “liturgical time” and, vis-à-vis the human beings which constitute it and which it shepherds, it assumes the responsibility to transform space and time as the unassailable bearer of the revelation of the Divine Word.
Today I invite you to bend the knee of our souls and bodies with me before the venerable memory of the Neomartyrs and of the Heroes of faith and fatherland, to whom the Church of Greece dedicates this great anniversary. The Neomartyrs chose to sacrifice their lives in order to articulate to the enslaved human beings as clearly as possible the Orthodox, ecumenical message that they should not convert to Islam, that there is no future without the light of Christ. They stood on their feet with a Christian ethos and Greek courage. They preferred the death of martyrs to a change of faith and national consciousness. Let us not forget that anyone lost to Orthodoxy would have also been lost to Hellenism. Anyone converted to Islam would “have become a Turk” and a persecutor of his former brothers and sisters.
Freedom requires virtue and boldness! The conditions were adverse. We saw brethren being lost, but we did not become fainthearted! We saw conquests and losses of territories but never ceased to fight. Faith in God, the consciousness of the iachronic continuity of our nation, our love of letters, our ethos of resistance, community solidarity, those were part of the spiritual gear which led to Freedom and made the movement of Philhellenism grow. We preserved the flame unquenchable and did not despair. We were not subjugated morally or spiritually. We were and always have been free. Free in our hearts, our thoughts, our state of mind, our conscience!
To this feast of spiritual freedom and unprecedented meeting with ourselves and our history I invite each one of you. I call upon each one of you to join the 261 Synodic and peripheral events which have been planned by the Church of Greece.
United, believing, and creative, let us commence!”
