The author was the young and ambitious playwright, Dimitri Kollatos. In the controversy that ensued, the outspoken Avgoustinos, Bishop of Florina, engaged the dramatist in a debate which won wide notice in the press. It was Kollatos’ first public confrontation with the Orthodox Church and the comments in these columns at the time concluded, “Whatever the final verdict may be on A Greek Today, Kollatos certainly has found a ready-made hero for his next play.”
Indeed, if writing a play with an Orthodox priest as its protagonist had been his intention, Kollatos was presented with a sensational plot three years later when photographs allegedly of Bishop Stylianos of Preveza and a nude woman were published in the newspapers. Following a trial, Stylianos was relieved of his pastoral duties and the photographer, an ex-priest who had acted as the bishop’s chauffeur, was fined for blackmail, along with his wife who had been, in fact, the lady photographed in the nude.
If, at this point, Kollatos had his theme and his obligatory nude scene readymade, the events of the following June provided him with farcical complications which even Georges Feydeau would have had difficulty conjuring up. In early summer of 1979, Procopios, Bishop of Cephallonia, was brought to trial after the evidence of nuns had been presented, for having dismembered the island’s sixteenth-century patron saint Gerasimos and trafficking in highly profitable relics. Procopios was duly relieved of his parochial duties when an autopsy on the saint revealed that a cheek and parts of a leg and foot had been recently removed.
With the aid of this doctoring, Kollatos’ play ‘The Saint of Preveza” was ready for rehearsals. So ready in fact was the play that an injunction against both Kollatos and the well-known and talented actor Petros Fyssoun (who was also the producer) was filed in court by a lawyer representing Procopios before the play opened on August 2. Needless to say, this notoriety provided a brisk business at the box-office.
At the ensuing trial, Kollatos defended his oeuvre as being not an attack on the Church but on the behavior of priests who were unworthy of it. Simultaneously, he claimed that his play was fictitious and at the same time suggested that, if legally called upon to do so, he could prove that his facts could be backed up by documentary evidence.
A week later both play and trial were playing to packed houses. The prosecution was demanding that certain scenes — such as one showing a bishop cutting up a saint’s remains with a cleaver — be deleted as “unseemly and full of hyperbole”, while the lawyer representing the author claimed that such omissions would weaken the play’s carefully arranged inner structure.
That deliberate dramatic delay between crisis and climax, which Euripides lengthened to an hour and Shakespeare to two, went on for at least a month, each ironic twist being eagerly published in the daily press.
In the first week of September tension mounted when actress Eleni Morali was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment for insulting public morality by having appeared on stage in the nude. Shortly thereafter, the court ruled that those responsible for the play be punished with thirty days’ imprisonment and a thirty thousand drachma fine imposed for each subsequent performance but without ruling that the play be closed.
At this point Fyssoun agreed to cut the most objectionable scenes. Kollatos, however, declared that his play was thus destroyed, demanded that his name be removed from the program, and Morati, in a defiant gesture of artistic integrity, refused to appear on stage with her clothes on.
On September 12, the deus ex machina appeared in the person of Archbishop Serafeim who, representing the Holy Synod, formally presented writs to a Superior Court announcing that the Kollatos play was an insult to the Orthodox Church. Two days later the play closed after a highly successful six-week run.
Whatever else it may have accomplished, The Saint of Preveza at least won a footnote in the annals of theater for instigating two trials, one of which actually ran longer than the play itself.
The final twist to this theatrical farce is that it was entirely upstaged by a far more significant religious drama being played out in Crete earlier in the month, involving Irenaeus, the former Bishop of Kissamos, who had been elected to head the Greek Orthodox diocese in West Germany in 1972.
The Cretans are a jealous and even a violent people when it comes to protecting what they believe is worth keeping amongst themselves. Last year they surrounded the archaeological museum and successfully prevented their masterpieces of prehistoric art from travelling abroad with the Aegean Exhibition. Last month they surrounded Bishop Irenaeus in the same spirit.
Irenaeus is one of those saintly figures in the Church today who raises hope among the faithful and admiration among the skeptical. In the past he worked closely with his parishioners and, taking today’s
world for what it is, he has created commercial enterprises in which literally thousands of Cretans today take part as shareholders.
A few weeks ago Irenaeus returned to Crete from Germany to rest in the monastery of Agia Sophia. At the time Bishop Nectarios had been just elected, but not yet installed, to the recently vacated see of Kissamos. On August 28, fifteen devoted followers led Irenaeus from the monastery to the Cathedral at Kastelli where they placed him on the episcopal throne. The next day, five thousand had joined the original fifteen, and two days later those surrounding the Cathedral — many of them armed — numbered twice that many, all demanding the installation of their beloved former bishop. It was said to be the greatest gathering of supporters seen in Crete since the days of Eleutherios Venizelos early in the century.
The semi-autonomous Church of Crete, the Patriarch of Constantinople and even Irenaeus himself took umbrage at this rash and violent act of devotion. By the middle of September, however, the bishop-elect Nectarios had, diplomatically, asked to be transferred to another see and Irenaeus was back in Germany where, it is said, properly authorized members of the Cretan Church and the Patriarchate will formally request Irenaeus to accept the position of Metropohtan of Kissamos.
Et in Arcadia Ego
WHILE most people kept abreast of the Venice Film Festival last month and applauded Thodoros Angelopoulos for winning the Golden Lion Medal with his Megalexandros, almost no one knew anything about the outcome of “Temenos 1980” which took place at the same time and was widely advertised in Athens. About this event, journalist Margot Granitsas writes the following:
What must be one of the strangest film festivals ever held took place on a weekend early in September. A few weeks before, posters had begun appearing in the windows of shops and galleries in Kolonaki announcing “Temenos 1980”, a presentation of modern films to be held on the sixth and seventh of September just after sunset near the village of Lyssaraia in the heart of the Peloponnesus.
The festival proved to be aptly named, for though the word “temenos” in classical times came to mean a sacred precinct reserved for a god, it had originally meant simply an area that was cut off. Lyssaraia is indeed so cut off and obscure that it cannot be found on most maps and even the chart of Arcadia published by the National Statistical Service identifies it in minute print as lying somewhat off a fine, dotted red line which the legend defines as a cart-and-mule track.
Intrigued by the adventure promised by this festival, I decided to attend “Temenos 1980”. An arduous trip via Tripolis, Dimitsana and thirty more kilometers of dirt road that passed a string of remote villages looking as if they had remained unchanged for the last hundred years, brought me to Lyssaraia. From there it was a few kilometers more down to a hollow below the village, an expanse of stubble fields, olive groves, rocks and wild pomegranate trees.
There, in the midst of nowhere, with a fiery red sun just setting over the magnificent landscape, stood two men stooped over a projector set up on a rickety folding table. Some twenty meters away a large screen had been set up before which sat about two dozen people, half of them children and the other half comprising a priest, several policemen, villagers and a few outsiders.
“Temenos 1980” had been advertised as dedicated to the work of Robert Beavers and Gregory J. Markopoulos, two American underground filmmakers now living in Switzerland. And so it was. On the first evening Robert Beavers’ film Sotiros Responds was projected, a collage of images, with fragments from Alban Berg’s Wozzeck as a sparse sound track, with a few words or syllables interspersed on the screen between the frames and repetitions of earlier shots turned at an angle. This was certainly something which must have been a unique experience for local viewers. It was, therefore, not too surprising that the small group thinned out during the showing as the villagers and children started returning up the hill holding their flashlights.
After the show, the few of us who were not local — this included three Swiss filmmakers who happened to be in Greece, two Greeks from Paris and an octogenarian Greek-American who introduced himself as a colonel — discovered that neither food nor shelter was available within thirty kilometers. We settled down at the coffee shop in Lyssaraia and unpacked our own food. After a good helping of local wine, we unrolled our sleeping bags in a nearby field. While several waited up for the only daily bus leaving for Tripolis at five o’clock in the morning, the rest of us decided to stay on for the second part of the festival.
Surprisingly enough, the group which had attended the premiere returned the following evening. Twice a Man (1963), a film by Markopoulos, who is one of the better-known New York underground filmmakers (his father had emigrated from Lyssaraia), was shown. It was again an avant garde work which had nothing in common with a “standard” film. Strong in its images, colors and effects, it was by far the more captivating work.
And that was it. The film festival was over. The screen was rolled up, the projector and reels collected, and the two filmmakers stole off into the night.
It was said later that among the dignitaries planning to attend the festival were the Director of the National Theater, Alexis Minotis, and the Minister of Culture. Their drivers, unfortunately, lost their direction amid the bucolic by-ways of Arcadia.
Never mind. The festival, according to its initiators, will return again for four days next year. Same time. Same place. But watch out: the well-known proverb “Et in Arcadia ego” has been ascribed by some scholars to the personified figure of death.
