They are all Orthodox; and for centuries the Greeks have thought that the government of the Orthodox Church is their business. Its head is, or was, the Œcumenical Patriarch, always a Greek, and its ruling caste is the Phanar. Until the wars of independence began the Patriarch got to be as near a Pope as any one ever has. And the Phanariote Greeks kept all the perquisites of the Church for themselves; the poor village priests might be Serbs or Bulgars or Roumans, they were married, and so in any case they could never rise to any higher place, but all the metropolitans were Greeks, sent out from Constantinople. And whatever the people might speak, the Holy Liturgy was sung in Greek. So for centuries there was sullen discontent among the nonGreek people and lower clergy against these Phanariote bishops. This was not only the case among the Slavs; the Arabic-speaking Orthodox in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine had just the same complaint.
Another feature that is rather astonishing is that the Rayahs began more and more to confuse the Phanar with the hated Turkish rule. We have seen that the Patriarch was the acknowledged civil Head of all the Orthodox before the Porte. It is also true that these rich Phanariote Greeks were always very ready to be the instruments of Turkish oppression over their fellow-Christians. The Vaivodes of Roumania, horrible tyrants sent by the Sultan to misrule the Roumans, were all Phanariote Greeks.[1] So the other Rayahs saw in the Phanar simply the shadow of the Turk and hated the Greeks even more than their real masters, since they were traitors to the cause. When Alexander Hypsilanti in 1821 made his fatuous attempt to raise the Greek flag in Moldavia and issued proclamations about the sacred cause of Hellas to those Roumans, he was surprised that none of them would help him. Naturally they would not fight for another Vaivode.[2] The result of this feeling is that as soon
- ↑ De la Jonquière, Hist. des Ottomans, pp. 364–368. "The Greeks of the Phanar, lowest and most corrupt servants of the Porte. It would be impossible to find greater abjectness united to greater vanity." The Vaivodes made huge fortunes and invented absurd princely titles for themselves, but they were flogged by the Turk if he was not pleased with them.
- ↑ W. A. Phillips, The War of Greek Independence, chap. iii. p. 30, seq.
