have lost to them the sympathy of natives. It is a common trick to injure a rival religion by representing it as foreign, and so hostile to all patriotic citizens. Then it was proposed that they should wear a square kalymauchion. The Melkites persisted in claiming that they would go on dressing exactly as their fathers had dressed, in the traditional costume of their rite.[1] The quarrel lasted with great bitterness for ten years. At last a compromise was made by the Government. The Melkite clergy were to wear a kalymauchion, not round, but six-sided;[2] their cassock was to be, not black, but blue or violet. This was made law by the Turk in 1847. But it was not long observed. The blue or violet got darker and darker, the six angles of the hat became more and more blunted, till there is now nothing to distinguish the Melkites from the Orthodox in dress.
A greater work, the greatest work of Maximos's life, was the civil emancipation of his people. It is known that, at any rate till the revolution of 1908, the Turkish Government grouped its Christian victims according to their religions. Each religion was a "nation," dependent on its religious head in civil matters too; these heads were responsible to the Porte for the behaviour of their people. When the division between Melkites and Orthodox came, at first that made no difference to the Turk. He still looked on them as one nation. Since the Government eventually took the side of the Orthodox Patriarchs, Silvester and his successors, these still had civil jurisdiction over the Melkites. Such a state of things was intolerable to them. Naturally, the Orthodox used their authority to vex, annoy, and persecute the followers of the Melkite Patriarchs in every possible way. It was not till 1830 that the Sultan freed all Uniates from dependence on their rivals. At first he put all under the civil authority of the Armenian Patriarch, as representing the largest and best known
- ↑ Naturally, they exaggerated its importance. In a protest of 1841 the Melkites declare that their kalymauchion has been worn by all their clergy since the birth of Christ! (Charon, op. cit., ii, p. 193). The high cylindrical cap seems to be of Persian origin. It is, no doubt, originally the same thing as the red tarbūsh worn by everyone, Moslem or Christian, in the Levant. Modern Persians wear a cap of the same shape, but of black wool. The brim at the top of the Kalymauchion is not earlier than the nineteenth century. Students and clerks in minor orders still wear it without this brim.
- ↑ It is said that the Grand Wazīr suggested this form, taking it from the little six-sided tables on which Turks put their coffee cups and pipes. In Charon, op. cit., ii, p. 149, may be seen the portrait of a Melkite bishop wearing the six-sided kalymauchion.
