Not my Athens-Islam in Europe

This, dear friends, is what happened this morning in Athens.
In the square in front of the City Hall. The seat of the Mayor of Athens. With guest appearance by an Egyptian imam.



No, dear friends, this is not some North African hamlet, this is not some Asian inner city. THIS is the city of
Theseus and Aeschylus, the city of Plato and all other giants of human civilisation. THIS is the center of Athens.This is where Muslems, most of them uninvited illegal immigrants, celebrated the end of the Ramadan. And declared their will to have a mosque built in Athens.

After some 400 years of bitter fighting, after rivers of European blood spilled in the gates of Constantinople and Vienna, our politicians open our countries' gates to the islamic flood.

In France



In Italy and the world



I believe in the right of people to worship the divinities that best fit their nature, their idiosyncarcy, their history, their traditions in their countries and homes.
I do not intend to worship in the open air of Mecca. I am a Greek Orthodox worshiping the God of my fathers, where my ancestors have lived from times unknown.

Why on earth do we have to put up with this?

The persecuted church

Dear friends,

Very often I see pages of Christian sisters supporting the cause of Christians around the world who are being discriminated upon because of their faith. Today I bring to you one such case that you may or may not be aware of.

(CNN)- Patriarch Bartholomew is the living embodiment of one of the world's oldest institutions -- the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople.

But he could be the last to hold the title in what is modern-day Istanbul, in secular but Muslim majority Turkey.

CNN's "World's Untold Stories" examines the dwindling Greek Orthodox community in Turkey and how they are faring.

There has been a patriarch in Constantinople for 14 centuries, ever since it was the capital of Byzantium and the Eastern Roman Empire, ruling over the Eastern Mediterranean and much of the Middle East.

To this day, Orthodox Christians around the world recite prayers to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the "first among equals." Some describe him as the equivalent of the "pope" for the world's Orthodox Christians. But Bartholomew, who is now 70, may become the last in a line of some 270 bishops in Constantinople.

The Turkish government refuses to recognize Bartholomew's title as "Ecumenical Patriarch."

Twenty-five years ago, the Turkish government shut the seminary where Greek Orthodox clergy traditionally trained. Greeks who do not hold Turkish passports are barred from becoming clerics.

Instead of being the spiritual leader of his faith, Bartholomew has become a symbol of the dwindling community of ethnic Greeks still living in modern-day Istanbul. There are only around 2,000 ethnic Greeks left in Istanbul. The last members of this community are gradually dying out, but they cling tenaciously to the churches and schools their ancestors built in what was once the capital of a Greek empire.

 Watch and listen to part 1, part 2 and part 3. Persecution is much closer that you can imagine...

May 29 1453: Asia sets foot on Europe

" To surrender the city to you is not of me or any other of its citizens;
common opinion have we all to die without counting our lives".

Constantinos Paleologos, by the grace of God Emperor of the Romans, +May 29, 1453 defending the ramparts of Constantinople against the invading Ottomans of Muhammad Khan II.

"…Crashing aside the Christians at Varna in 1444 they secured possession of Walachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, the territory now called Bulgaria and Romania, then in 1453 they put again under siege Constantinople which on May 29 fell into the hands of Mehmet II and by the way: do you know who was Mehmet II? A guy who, by virtue of the Islamic Fratricide Law which authorized a sultan to murder members of his immediate family, had ascended the throne by strangling his three year-old brother. Do you know the chronicle that about the fall of Constantinople the scribe Phrantzes has left us to refresh the memory of the oblivious or rather of the hypocrites?

Perhaps not. It would not be Politically Correct to know the details of the fall of Constantinople. Its inhabitants who at daybreak, while Mehmet II is shelling Theodosius’ walls, take refuge in the cathedral of St. Sophia and here start to sing psalms. To invoke divine mercy. The patriarch who by candlelight celebrates his last Mass and in order to lessen the panic thunders: “Fear not, my brothers and sisters! Tomorrow you’ll be in the Kingdom of Heaven and your names will survive till the end of time!”. The children who cry in terror, their mothers who give them heart repeating: “Hush, baby, hush! We die for our faith in Jesus Christ! We die for our Emperor Constantine XI, for our homeland!”. The Ottoman troops who beating their drums step over the breaches in the fallen walls, overwhelm the Genovese and Venetian and Spanish defenders, hack them on to death with scimitars, then burst into the cathedral and behead even newborn babies. They amuse themselves by snuffing out the candles with their little severed heads... It lasted from the dawn to the afternoon that massacre. It abated only when the Grand Vizier mounted the pulpit of St. Sophia and said to the slaughterers: “Rest. Now this temple belongs to Allah” Meanwhile the city burns, the soldiery crucify and hang and impale, the Janissaries rape and butcher the nuns (four thousand in a few hours) or put the survivors in chains to sell them at the market of Ankara. And the servants prepare the Victory Feast. The feast during which (in defiance of the Prophet) Mehmet II got drunk on the wines of Cyprus and, having a soft spot for young boys, sent for the firstborn of the Greek Orthodox Grand Duke Notaras. A fourteen year-old adolescent known for his beauty. In front of everyone he raped him, and after the rape he sent for his family. His parents, his grandparents, his uncles, his aunts and cousins. In front of him he beheaded them. One by one. He also had all the altars destroyed, all the bells melted down, all the churches turned into mosques or bazaars. Oh, yes. That’s how Constantinople became Istanbul. But Doudou of the UN and the teachers in our schools don’t want to hear about it."
(+Orianna Fallaci, The Force of Reason)

Old maps and paintings and a digital recreation of the City, accompanied by a song about the Red Apple Tree of folk tales.



"Ethnic" by Michalis Rakintzis. Watch the half-moon turn into a cross, and the church of St. Sophia (The Wisdom of God) now a mosque, become a church again.



"You'll come like a lighting", from the "Marble King" collection (1998) by Stamatis Spanoudakis at the Herod Atticus Theater, below the Acropolis of Athens.

"...A dove came down from heavens:
Stop the Cherubic, and lower the Sacred Vessels,
Priests, take the Sacramental
and you candles blow out...
For it is the will of God the City should fall to the Turks...

Our Lady was disturbed and the icons tearful.
Hush, Our Lady and you, icons weep not,
With the passing of years and in time she 'll be yours again".