THE WORDS THAT OUTLIVED THEIR WORLDS

 

A book printed in the sixteenth century seems an unlikely visitor to a Greek Orthodox parish hall in suburban Melbourne. The empires under whose authority its author lived may have collapsed and the particular form of Greek in which it was written may now be largely unintelligible even to those who consider themselves fluent in the language and yet there it lies, its pages still legible, its words awaiting a reader, having survived the political, geographical and linguistic transformations that have overtaken the people for whom it was originally intended.

It was precisely this incongruity that prompted me to organise an exhibition of rare Greek books at the recent panigyri of Saint Dimitrios in Moonee Ponds. I wanted visitors to encounter the physical evidence of a civilisation whose continuity has depended upon an extraordinary capacity for transformation. Dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the volumes of the exhibition reveal a Greek world extending far beyond the boundaries of the modern state, whose intellectual influence travelled across Europe before returning, transformed, to the communities from which it had originated.

For Greeks, the written word possesses a significance that is simultaneously cultural and theological. The opening of the Gospel according to John, «Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος», places the Logos at the beginning of existence itself. In Orthodox Christianity, the Divine Logos is Christ, the Word made flesh. The Greek understanding of λόγος encompasses speech, reason, meaning and rational principle, while its theological significance gives the relationship between language and the sacred a particular resonance.  Given this heritage, we are uniquely placed to contemplate the power of language to transmit meaning across generations.

Following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Byzantine scholars contributed significantly to the development of Renaissance humanism in Western Europe. Scholars such as Manuel Chrysoloras, Cardinal Bessarion and Markos Mousouros helped make Greek learning accessible to Western scholars, while the Venetian printing house of Aldus Manutius revolutionised the circulation of classical literature. Greek philosophical, scientific and literary works entered new intellectual networks, influencing European scholarship and, eventually, the Enlightenment. Ideas developed through this encounter would subsequently return to Greek-speaking communities in the form of educational reform, political philosophy and revolutionary aspiration.

The presence of Lucian of Samosata among the exhibits in a 1535 edition, illustrated the complexity of this exchange. A Syrian-born writer of the second century who composed in Greek, Lucian belonged to a Hellenic literary world defined by cultural participation rather than geographical origin. His irreverent dialogues and extraordinary True History, with its fantastic voyage to the Moon, influenced European satire and imaginative literature, with renaissance humanists including Erasmus and Thomas More drawing upon his techniques of philosophical ridicule and social inversion.

Among the earliest exhibits was a diminutive 1586 edition of the laws of Emperor Justinian. Its modest proportions conceal its importance as a witness to the transmission of Roman jurisprudence into Renaissance legal scholarship. Equally revealing is its typography, belonging to the tradition of the Grecs du Roi, the celebrated sixteenth-century French Greek typefaces modelled upon the handwriting of late Byzantine scribes. Their elaborate ligatures and interlocking characters can bewilder modern readers, yet they demonstrate how the revolutionary technology of printing preserved the visual conventions of manuscript culture. Even the shape of a letter could carry an older civilisation into a new intellectual age.

The ecclesiastical volumes on display tell a more immediate story of survival. During Ottoman rule, Venice became a principal centre of Greek printing, supplying Orthodox communities with Gospels, Psalters and liturgical books. Particularly important were the publishing enterprises of Greeks from Ioannina, including Nikolaos Glykys, Nikolaos Saros and Dimitrios Theodosiou, whose presses sustained networks extending throughout the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Through such volumes, common forms of worship endured despite political fragmentation and the precarious circumstances of many Orthodox communities.

Among the most intriguing exhibits was a Gospel book dated 1756, associated with Moschopolis, in present-day Albania. During the following century, this largely Vlach-speaking town became a remarkable centre of commerce, education and Greek-language scholarship, establishing a printing press in 1731. Its inhabitants demonstrate the inadequacy of projecting modern national categories backwards onto the Ottoman Balkans. Greek functioned as a language of education, religion and wider intellectual communication among people whose everyday speech was largely Vlach. The attacks beginning in 1769, amid the disturbances associated with Russian-backed revolutionary agitation, contributed to the town's decline and the dispersal of its population. Moschopolis lost its prominence, yet the learning cultivated there travelled with those who departed. The city’s fate thus encapsulates the recurring displacement of Greek cultural centres, whose disappearance seldom entailed the extinction of the traditions they sustained.

Another remarkable volume was the 1638 Greek translation of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, undertaken by Elias Petley and published in London. Its existence reflected the interest of English ecclesiastical circles in the Orthodox East and the possibilities of theological communication through the language of the New Testament and the Greek Fathers. An English religious text thus assumed Greek form in order to participate in an international conversation about Christianity. The language thus served purposes extending beyond the communities that spoke it, acquiring authority among scholars and churchmen whose theological convictions sometimes differed substantially from those of their Orthodox interlocutors.

The bilingual Greek-Russian edition of Catherine the Great's Nakaz, published in Saint Petersburg in 1771, reveals yet another dimension of this intellectual traffic. Catherine's legislative instruction, intended to guide consideration of a new Russian law code, drew extensively upon European Enlightenment philosophy. The eminent Greek scholar Eugenios Voulgaris translated it into Greek from its French text, helping introduce contemporary political and legal ideas to a wider Orthodox readership. Voulgaris, who later became Archbishop of Slaviansk and Kherson, exemplified the mobility of Greek intellectuals whose activities crossed imperial and cultural boundaries. Here, Western European political thought, itself partly indebted to classical traditions, passed through Russian imperial institutions and returned to the Greek-speaking world in translation.

Perhaps the most affecting exhibit was an altogether more prosaic volume: an algebra textbook by Manuel Christaris of Ioannina, published in Vienna in 1804. Its frontispiece records that members of the Greek diaspora commissioned the work for use in Greek schools, so that young people might receive an education. Merchants living far from their ancestral communities had financed a mathematics textbook for children they might never meet, their generosity expressing a conviction that collective advancement depended upon the cultivation of knowledge.

The book belongs to the intellectual atmosphere of the Modern Greek Enlightenment, when education increasingly became associated with the prospect of national regeneration. Before political independence could be achieved, a generation had to acquire the resources with which to imagine and sustain it. In that modest textbook one senses the anticipation of a future whose precise form remained uncertain. By the time of the also on display 1829 French-language Histoire de la Révolution grecque, associated with Alexandros Soutsos, the struggle for Greek independence had become a subject of European political and literary debate. The language of publication itself reveals how Greek aspirations were articulated within an international intellectual environment.

Yet the exhibition also raised a more difficult question concerning the historical boundaries of Hellenism. An 1824 Greek-Albanian New Testament printed in Corfu employed Greek characters to represent Albanian, in a period pre-dating the emergence of lbanian nationalism and a standardised script, while a Psalter in Karamanlidika presented Turkish in Greek script for Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor. Such books demonstrate that language, religion, ethnicity and national identity have seldom coincided as neatly as later national narratives suggest. Greek letters could retain religious and cultural significance among communities whose everyday language was entirely different. The alphabet itself became a means of expressing affiliation, even where the spoken word had changed.

These examples have particular relevance in Australia, where the future of the Greek language is frequently discussed in terms of decline. We lament the diminishing number of children who speak Greek at home, the difficulties confronting community schools and the growing distance separating younger generations from the literary and religious language of their ancestors. Such concerns are legitimate, although the history of Greek printing suggests that cultural continuity has always involved changes in language, educational practice and the institutions through which knowledge is transmitted.

Indeed, many of the books displayed would appear almost as incomprehensible to contemporary Greek Australians as the textbooks imported from Greece during the migration decades of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s now appear to their grandchildren. Those once indispensable instruments of cultural preservation lie neglected in the cupboards of community schools and parish libraries, their illustrations, vocabulary and assumptions belonging to a society that has since transformed itself. Like the venerable volumes in my collection, they represent deliberate attempts to transmit an inheritance to future generations, undertaken by people who believed that education was essential to the survival of their community.

Historian Benedict Anderson famously described nations as imagined communities, sustained partly through the circulation of printed language. The Greek experience both illuminates and complicates his argument. Long before the establishment of a modern Greek nation-state, books connected communities scattered across different empires, speaking different languages and possessing varied understandings of their collective identity. Their relationships were religious, educational and commercial as well as national. Consequently, the boundaries of the community imagined through print were therefore continually negotiated, rather than permanently fixed.

This history invites us to reconsider the meaning of preservation. The institutions established by Greek migrants in Australia reflect the circumstances, priorities and educational assumptions of their generation. However, their future relevance depends upon their ability to engage with descendants whose experiences differ substantially from those of their founders. The challenge lies in discerning which elements of the inheritance remain essential and how they might find expression in forms meaningful to contemporary society.

Returning to that small edition of Justinian, with its Byzantine ligatures painstakingly reproduced in Renaissance metal type, I find an image of our own predicament. Its printers employed a new technology while retaining the appearance of an older tradition. They could scarcely have imagined that, more than four centuries later, their work would be displayed in a Greek church hall in Melbourne, before descendants of migrants whose language and cultural habits would have seemed equally unfamiliar to them.

Yet the letters remain, awaiting interpretation. Their survival offers neither a guarantee of our own nor a prescription for achieving it. It reminds us that the history of Hellenism has been written through successive acts of imaginative reconstruction, and that its future will depend upon our willingness to undertake the same labour.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

Firat published in NKEE on Saturday 7 November 2026