GREEKS AND THE ANTI-SEMITIC POGROMS OF ODESSA

Odessa entered the nineteenth century as an imperial experiment. Founded in 1794 on the site of an ancient Greek colony, it developed rapidly into a major Black Sea port whose population was shaped by trade, mobility and imperial privilege. Greeks and Jews, fleeing persecution and seeking opportunity, arrived early and settled in large numbers. By the 1820s, both communities occupied prominent positions in the city’s commercial and social life. Greek merchants dominated shipping, brokerage and international trade networks, while Jewish traders, artisans and middlemen expanded steadily within retail, finance and grain export. Proximity and competition were inescapable.

The first major rupture between the two groups occurred in 1821, driven by events unfolding far beyond Odessa. The outbreak of the Greek War of Independence and the execution of Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V in Constantinople reverberated across the Orthodox world. Odessa, home to a politically active Greek diaspora and members of the Filiki Eteria, became a centre of agitation. Greek refugees arrived from Ottoman territories bearing accounts of violence, executions and reprisals. Within this charged atmosphere, allegations circulated that Jews in Constantinople had assisted Ottoman authorities in the patriarch’s execution and had even agitated in favour of it. These claims were repeated with growing insistence in the Greek coffee houses and clubs of Odessa.

The burial of Gregory V in Odessa in June 1821, after his body was recovered from the sea, provided the immediate setting for violence. Contemporary observers describe unrest breaking out during the funeral procession itself. The German writer Heinrich Zschokke, present in the city shortly afterwards, recorded that Greek attacks on Jewish homes and shops erupted simultaneously in several districts. Windows were smashed, shops looted and individuals assaulted. The main synagogue was damaged. Later reconstructions based on municipal records indicate that seventeen Jews were killed and more than sixty injured.

Imperial forces were deployed, though their role proved ambiguous. Zschokke reported uneven intervention by soldiers and Cossacks and noted that looting continued in their presence. He further observed that advance warnings had circulated among Jews advising them to remain indoors, suggesting foreknowledge on the part of local officials.

The 1821 pogrom was treated by the authorities as a disturbance arising from exceptional circumstances. No structural measures were introduced to prevent recurrence, and the event was soon forgotten, its memory remaining largely confined to the Jewish community. Within Odessa’s Greek milieu, it was absorbed into narratives of martyrdom and national awakening.

Over the following decades, economic relations in the city shifted markedly. The abolition of Odessa’s free port status in 1859, together with the aftermath of the Crimean War, weakened Greek mercantile dominance. Jewish firms expanded into sectors vacated by Greek trading houses. By mid-century, Jewish traders were prominent in grain export, retail and finance, with statistical surveys from the 1860s showing steadily increasing Jewish ownership across commercial sectors. Greek commentators and merchants registered this transformation with growing resentment.

A second pogrom targeting Odessa’s Jewish population occurred in 1859 during the Orthodox Easter period. Its immediate catalysts lay in the circulation of rumours rather than in any identifiable political event. Jews were accused of ritual murder and of desecrating a Greek Orthodox church and cemetery, allegations drawing upon long-established European antisemitic tropes. In subsequent correspondence, Governor Alexander Stroganov attributed the outbreak to religious fanaticism intensified by false reports.

Violence broke out among groups of Greek sailors and dockworkers, joined by local residents. Jewish homes and shops were systematically attacked. Some contemporary accounts record that Jewish residents confronted their assailants holding Christian icons, hoping that the display of sacred images might restrain or deter the violence. Sources differ regarding fatalities, with some reporting one Jewish death and others two, while several individuals were seriously injured. Property damage was limited in scale compared with later events, though the symbolic impact was considerable. Local newspapers described the episode as a street fight, avoiding the language of communal violence, and once the unrest subsided, the administration treated the matter as resolved.

By the late 1860s, Odessa had become one of the Russian Empire’s largest Jewish urban centres, a transformation accompanied by the growing prominence of Jewish entrepreneurs and the further decline of Greek firms. Within the Greek community, these shifts were increasingly experienced as displacement and loss, with responsibility for economic decline frequently attributed to Jewish competitors. Tensions hardened as economic resentment was expressed in religious terms. Pamphlets circulated accusing Jews of exploiting Christian labour and mocking Orthodoxy, while the memory of Patriarch Gregory V was revived, detached from its historical context and redeployed as a symbolic instrument of grievance.

Against this background, the pogrom of 1871 unfolded over several days and marked a qualitative escalation. It erupted once more during Orthodox Holy Week, apparently triggered by a minor altercation whose precise circumstances remain unclear. What can be established with greater certainty is that organised groups quickly coalesced and directed their actions toward Jewish districts. Contemporary reports and later investigations identified Greek merchants and agitators as principal organisers, and the violence spread methodically, with Jewish taverns, shops and homes subjected to widespread destruction.

Municipal records and eyewitness accounts indicate that more than eight hundred homes and five hundred businesses were damaged or looted, displacing thousands of Jewish residents. Official casualty figures recorded six Jewish deaths and twenty-one injuries, although some contemporary Russian reports sought to minimise fatalities. The scale and pattern of destruction suggest restraint in the use of lethal force, possibly shaped by an assumption that authorities would tolerate extensive property damage while intervening decisively only in cases of murder.

The response of the imperial administration was marked by hesitation. Governor-General Pavel Kotzebue delayed decisive military intervention, while Jewish self-defence groups were dispersed by police and Cossack units rather than permitted to protect their neighbourhoods. In this atmosphere of uncertainty, a rumour circulated among rioters that imperial permission had been granted to destroy Jewish property. One Russian eyewitness later recalled a remark attributed to a Greek participant in the violence: “Do you think we could destroy and beat Jews for three whole days if that had not been the will of the authorities?” Order was restored only when unrest spread beyond Jewish districts and threatened the stability of the city as a whole.

Arrests followed, with approximately six hundred individuals detained, largely from the urban poor. No prominent organisers were subjected to serious punishment. Official reports attributed the pogrom to intoxication, religious passion and class resentment, while an internal memorandum explained hostility as arising from perceptions of Jewish economic dominance combined with religious difference. The language of these assessments avoided sustained engagement with structural or systemic factors.

Jewish intellectual responses were swift. Writing in Odessa in 1871, the jurist Ilya Orshansky framed the violence in legal terms: “Until such time as the divergence between the Jews’ actual and juridical position in Russia is permanently removed by eliminating all existing limitations on their rights, hostility to the Jews will not only persist, but in all likelihood will increase.” His assessment circulated widely within Jewish legal and journalistic circles. The journalist Mikhail Kulisher approached the events from a psychological perspective, observing that “beneath the apparently accidental and singular Odessa pogrom we discovered something of enduring importance, namely, that Judeophobia was not a theoretical error of some kind, but a psychic attitude in which centuries upon centuries of hatred was reflected.”

Taken together, the three Odessa pogroms form a coherent pattern rather than isolated disturbances. In each case, rumours framed in religious language circulated during periods of economic transition, often coinciding with heightened liturgical moments, while administrative hesitation operated as a permissive condition. During this phase of Odessa’s history, the Greek community emerged as the principal initiator of anti-Jewish violence, a role that diminished after 1871 as leadership of pogrom activity shifted toward Slavic populations and organised far-right movements. In this respect, Odessa invites comparison with imperial cities such as Roman Alexandria, where Greek and Jewish communities similarly competed for proximity to power, civic privilege and economic advantage, and where violence erupted when imperial authority proved ambivalent.

In Odessa, as in Alexandria, communal conflict unfolded within an imperial framework that rewarded intermediaries. Greeks in southern Russia functioned for decades as favoured Orthodox agents of empire, occupying a position shaped by commercial utility, religious affinity and political expediency. This alignment conferred privilege while also exposing the community to instrumentalisation. Although direct state orchestration of the pogroms cannot be demonstrated, patterns of hesitation, selective enforcement and narrative minimisation suggest that Greek hostility toward Jews operated within tolerable limits of imperial policy, at times deflecting social tension without destabilising the broader order.

The consequences of this history extended beyond its Jewish victims and profoundly shaped the Greek community itself. As mercantile dominance declined and imperial favour weakened, Greeks in Odessa came to occupy an increasingly ambiguous position within the Russian state. Following the Russian Revolution and civil war, the Greek population of southern Russia abandoned the region in large numbers, dispersing to Greece, the Balkans and the wider diaspora. In exile, memories of Odessa were selectively reordered. Narratives of prosperity, philanthropy and national awakening were preserved, while episodes of communal violence were marginalised or omitted, excluded from the usable past through which displaced Greek communities articulated their twentieth-century identity.

Greek-language sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflect this selectivity. Memoirs, communal histories and publications produced by Greek Odessans emphasise educational institutions, churches, benefactions and revolutionary activity, often portraying the city as a site of harmonious coexistence later disrupted by Russian or Bolshevik violence. Where conflict is acknowledged, responsibility is diffused or reframed as disorder and popular excess. The Greek role in earlier pogroms against Jews is rarely examined directly and, when mentioned, appears obliquely, stripped of agency and specificity. Silence thus functioned as a mechanism of communal self-preservation.

The Odessa pogroms therefore illuminate more than a sequence of anti-Jewish attacks. They reveal how imperial structures fostered competition among minority intermediaries, how privilege could be extended without protection, and how violence could be absorbed into administrative routine and later effaced from communal memory. As in Alexandria under Rome, coexistence rested on contingent favour rather than secure equality. The surviving record remains incomplete, shaped as much by omission as by preservation, reminding us that communal histories are determined as decisively by what is set aside as by what is remembered.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 February 2026

SON OF HYDRA

 

Shelley Dark’s new book: Son of Hydra moves like saltwater through the consciousness of every Greek-Australian who has ever reflected upon the history of their forefathers. The narrative begins in exile, and the reader is immediately placed within the salt-stained boots of Ghikas Voulgaris, a young Hydriot who once stood at the threshold of inheritance, maritime command and familial expectation. Circumstance transports him instead upon the convict ships of Empire, the outcome of imperial suspicion and the harsh logic of history. We embark beside him, caught within opposing currents. The embers of the Greek Revolution continue to glow, while the British sentence passed upon him casts a long shadow over his identity, tinging his courage with doubt and marking him as both defiant and compromised.

Dark’s masterly portrayal of companionship is one of the novel’s most affecting achievements. Ghikas’ four compatriots, Andonis, Damos, Kostas and Nikos, travel beside him, each shaped by distinctly Hydriot sensibilities that transcend their island’s borders. Andonis possesses a gentleness that lends to every scene a quiet constancy. Damos, tough and irreverent, challenges authority and fate with the ease of one accustomed to hardship. Kostas, reticent yet unwavering, reveals a depth of character that is rooted in loyalty and inner strength. Nikos, the most exposed to harm, grounds the group’s humanity through his refusal to believe that cruelty must be repaid in kind, and through his yearning for the kindnesses of home. Dark renders their brotherhood with such intimacy, and with so faithful an ear for Hydriot idiom and interaction, that Hydra itself seems to pulse through their speech, gestures and glances.

Ghikas’ gradual transformation is charted with sensitivity and insight. He begins with the ardour of one raised amid revolution and maritime prosperity, imagining a future of command, wealth and social standing. As the story unfolds, he exchanges ambition for the more exacting demands of survival, resourcefulness and dignity. Leadership takes on new meaning within the penal colony. It ceases to be the art of strategy alone and becomes the work of protecting others, negotiating peril and at times enduring in silence. The memory of his father’s condemnation weighs heavily upon him, although the reader witnesses his slow ascent from shame. Every act of care towards Nikos, every negotiation with a guard, every flash of humour that defies despair contributes to his quiet reclamation of self.

Ghikas Voulgaris, among the earliest Greeks to set foot upon the Australian continent, serves as both mirror and lantern for generations of Greek-Australians seeking to understand the foundations of their presence here. Dark’s depiction compels attention because it defies simplistic categories. The narrative dwells in the unresolved space where legend meets record. The seven Hydriots, labelled pirates by some and hailed as freedom-fighters by others, are presented as men negotiating the shifting ground of imperial law, settler violence and the intricate politics of inheritance. The question of whether to embrace or obscure a convict genesis becomes emblematic of broader tensions within diasporic memory. British Imperial designation of piracy reveals itself as an act that imposes a legacy of transgression, binding newcomers to an Australian mythos born in violence and moral ambiguity.

Through a postcolonial lens, Dark’s narrative intervention becomes more than a literary exercise. It constitutes a critique of the coloniality of the archive and its epistemic violence. Ghikas is a subject historically positioned within structures that denied him narrative authority, recorded through British legal discourse that defined him through criminality and suspicion. His presence in the colonial record was shaped by institutional mechanisms that sought to categorise, discipline and silence the non-Anglo other. Dark’s act of fictional recuperation intervenes in this authorised narrative space by constructing a counter-archive in which Ghikas is endowed with interiority, agency and ideological complexity. This intervention is complicated by the author’s position as a member of the dominant cultural group within contemporary Australia, although this again is rendered ambiguous by her being married to a descendant of the historical Ghikas. The postcolonial ethical stakes of ventriloquising a subaltern voice must nonetheless be acknowledged.

While the subaltern may not speak within the colonial archive without mediation as Spivak would conend, Dark’s project rejects the simplistic restoration of voice common to rehabilitative historical fiction. She neither idealises Ghikas as a hero reclaimed from British slander nor reproduces the colonial caricature that reduced him to a disruptive foreign element. Instead, she sustains the tension inherent in subaltern representation. Ghikas is allowed to exist within contradiction, capable of courage and misjudgement, loyalty and anger. Dark’s marriage into the Voulgaris line further complicates this dynamic. She writes as both heir to the settler-colonial cultural centre and as custodian of a diasporic inheritance. This duality mitigates the risk of epistemic appropriation and situates her narrative labour within an ethics of relational accountability, rather than detached scholarly claim over the subaltern voice.

Such an approach avoids the triumphalist tendencies that have often characterised Greek and Greek-Australian retellings of foundational migrant narratives. In place of hagiography, Dark offers critical intimacy. The legacy of the seven Hydriots has often been filtered through a lens of heroic exceptionalism, in which the convict stain is erased, the men recast as proto-migrants whose presence foreshadowed the industriousness and moral fibre of later Greek arrivals. Dark resists this narrative sanitisation. Her novel exposes the discomforts of diasporic belonging, revealing that the desire to mythologise origins is itself a response to the anxieties of minority identity negotiation within a settler-colonial society. By reintroducing complexity and moral ambiguity into the story, she challenges communities to confront the shadowed dimensions of their own past.

Among the secondary figures, Mary Lyons emerges with particular force. Frequently relegated in colonial narratives to the role of witness or reward, here she possesses agency, moral complexity and resolve. She declines the prospect of a circumscribed Greek womanhood defined by absence and instead attempts to fashion a life within the unsettled realm of the colony. Her relationship with Ghikas unsettles familiar binaries. Otherness is no longer simply the Greeks in conflict with British power, for both characters must confront their own dislocation, longing and limits of adaptation. Dark’s perceptive handling of gender, power and the hidden migrations of shame across cultures grants the novel a rare depth.

The novel also offers a gentle reframing of women’s place within such origin stories. Dark accords Mary Lyons a degree of presence and inner life that counters the erasures which often afflict women in both colonial and diasporic narratives. Rather than functioning as a sentimental ornament to the male exile or a moral yardstick against which his character is measured, Mary is allowed a voice, a history and a personal reckoning with the limitations imposed upon her. Her choices are shaped by the social codes of the period, yet she retains a quiet determination to shape her life with dignity. Through Mary, Dark demonstrates that the experiences of women in the colony possessed their own moral and emotional complexity, and that they too navigated profound displacement. In granting her such careful attention, Dark enables a more humane and inclusive retelling of the foundational story.

 

This treatment intersects with another element that distinguishes Son of Hydra from many Greek and Greek Australian accounts of early migrant figures. Diasporic retellings have often elevated the male pioneer to emblematic status, investing him with virtues intended to counteract insecurity in the host society. The cost of this narrative strategy is that the women connected to such figures are turned into abstractions. They are invoked as patient keepers of the hearth, as guardians of memory or as silent companions to the heroic male trajectory. Dark resists this pattern. She neither idealises Mary as a vessel of moral purity nor diminishes her as an appendage to Ghikas’ odyssey. Instead, she invites readers to recognise that women participated actively in the formation of community and in the bearing of its moral burdens. Mary’s endurance, integrity and capacity for compassion become essential to the preservation of the legacy that later generations inherit. In this sense, Dark subtly restores women to the narrative as agents of continuity rather than symbols of passivity.

 

The novel’s closing sections reinforce its central preoccupation with the formation of identity in conditions of rupture. The seven Hydriots come to embody the experience of forging meaning amid loss and reinvention. Their story resonates with those who have inherited the mixed legacy of migration, for it acknowledges that belonging is achieved gradually, through choices made in adversity, through acts of compassion and through the refusal to surrender one’s sense of self. Dark’s vivid prose, attentive characterisation and commitment to ethical storytelling combine to produce a work that honours the complexity of the past without succumbing to nostalgia or to triumphal myth-making.

 

There is a quiet courage in Dark’s method. She declines to resolve every contradiction or to claim moral certainty on behalf of her characters. Instead, she invites readers to reflect on the ambiguity that defines human lives. The seven Hydriots are neither purely heroic nor wholly compromised. They are men who endured displacement, injustice and the weight of expectation, who made mistakes and who sought redemption in small gestures of humanity. In presenting their story in this way, Dark encourages contemporary readers to approach their own histories with humility, curiosity and compassion. The legacy she articulates is one of complexity embraced rather than denied.

 

Son of Hydra may be read as an invitation to reconsider the narratives through which communities understand themselves. It suggests that dignity resides not in the perfection of origins, but in the willingness to confront them with honesty. For Greek Australians, this requires the courage to acknowledge the shadows as well as the triumphs of their early presence in this country. By doing so, they may discover a more grounded and generous foundation upon which to build their identity. Dark’s novel offers a model for such engagement. It demonstrates that when the past is approached with empathy and critical attentiveness, it becomes a source of insight rather than burden.

In the end, the novel extends its reach beyond the Greek-Australian community. It speaks to anyone who has grappled with the inheritance of migration, who has searched for belonging across cultures, or who has inherited a story that felt fractured or incomplete. Through Ghikas, Mary and their companions, Dark affirms that identity is shaped by the choices we make in adversity and by the compassion we extend to others. The story becomes a testament to resilience, to the capacity of individuals to craft meaning from dislocation and to the enduring human desire for home, even when home must be remade in unfamiliar soil.

The great achievement of Son of Hydra lies in its refusal to present origins as static. It shows that every legacy can be renewed through mindful retelling. As readers step away from its final pages, they may feel invited to carry forward a more generous understanding of the past, one that embraces complexity and honours all who contributed to the story. In doing so, the novel leaves us with a sense of uplift, encouraging us to walk our own long road with openness, integrity and hope.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 7 February 2026

 

ON ACHILLEAS

 

The first time I realised that Achilleas Yiangoulli was not quite like other people was when I watched him stop a rehearsal dead, mid-song. This did not take place because someone had played a wrong note, but rather because someone had played a note too earnestly. He paused, looked up slowly, and said, with perfect serenity: “This song has suffered enough.”

Then there was the time I brought my Chinese erhu to the Pontian Club and joined with Achilleas and the rest of the members of his band in playing rebetika. Soon after an elderly member of the club approached me:

-        Τι είναι αυτό;

-        Κινέζικη λύρα, I responded.

-        Μιλάς πολύ καλά ελληνικά για έναν Κινέζο, the man observed.

Achilleas, not being able to contain himself, smiled and asked: - Καλά, Πόντιος είστε;

I was gutted by the news of his death. Achilleas was a dear friend and a teacher in ways he may never have realised, or if he had, admitted. He was truly unique, a person who taught without instruction, corrected without humiliation, and mocked without cruelty. Truly, he possessed that rarest of talents: the ability to puncture pretension while leaving the human being intact.

Achilleas and I shared a birthday, and every year, without fail, he was the first person to call me to wish me happy birthday. He treated birthdays the way he treated music: miss the opening beat and the whole thing collapses. The call was never cliché in the conventional sense, but aways meaningful, invariably involving an obscure reference, a deadpan observation, something faintly absurd, and then laughter that appeared without warning, like a Shostakovitchian dissonance that unsettles the ear and takes a while to be resolved.

We also shared a fondness for the obscure and the absurd, and the deep privilege (mine, not his) of making music together many times. Achilleas was a quiet force for good in the world, though he would have visibly recoiled at the word “instrumental” for he despised puns unless he was the one using them, in sustaining the life of our community music scene. This he achieved without preaching, without seeking to draw attention to himself or big-noting his many achievements (he was, among other things, ‘instrumental’ in bringing about the first ever performance of Elytis’ Axion Esti in Australia,) but by showing up, at so many events around Melbourne and broader Australia, week after week, armed with a guitar, an impeccable ear, and an internal alarm system that activated instantly at the presence of nonsense, although he tended to employ a more strident term.

Achilleas had an innate ability to detect insincerity and hypocrisy. It was almost scientific. He could sense it before it had fully formed. To some, he may have appeared cynical or detached, but everything he did was driven by a fierce loyalty to his own beliefs, his moral code and the people who he loved. He had no patience for people who were insincere, though he was invariably kind to everyone. This apparent contradiction was, in fact, his genius. He understood that kindness does not require agreement, and honesty does not require brutality. At his funeral Irine Vela likened him to Simon the Likeable, the Kaos agent from Get Smart, in his innate capacity to have people warm to him. Unlike her, I am firmly of the belief that my friend was an agent of Kaos, in that he was innately subversive and refused to accept the tropes, ideologies, assumptions and buzzwords that frame our lives without interrogation.

I was constantly astonished by the breadth of his musical knowledge, which encompassed all spheres. Achilleas didn’t merely play music. He inhabited it. To sit with him and play was an overwhelming experience because he was the exact opposite of a tape recorder mechanically reproducing songs. To the contrary, his interpretations came from a deep, life-long engagement with lyrics, history, and the social conditions that produced them. Music, for Achilleas, was not nostalgia, or merely a means of earning a livelihood. It was life itself

I once argued with him about his version of Ραγίζει απόψε η καρδιά. Instead of singing Τυχαία δήθεν αν τη δεις, φέρ’ την στο ταβερνάκι, he sang στον Ταβερνάκη. When I objected, he laughed and said, “Imagine Tavernakis as the personification of all tavernas.” It was absurd. It was brilliant. It was completely correct. Achilleas had an uncanny habit of being right in ways that initially sounded wrong. He was always inserting fragments of himself into his art. That was what made it so intimate, so alive, so unrepeatable.

I will never forget his nonchalant, devastatingly precise remarks during the Canberra Greek Festival in 2009. Delivered deadpan as I struggled on stage, stoically attempting to introduce the band, they reduced me to helpless laughter. Those remarks are as unprintable as they were hilarious. Achilleas understood timing in the deepest sense, not just musical timing, but most importantly human timing. He knew exactly when silence should be broken and when it should be allowed to do the work.

He and the rest of Rebetiki Compania let me join them on Friday night rebetiko nights at the Pontian Koinotita for two years and it would not be an exaggeration to maintain that he played an intrinsic role in transforming Melbourne into one of the most important centres of the genre in the world. He lent me his preamp to give my violin more sound, delicately obscuring the fact the real problem was not the amplification but the violinist. Quietly, behind the scenes, he offered guidance, because he was gentle. He knew that ego is a fragile instrument and should never be played loudly. We ate much κατσίκι στο φούρνο together in those days and merely basking in his company was an education in itself.

After two years, I stopped playing, though I continued to follow him wherever he performed. One day he asked, “Have you still got my preamp?” I said yes and arranged to return it. When we met, I found I couldn’t hand it over. He noticed, smiled, and said: “It’s okay. Just give it back. It’s time to let go. Time for others to continue on.”

That was Achilleas in a sentence. We hold things only long enough to pass them on. We borrow sound. We borrow stages. We borrow one another. What matters is not what we accumulate, but what we release with grace.

Achillea, it was not time for you to hand over your preamp. You had so much more to give. But as always, you were right. It is time for us to let you go, and time for us to continue along the path you marked out: truthful, curious, allergic to pretension, generous with our gifts, and unafraid to laugh at the world when it mistakes seriousness for depth.

I close my eyes and I can see you winking at me, the way you used to whenever I would miss a note, or not get a joke. We will not miss you in the ordinary sense, because you are already everywhere we learned to listen more carefully. But our community will feel poorer, lonelier, and a little less sharply tuned without you.

Just a week before you left us, I purchased my daughter a guitar and when she asked which songs she should learn, I told her that this should invariably be your Beatles favourite, ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ To her I related my memories of you arguing over which Beatles song is the most technically perfect and I promised her that once she mastered the song, I would get her to play it with you. This is why I teared up at your funeral, walking into the chapel, only to hear ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ playing gently in the background. And this is why, when I returned home, I taught the song to my daughter, just as you taught it to me.

And somewhere, I like to think, the great Tavernakis in the sky is pouring you a drink, all tavernas condensed into one, while you correct his rhythm gently, and tell him kindly, with that twinkle in your eye, that the song has suffered enough.

Καλή αντάμωση φίλε.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 31 January 2026

HATE SPEECH PROTECTION - AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE

The Australian government has published an exposure draft of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, which would insert a new federal criminal offence of publicly promoting or inciting racial hatred, including by disseminating ideas of superiority over or hatred toward a person or group on the grounds of race, colour, or national or ethnic origin. The offence turns on intention and on whether the conduct would, in all the circumstances, cause a reasonable member of the targeted group to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety. The draft also provides that the offence does not apply to conduct consisting only of directly quoting from, or otherwise referencing, a religious text for the purpose of religious teaching or discussion.

Public controversy has coalesced around this treatment of religious texts. For some, it represents a necessary acknowledgment that religious traditions teach from inherited writings. For others, it appears as a loophole capable of laundering incitement through the cadence of piety. Australia’s peak Jewish body has publicly questioned the wisdom of such a carve-out, warning that it risks granting dangerous latitude to those who would shelter hostility behind quotation. From another direction comes the concern that the same drafting may chill legitimate debate while failing to capture the most effective forms of contemporary mobilisation. The dispute reveals the difficulty of legislating speech within a public culture structured by fragmentation, circulation and performance.

The Orthodox contribution to this debate lies not in seeking special accommodation but rather in questioning the assumption that Orthodoxy requires a clerical or scriptural exemption in order to remain faithful to its own theological commitments. Literalism has never functioned as a normative mode of reading within the Orthodox tradition. Within it, as opposed to other traditions, Scripture is received through an inherited discipline of interpretation whose purpose is to prevent the conversion of divine speech into an instrument of harm. Where the law struggles to distinguish instruction from incitement, Orthodoxy has long maintained that distinction internally, as part of its grammar of reading.

This position emerges early and decisively. Origen of Alexandria, writing in the early third century, articulated the tripartite structure of Scripture as body, soul and spirit. The literal sense belongs to the body. The moral sense shapes the soul. The spiritual sense discloses divine truth and directs the reader toward transformation. This schema establishes an order of authority rather than a catalogue of meanings. The spiritual sense governs because it alone fulfils the purpose of revelation, which is the refashioning of the human person. A reading that generates contempt or hostility betrays its arrest at the surface of the text, even where its language remains formally accurate.

Later Fathers deepen this insight by locating interpretation within moral formation. St Gregory of Nyssa describes Scripture as pedagogical movement, transferring what is contemplated spiritually into the life of the reader, so that narrative becomes a ladder for virtue rather than a quarry for assertion. St Maximus the Confessor insists that interpretation moves from multiplicity toward unity, from fragmentation toward the coherence disclosed in Christ. The letter remains indispensable, though it never exercises independent authority. Detached from its spiritual telos, it produces distortion rather than illumination.

St John Chrysostom brings this hermeneutic into the register of pastoral realism. Scripture functions as medicine administered within the Church, aimed at healing both reader and community. Accordingly, its purpose lies in the cultivation of humility, repentance and restraint. Saint Athanasius in turn, in his discourse on the Psalms, describes them as a mirror in which the reader encounters the state of the soul before presuming to address the world. Together, these witnesses establish a consistent Orthodox intuition: Scripture forms before it instructs, reshapes before it directs, and judges the reader before it authorises judgement of others.

This interpretive restraint is also reinforced structurally by Orthodoxy’s conciliar instinct. Authority is neither vested in the solitary reader nor concentrated in charismatic assertion. Instead, Scripture is received, tested and corrected within synodality, through councils, liturgy and the long memory of tradition. Conciliarity disperses interpretive power and subjects it to accountability. A tradition ordered in this way does not readily generate unilateral, literalist proclamations. Where interpretation remains communal and answerable, the temptation to weaponise isolated verses recedes.

A further distinction is required between offence and harm. Orthodoxy has never promised insulation from offence. Its saints endure insult, mockery and persecution without demanding protection, and its theology shows little patience for wounded pride elevated into moral principle. Harm occupies a different register. Speech that dissolves communion, dehumanises entire communities or habituates contempt strikes at the relational fabric Orthodoxy regards as constitutive of personhood. The law’s concern with intimidation and fear operates within this horizon. Restraint aimed at preventing harm does not conflict with Orthodox witness, because the tradition already treats disciplined speech as integral to faithfulness.

Thus the fragility of contemporary religious victimhood rhetoric is eposed. A tradition forged under empire, exile and marginality does not confuse the loss of rhetorical licence with persecution. Orthodoxy’s historical memory resists the inflation of inconvenience into martyrdom. It recognises that faith has often flourished under constraint, and that credibility erodes when every external limit is framed as existential threat. Proportion, therefore, functions as a theological virtue.

Underlying these questions lies a deeper divergence over the nature of free speech itself. Liberal discourse often treats speech as an absolute entitlement grounded in individual autonomy. Orthodoxy approaches speech ascetically. Words are acts. They shape the speaker as much as the hearer. Freedom of speech is measured by the capacity to speak without wounding communion. Silence can be an exercise of freedom. Refusal can be an ethical act. The highest use of speech remains blessing rather than assertion.

The legal controversy nonetheless exposes a genuine structural difficulty. Law and Orthodoxy manage meaning on different planes. Law operates externally, inferring function from intent, context, pattern and likely effect. Courts must determine whether an utterance operates as teaching or incitement using evidentiary markers available to them. The religious-text defence reflects this limitation. It gestures toward the existence of interpretive traditions without possessing the competence to adjudicate them from within. Orthodoxy regulates interpretation internally through discipline rather than procedure. The distinction the law seeks to draw already exists structurally within Orthodox practice.

The deeper issue, therefore, is neither whether the law protects Orthodoxy nor whether it threatens it. The law addresses effects that Orthodoxy has always treated as symptoms of internal failure. When interpretation collapses into assertion and Scripture becomes an identity marker rather than an instrument of transformation, it has already exited the Orthodox hermeneutical universe. Legal scrutiny arrives late, responding to consequences ecclesial discipline was designed to prevent at their source.

This returns the argument to the centre of the Orthodox position. Orthodoxy reads Scripture teleologically, ordered toward communion. The Gospel announces this in its very name. Εὐαγγέλιον signifies good news, proclamation directed toward repentance, consolation and reconciliation. When Scripture is mobilised to cultivate contempt for ethnic or racial groups, it has been severed from its Gospel telos, even where its wording remains intact. The tradition has always regarded such severance as spiritual disorder. St Paul’s diagnosis remains decisive: the letter kills, the Spirit gives life.

The ultimate question raised by the present controversy is inward rather than juridical. The Church does not depend on exemptions to preserve its integrity. It depends on its capacity to continue forming readers capable of restraint in an age that rewards excess. Whatever boundaries courts succeed or fail in drawing around incitement, the Orthodox responsibility remains unchanged: to refuse the reduction of Scripture to slogan, to resist the conversion of divine language into instrument, and to insist again that the highest reading of the text is the one that gives life.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 24 February 2026