LEADERS IN PROFILE Archbishop Makarios, Priest Or Politician?

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28258, 22 April 1957, Page 8

LEADERS IN PROFILE Archbishop Makarios, Priest Or Politician?

[By

KEITH RENSHAW]

The choicest dish of the Seychelles, from which Archbishop Makarios lately sailed out of imprisonment, is “millionaire’s salad,” so called because its main ingredient is the tenuous terminal roots of the coconut palm and the removal of these tiny morsels kills the whole tree. During his year’s enforced stay in the islands, the Archbishop, who prefers vegetables to meat without being a strict vegetarian, doubtless heard of this whim-sically-titled delicacy. Its significance could not have escaped the keen brain of a man steeped in the ironies of classical Greek tragedy. For when the British deported him from his archiepiscopal see of Cyprus in March, 1956, were they not attempting to deprive the Enosis movement, with its vocal and often bloody agitation for union of the island with Greece, of one of its vital roots? Unlike the coconut palm, that tree did not wholly wither. There are many reasons for this, and to suggest that the British Government only succeeded 'ln leaking a martyr of the Archbishop is to leave aside far more important considerations to do with a man himself and the unique position he holds in Greek Cypriot society. He is hardly the prime mover in the Enosis movement that many have taken him to be. He is rather the living embodiment of forces, historic and present, religious and secular. As such, he is their leading exponent, but it is largely the forces who have made the leader, not the leader the forces. The Archbishop’s powers are less personal than public. Were it not so, his exile might have been a much heavier blow to the movement than it was. The heavy-smoking, tea-drink-ing Makarios is at one and the same time the leader of his wineloving people and the slave of their—and his—ideals. The mainspring of his authority lies in the peculiar overlapping of priestly and political roles that his office demands. The British idea that politics and religion should be kept separate has no meaning in Cyprus. Historical Maze Over the last 2500 years, Cyprus has been governed by Persians, Egyptians, Romans, Franks, Venetians, Genoese, Turks and British. But never, incidentally, by the Greeks. Since the spread of Christianity, and especially since the fifth century, the Orthodox Church in Cyprus has been the single consistent thread through the island’s historical maze. Time and again it has shown a sturdy independence of its brother churches and of the island’s many masters. Inevitably

it has become the rallying point of Greek Cypriot ambitions, and the centre of their community existence.

Even the election of their Archbishop is on a loosely popular basis and his second title of Ethnarch means, roughly, “Community Leader.” This is the strange dual office that Makarios Kykkotis took up in 1950 at the unprecedentedly early age of 37 and only three years after his consecration as bishop. Quiet obviously, and whatever one’s other thoughts may be, Archbishop Makarios is a very remarkable man. He was born a peasant’s son in 1913 and attended the local school at his village near Paphos. He has turned his extremely humble origins to good account. His most devoted support comes from the peasantry, who trust him as one of themselves. Brilliant Scholar From school he moved on to the monastery at Kykko as a novice and it was here that his scholastic brilliance first showed itself. He was selected for secondary education at Nicosia and then for study at the University of Athens. The fact that he lived in Greece right through the German occupation and played some part in the Greek underground may go a long way to explaining his subsequent attitude to the Eoka underground in Cyprus. Soon after the end of the war he was ordained. Then came another great experience of his life —the World Council of Churches awarded him a two-year scholarship in the United States. He was actually completing his divinity and sociological studies at Boston when his election as bishop came. One legacy of the American period is Makarios’s marked American accent, about which he is sensitive. Some say this accounts

for his insistence on using interpreters when giving interviews in English. Others, less charitable, suggest that an interpreter gives the Archbishop time to think up the wily answers to dissociate himself from the methods of the Eoka leadership without repudiating them. The two theories are fairly representative of the vexed and contradictory views the world takes of Archbishop Makarios, the dignified figure of a man who has shown himself an able publicist of two creeds.

Worldly priest or priestly politician? The big enigma remains. (Central Press).