GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH

GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH, modern. Greece is the oldest country in Europe, but it is a relatively new nation-state. Its independence from the Ottoman Empire (q.v.) dates only to the 1820s. The Greek Revolution of 1821 was significantly influenced, and the resulting state shaped, by men deeply impressed by the Western European movements of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This proved to be a mixed blessing for the Orthodox Church and culture of the country: Church and state were ordered in ways more dependent on Western models and an already Westernized imperial Russia than on the Greek Christian past. The Byzantine era (q.v.) was held in contempt by the new establishment and contrasted to an uncritical and romantic portrait of classical Greece, a portrait again drawn largely from the European classicism of the Renaissance. The result was, and continues to be, a sort of national schizophrenia not unlike the debates between Westernizers and Slavophiles (q.v.), which divided 19th-c Russia and which have resurfaced in the post-Soviet era. (See Phanariot; Tikas, Seraphim).