Patmos Under Italian Rule

Patmos and the whole Dodecanese passed under Italian rule in 1912, and by the 1930s the Fascist administration was pressing the italianization of the islands and the suppression of Greek-language education. Amphilochios defended the Greek language, faith, and identity of his people — most notably through a workshop that doubled as a covert school of Greek — and was exiled for it from 1937 to 1939. This file sets out that history, verifying the specifics and pinning the particular claims to their sources.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Italian Dodecanese

The Dodecanese — Rhodes, Kos, Patmos, Kalymnos, Leros, and their neighbours — came under Italian control in 1912, occupied during the Italo-Turkish War and retained by Italy thereafter; Italian sovereignty was formalized by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and the islands remained Italian until the Second World War (the standard political history of the Italian Dodecanese, 1912–1943). Under the Fascist governorship — especially that of Cesare Maria De Vecchi in the later 1930s — the administration pursued an active policy of italianization: the promotion of Italian language and institutions, pressure on the Greek Orthodox Church and Greek schooling, and the discouragement of the Greek national identity of the islanders (the political history of the Fascist administration of the Dodecanese, on the italianization policies of the 1930s). It was under this régime that Amphilochios lived his whole active ministry until the Second World War, and against its pressure on Greek identity that his most public actions were directed.

For the Greek Orthodox of the islands, the Church and the Greek language were the twin bearers of a national and religious identity under threat. To defend Greek was to defend Orthodoxy, and to defend Orthodoxy was to defend Greek; the two were inseparable in the islanders’ self-understanding. Amphilochios, as monk, confessor, and then abbot of the great monastery of Patmos, stood at the center of that defense (the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder, on his defense of Greek and Orthodox identity under the occupation; Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, Synodal Act, 29 August 2018, naming him “a great defender of Orthodoxy” who “endured suffering during the Italian occupation”).

The Workshop as a School of Greek

Amphilochios’s most concrete act of resistance was the founding, during his abbacy (from 1935), of a workshop for knitting and weaving on the western side of Patmos — which was also, and deliberately, a cover under which the children of the island could continue to be taught Greek at a time when Greek-language education was being suppressed (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the workshop as “a guise under which to teach the children Greek”; OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, following the sisterhood). This workshop was, at the same time, the seed of the Convent of the Annunciation — so that the same institution served three purposes at once: a genuine handicraft, a covert school, and the nucleus of a monastic community (see Founding the Evangelismos Convent).

The combination is characteristic of resistance under occupation: the preservation of a people’s language and faith carried on under the innocent guise of a trade for young women. It was risky, and the risk was realized. When the Italian authorities discovered that the workshop was a school of Greek, they acted against its founder (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the discovery and its consequences).

Exile, 1937–1939

In 1937 the Italian authorities exiled Amphilochios from Patmos to mainland Greece for this resistance activity (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the 1937 exile; OrthodoxWiki, on the exile of 1937–1939). It was the heaviest cross of his active life: a monk deeply rooted in his island, torn from it and from the infant community he had just founded, for the crime of teaching children their own language (see Abbot of Patmos).

The exile was not idle. During it, the biography relates, Amphilochios received hospitality from the Zoe brotherhood in Athens — the influential Greek Orthodox renewal movement of the period — and travelled widely through mainland Greece and Crete, where his gifts as a confessor drew such a following that he became, in the sisterhood’s phrase, “the spiritual father of the land” of Crete (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his hospitality among the Zoe brotherhood and his ministry in Crete during the exile; Sanidopoulos, “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood). Thus the exile that was meant to silence him instead widened his ministry, carrying the confessor of Patmos to the mainland and to Crete.

He was permitted to return to Patmos in 1939 (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography; OrthodoxWiki, on the return in 1939). On his return he declined to resume the abbacy, giving himself instead to his convent and to the ministry of confession (see Abbot of Patmos).

Verifying the Specifics

Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, the particular claims of this episode should be weighed carefully. [Disputed: the specifics of the resistance and exile. The broad frame is secure and multiply attested: the Italian occupation and its italianization pressure are matters of documented political history; the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s own act names Amphilochios as a defender of Orthodoxy who suffered and was exiled under the Italian occupation. The particular details — that the workshop’s true purpose was teaching Greek, that this was the specific cause of his exile, that the exile ran 1937–1939, and that he ministered in Crete under the Zoe brotherhood’s hospitality — rest on the sisterhood’s biography and the accounts following it. These particulars are internally consistent and inherently plausible, and no source contradicts them; but they are the community’s record rather than independently documented archival facts, and are reported as such. The year of exile is generally given as 1937 and of return as 1939.] What is not in doubt is that Amphilochios stood, at real cost to himself, for the Greek language and the Orthodox faith of his people under an occupying power, and that he paid for it with exile — an aspect of his sanctity that the Patriarchate itself underlined at his canonization (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal Act, 29 August 2018).

The Meaning of the Stand

Amphilochios’s resistance was of a piece with his “religion of love,” not in tension with it. His universal love — the love that embraced “the Turk, the black, the white” as the image of God (see Gentleness and Discernment) — was never a bland refusal to defend his own people. He loved the Italian as a man and the occupier as the image of God; but he defended the language, faith, and identity of the children entrusted to him against a policy that sought to erase them. The two hold together in the Christian understanding: love of enemy does not cancel the duty to protect the vulnerable and to preserve what is good. That Amphilochios could be at once the gentlest of confessors and a determined defender of his people’s identity is not a contradiction but the mark of a mature Christian charity — one that suffers wrong without hatred and yet does not abandon its own (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography; see The Gospel of Love and Joy; on the war years and the union of 1948, see Shepherd of His People).

References

The Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation (Evangelismos), Patmos. Biography and counsels of the Elder Amphilochios Makris. Patmos: Holy Monastery of the Annunciation. (The workshop as a cover for teaching Greek; the exile of 1937; the Zoe brotherhood’s hospitality; the ministry in Crete; the return of 1939.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Amphilochios (Makris) of Patmos.” (The exile of 1937–1939 and the return.)
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Synodal Act for the canonization of St. Amphilochios of Patmos, 29 August 2018. (A defender of Orthodoxy who suffered and was exiled under the Italian occupation.)
Standard political histories of the Italian Dodecanese, 1912–1943, and the Fascist italianization policies of the 1930s (the Treaty of Lausanne 1923; the governorship of De Vecchi).
Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010. (Aggregator translation following the sisterhood; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)