Shepherd of His People

After his return to Patmos in 1939, Amphilochios shepherded his people through the German occupation and the hardships of the Second World War, and lived to see the long-awaited union of the Dodecanese with Greece in 1948 — after which he turned the energies of his convent to the relief of the war’s victims, above all the orphans of Rhodes. This file follows his pastoral care through the war years and the union.

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

Through the Second World War

Amphilochios returned to Patmos in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War (see Patmos Under Italian Rule). The war brought fresh occupation and fresh suffering to the Aegean. Italy, which had held the Dodecanese since 1912, entered the war in 1940 and invaded Greece; after Italy’s capitulation in September 1943 the islands were seized by Germany, which held them until the war’s end. Mainland Greece under Axis occupation suffered a catastrophic famine in the winter of 1941–1942, and the islands of the Aegean, dependent on imported grain and cut off by the war, endured severe privation (the standard history of the Axis occupation of Greece and the Dodecanese, 1940–1945, and the Great Famine of 1941–1942).

Through these years Amphilochios remained on Patmos as confessor and spiritual father, sharing the hardships of his people. The sisterhood’s biography records that the German occupation from 1943 caused relatively little disruption to his own work compared with the earlier Italian pressure — the German administration having other priorities than the italianization the Fascist régime had pursued — so that he was able to continue his ministry and the care of his convent through the war (the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder, on the German occupation period; Sanidopoulos, “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood). [Disputed: the relative severity of the two occupations for his work. The sisterhood’s account contrasts the heavy Italian pressure (which cost him exile) with a lighter German impact on his ministry; this is the community’s assessment of his particular experience and is reported as such. The general severity of the Axis occupation of Greece — the famine, the reprisals, the privation — is a matter of documented history; the point here is only that Amphilochios’s own pastoral work continued through the German years.]

The Union of the Dodecanese with Greece, 1948

The great political event of Amphilochios’s later life was the union of the Dodecanese with Greece. After the German withdrawal the islands passed briefly under British military administration (1945–1947), and then, by the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 with Italy, they were ceded to Greece; the formal incorporation of the Dodecanese into the Greek state took place on 7 March 1948 (the standard history of the union [Ενσωμάτωση] of the Dodecanese with Greece, 1947–1948). For islanders who had lived under foreign rule since 1912 — and, before that, under the Ottomans — the union was the fulfilment of a long national hope, and for a man who had been exiled for teaching the Greek language it was a personal vindication as well as a national joy (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the union and its meaning for the elder and his people).

Amphilochios had defended the Greek and Orthodox identity of the Dodecanese through the darkest years of foreign rule; he lived to see that identity secured in union with the Greek nation. The defender of the Greek language under the Italians could now teach and confess and found without the shadow of an occupying power — and he turned that freedom, characteristically, not to triumph but to works of mercy.

The Works of Mercy After the War

The end of the war and the union of the islands opened the way for Amphilochios to direct the energies of his sisterhood toward the relief of the war’s victims. In 1947, as the Dodecanese passed to Greece, he was given the opportunity to help the orphans of Rhodes, and he organized a group of his nuns, under an abbess, to establish on Rhodes an orphanage together with a home for pregnant women in need and, in the fuller accounts, schools (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the Rhodes orphanage of 1947; OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, following the sisterhood; Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal Act, 29 August 2018, on his orphanages and charitable institutions; see The Nuns and the Mission). The Aegean of the late 1940s was full of the orphaned, the widowed, and the destitute; the shepherd who had guarded his people’s identity through the occupation now gathered his nuns to bind the wounds the war had left.

The Shape of a Shepherd’s Life

Seen whole, Amphilochios’s life through the years of occupation and war traces the shape of a good shepherd’s. He guarded his flock’s faith and language against an occupier and was exiled for it (1937–1939); he returned and remained with his people through the privations of the war; he lived to see them united at last with their nation (1948); and he spent the peace not in rest but in the care of the war’s victims. The universal love he preached and the defense of his own people he practised were never at odds: he loved every man as the image of God, and precisely because he loved he did not abandon the vulnerable of his own island and region to erasure or to destitution (see The Gospel of Love and Joy; Patmos Under Italian Rule). The last two decades of his life, from the union to his death in 1970, were the quiet, fruitful years of the elder — the confessor of souls, the founder of convents, the planter of trees — treated in the other sections of this guide (see The Confessor of Souls; Repose 1970).

See Also

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 German occupation period; the union of 1948 and its meaning; the Rhodes orphanage of 1947.)
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Amphilochios (Makris) of Patmos.” (The Rhodes orphanage and charitable foundations.)
  • Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Synodal Act for the canonization of St. Amphilochios of Patmos, 29 August 2018. (His orphanages and charitable institutions.)
  • Standard histories of the Axis occupation of Greece and the Dodecanese, 1940–1945 (the Great Famine of 1941–1942); and of the union of the Dodecanese with Greece (British administration 1945–1947; the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947; formal incorporation 7 March 1948).
  • Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010. (Aggregator translation following the sisterhood; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)