Free Republic

Rowan W. Dorin, assistant professor of history, with the miscataloged parchments whose mystery he is working to solve. Credit: L.A. Cicero __________________________________________________________________________ When historian Rowan Dorin first stepped onto the Stanford campus in early 2017, he made it a habit to visit Green Library every week to dig through its collection of medieval documents and objects. After a few months, Dorin, an assistant professor of history specializing in medieval Europe, discovered something out of the ordinary. Three leaves of ancient parchment were labeled as a Hebrew translation of text about grammar, but its margins had Latin words like fish, capers...

July 4, 2018 Independence Day To the Most Reverend Hierarchs, the Reverend Priests and Deacons, the Monks and Nuns, the Presidents and Members of the Parish Councils of the Greek Orthodox Communities, the Distinguished Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Day, Afternoon, and Church Schools, the Philoptochos Sisterhoods, the Youth, the Hellenic Organizations, and the entire Greek Orthodox Family in America Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ, As we commemorate Independence Day, we are gathered in Boston for our 44th Biennial Clergy-Laity Congress. We are meeting in a city that has deep historical connections to the struggle for independence, a...

There is wide consensus among scholars that Aramaic was the primary language spoken by the Jews of first century Palestine. The vast majority of Jews spoke it. Jesus spoke it. This has been the commonly accepted view since 1845, when Abraham Geiger, a German rabbi, showed that even Jewish rabbis from the first century would have spoken Aramaic. He convincingly argued that the Hebrew from the first century (Mishnaic Hebrew) only functioned as a written language, not as a living, spoken language. There are two reasons most scholars believe Aramaic was the primary language of Jesus’s time—and the language Jesus...

The mayor of Greece’s second-largest city, Thessaloniki, was treated in hospital after he was beaten up by nationalist extremists. Mayor Boutaris had been at an event commemorating the killing of ethnic Greeks by Turks.Boutaris was being escorted from an event that commemorated the massacre of Black Sea Greeks, when members of the crowd turned violent. Footage showed the 75-year-old Thessaloniki mayor being heckled by dozens of people as he left the event on Saturday evening. Bottles were thrown at Boutaris, who is known for his strong anti-nationalist stance, before he fell down and was kicked and punched in the head...

In a sometimes-surreal interview with Greek television news channel Antenna, Antonios Pagourtzis, the father of the accused school shooter in Texas said that his son wasn’t a criminal, but a victim. His comment came during a telephone interview that the network broadcast on their newscast in Greece. Pagourtzis denied any responsibility in his son’s murderous rampage that killed ten people in a Texas school, criticizing people who said that there was blood on his guns. “The guns were clean,” Pagourtzis said in the interview, adding that he as hurt that a lot of the negative press about him was coming...

The 17-year-old suspect in Friday's shooting at a Texas high school killed a classmate who turned down his repeated advances, killing her first in his deadly rampage that also killed nine others, according to the girl's mother. Student Shana Fisher's mother told the LA Times that junior Dimitrios Pagourtzis gave her daughter "4 months of problems" before Fisher rejected him publicly in front of classmates. "A week later he opens fire on everyone he didn't like," she wrote to the newspaper. "Shana being the first one."

The Foreign Ministry has rejected as “hypocritical” statements by European Union Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker regarding two detained Greek soldiers in Turkey. “With these remarks ... The EU authorities lose their credibility and reliability day by day,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hami Aksoy said in a written statement on April 26 During a recent visit to Greece, Juncker said Turkey must release the Greek soldiers, detained after inadvertently crossing the border last month. “We reject this statement, which is far from being serious and lacks legal basis. Greek soldiers who violate Turkish law do not have any privileges before the independent...

Turkish President Recep Tayipp Erdogan said he would consider releasing the soldiers if eight Turkish servicemen, who sought assylum in Greece following the failed 2016 coup attempt, were sent home first."Blackmail" Athens has described this as "blackmail", with the Defence Ministry describing the soldiers as "hostages", and the Greek Supreme Court has sided with the government. President Prokopis Pavlopoulos of Greece said: "There was an unacceptable connection made between the Greek officers who were arbitrarily detained, and Turkish citizens who came to Greece, and requested asylum. Because Greece implemented - I emphasize this - implemented international law, it was granted....

Turkish propagandists also have been twisting facts to try to portray Greece as the aggressor. Although Turkey knows that the islands are legally and historically Greek, Turkish authorities want to occupy and Turkify them, presumably to further the campaign of annihilating the Greeks, as they did in Anatolia from 1914 to 1923 and after. Any attack against Greece should be treated as an attack against the West. There is one issue on which Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its main opposition, the Republican People's Party (CHP), are in complete agreement: The conviction that the Greek islands...

"You can live a normal life here [Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus] if you keep quiet, if you don't tell the truth that we live under Turkish occupation, that much of our territory is a military zone where we can't go." — Şener Levent, owner and editor of the daily newspaper Afrika, in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. In 1974, the Turkish army brutalized and terrorized at least 170,000 indigenous Greek Cypriots into fleeing to the free, southern part of the island, seized their properties, and replaced them with illegal settlers from Turkey. "40,000 Turkish troops remain in Cyprus as a presence that prevents...

WASHINGTON—The Hellenic American Leadership Council (HALC) and the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) have launched a national advocacy campaign encouraging U.S. Senators to block a planned sale of U.S. F-35 stealth fighters to Turkey’s increasingly erratic and anti-American Erdogan regime. The ANCA and Hellenic American Leadership Council have joined forces to launch a grassroots campaign to block the impending F-35 sale to Turkey (Graphic: ANCA) This joint Hellenic-Armenian American initiative – the most recent in a series of ANCA-HALC advocacy campaigns – warns Senators against the dangers of providing Erdogan with advanced weapons that he may turn against our...

NEW YORK – The Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate elected unanimously today the Very Reverend Archimandrite Nathanael Symeonides as Metropolitan of Chicago. Immediately following the election, His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of America stated: “I express my wholehearted congratulations on the election of Very Reverend Archimandrite Nathanael Symeonides as Metropolitan of Chicago, wishing the abundant blessing of God on the sacred ministry the Church has entrusted him with. The newly-elected Metropolitan has served as Deacon, Priest and Director of the Department of Inter-Orthodox, Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Relations for a number of years, and I am certain that he...

Researchers think Plutarch’s De Facie tells the tale of Greek sailors making the treacherous transatlantic crossing. They dug into the science to show how it could have happened. The story of the European settlement of North America usually features a few main characters: red-headed Norsemen who sailed across an icy sea to set up temporary outposts, Spanish conquistadors, white-collared English separatists, French trappers, and Dutch colonists. Now a team of Greek scholars proposes another—and much earlier—wave of European migration: the Hellenistic Greeks, in triremes powered by sail and oar in the first century CE, nearly a millennium before the Vikings.These...

Biblical scholars have discovered the first-known original Greek copy of an ancient forbidden Christian text that purportedly describes Jesus’ secret teachings to his “brother” James, an early leader of the Church. Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau, religious studies scholars at The University of Texas at Austin, located the rare text in Oxford University archives earlier this year. The experts found several fifth- or sixth-century A.D. Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James, one of the books from an ancient collection known as the Nag Hammadi library. Previously, the text was thought to be preserved only via translations in the...

The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the spiritual center of Orthodox Christianity which is based in Turkey, is unable to train clergy and potential successors for the position of patriarch. The reason is that the Halki Seminary, the only school for training the leadership of Orthodox Christianity, was forcibly closed down by the Turkish government in 1971. It has been waiting to re-open its doors ever since.The closing of the Halki seminary, which was founded in 1844 on the island of Halki (Heybeliada), has made it very difficult for the Ecumenical Patriarchate to survive. The Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights...

Sept. 6, 1955 started just like any other day for the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews of ‎Istanbul—or Constantinople. ‎‎”I resided in Cengelkoy with my wife and two children back then,” wrote Apostolos Nikolaidis ‎in the book I Nihta ton Kristallon. ‎”Just as protests were starting in Taksim, I left my shop in Karakoy and went home.”Nikolaidis did not know that a horrid ethnic cleansing campaign was on the way. Just like Nikolaidis, ‎thousands of non-Muslims in Istanbul were not yet aware of the intent of their own state to ‎destroy their private property, businesses, and places of worship, to terrorize...

Caption -- Borobudur: hardly Chinese The author is former foreign secretary of India sibalkanwal@gmail.com The West has built a lot of myths about China which others, including in India, have accepted without challenge. That China was for centuries the dominant power in Asia and is now on the way to recovering that lost status is one such myth. This historical distortion is serving to legitimize China's hegemonic ambitions, as if China has the right to recover its natural position in Asia and any resistance amounts to denying the Chinese their due. This explains why even when China is aggressive...

The 3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York. Credit: UNSW/Andrew Kelly ================================================================================ UNSW Sydney scientists have discovered the purpose of a famous 3700-year old Babylonian clay tablet, revealing it is the world's oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, possibly used by ancient mathematical scribes to calculate how to construct palaces and temples and build canals. The new research shows the Babylonians beat the Greeks to the invention of trigonometry - the study of triangles - by more than 1000 years, and reveals an ancient mathematical sophistication that had been...

The cargo ship named M/V ACT was carrying steel from the southern port of İskenderun to İzmit in the northwest when the Greek coast guard called on the ship to divert its course to Rhodes, Turkey-based Deniz Haber Ajansı reported. Turk said the Hellenic Coast Guard opened fire after the Turkish-flagged ship refused to comply with instructions to dock at the port of Rhodes for an inspection. The Greek coast guard confirmed the incident, saying it approached the vessel and asked the captain to dock at Rhodes after the authority received an anonymous call saying drugs were being transported.The captain...

Yannis Vasilis Yaylalı, an ethnic Greek peace activist born in Samsun, was recently arrested by Turkish police in the Kurdish city of Şırnak, where he had been living since 2012. Yannis Vasilis YaylalıMeral Geylani, his partner and fellow activist, told the Armenian Weekly that four lawsuits have been filed against Yaylalı. Three of them are for “discouraging the public from military service” and one is for “publicly disrespecting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk” through his articles and social media posts about the 1914-1923 massacre of Pontian (Pontic) Greeks by Turkey.“On April 22, the day he posted his article about the commemoration of...