Elder Pastitsios

~ the eulogy ~

The page took the name of Elder Paisios, a monk of Mount Athos held in enormous regard across Greek Orthodoxy, and changed one part of it to pastitsio, the baked pasta dish with béchamel on top. It then ran that joke hard: the monk's image reworked with pasta, and Orthodox iconography crossed with the iconography of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was a Facebook page written in Greek, for Greeks, and it had been going about a year.

Half of that joke is legible from Turkey and half is not. The dish is recognizable immediately, since baked pasta under a white sauce is cooked in Turkish kitchens too under a different name. The monk is not: to feel what the page was doing you had to have grown up with Paisios quoted at you as an authority, and I did not. What crossed into Turkey was the arrest.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pun ~

Elder Paisios died in 1994 and had become, in the years after, one of the most widely venerated figures in modern Greek religious life, with his sayings circulating as collected wisdom. Against that, the page was doing something small and precise: three extra letters inside a revered name.

That precision is what made it travel inside Greece and what made it prosecutable. An outright attack on religion is a familiar argument with a familiar reply. A respected name with a pasta dish inside it was harder to answer, which is roughly why the complaint, when it came, arrived from a politician rather than from a theologian.

~ the prosecution ~

On 17 September 2012 Christos Pappas, a member of parliament for the far-right Golden Dawn, raised the page with the Minister of Justice. Four days later, on 21 September, police arrested the man behind it, described at the time as 27 years old and named in the Greek press as Filippos Loizos. The charge was malicious blasphemy and offending religion, carrying a fine of up to 3,000 euros and up to two years in prison. The page went down with him, and the hashtag #FreeGeronPastitsios trended while he was in custody.

~ after the verdict ~

He was convicted on 16 January 2014 of repeatedly insulting religion and given ten months, suspended. Amnesty International objected four days later and called on Greece to repeal the law he had been tried under. Human Rights Watch wrote the case up in the same week, in a piece about dead monks and muzzled media.

In 2017 the case was dismissed, the statute of limitations having run out under Greek Law 4411 of 2016. Greece then dropped the blasphemy articles from its penal code entirely in 2019. Christos Pappas, who had asked for the arrest, was convicted in 2020 along with the rest of Golden Dawn's leadership of running a criminal organization. The page itself never returned.

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